Mother Jones January 26, 2004
Fly me to the moon
By Tom Engelhardt
I was one of those space kids of the 1950s. An only child, bored with my life, I spent an inordinate amount of time off in space in every sense. I still wonder where those little platforms with steering mechanisms powered by jetpacks are -- the ones that pop magazines of the era swore would take us individually zipping amongst the spired towers of our cities, creating traffic jams 30 stories up. Nothing better proves to me how pathetic our ability to predict the future is -- take my previous assessment of Kerry's presidential chances for an example -- than the fact that at 59 I still find myself subway, bus, or car-bound in the big city.
Much of my night-time life back then was spent under the covers, at hours when I was supposed to be asleep, reading H. G. Wells' First Men in the Moon or The War of the Worlds by flashlight -- talk about terror wars, don't get me started on how terrified I was -- or checking out Isaac Asimov's fabulous Foundation space operas in which empires in the stars rose and fell like clockwork. In the dark at least, Asimov prepared me well enough for the present Bush administration dreams of imperial adventure in space (though they do look so shabby by comparison).
Unfortunately, when we finally reached the moon in 1969, the Vietnam War was growing ever hotter, the first pictures back looked like they were taken from inside a washing machine, and the guys bouncing around up there were about as heavily scripted for banality as the automatons in Kubrick's already released 2001: A Space Odyssey. So I put my space dreams away and focused on what was happening back on hidebound old planet Earth. But sometime in the 1970s, I found myself at the Exploratorium, San Francisco's science museum, just as the first photos from our initial probe of Jupiter were coming in. Well, I have to tell you, my heart gave a suitable little, awed pitter-pat.
All of this is to say that some boyish part of me is still primed for the idea of space exploration. But space exploitation? Or worse, the further exploitation of our own planet via space -- well, that's another story, isn't it?
The President, of course, was enthused. Like his father -- some said in "tribute" to his father, who offered a similar plan during his presidency, but in this Oedipus Wrecks of an administration that seems doubtful -- he called on us to establish a "base" on the moon by 2020 and then head for Mars. The good news is that there's even a potential "race" into space to go with his plan. Will the Chinese, our supposed future imperial competitors, get someone to the moon first? Of course, George only plans to scrape together a billion dollars for the project over numerous years by shutting down other NASA projects, starting evidently with repairs for the Hubbell telescope, and then he naturally expects someone else to pay the gargantuan bill for this "vision" somewhere off in 2010 or after, while he's sipping non-alcoholic Mai Tais in Crawford, TX. Still, something about that payment plan has a distinctly familiar ring to it. Where have I heard the idea before that we should mortgage the future to exploit the present?
So here was the President's "vision thing" on space exploration (a vision that admittedly seemed to go over nationally with all the rocket thrust of a lead bagel), and it turns out to be subject to a little known natural law --I'd call it Cheney's Law. It goes: Where the vision thing advances, can Halliburton be far behind? In fact, as it turns out, Halliburton was far ahead; so far, in fact, that Petroleum News reported in February 2001:
"If there is life on Mars, it would probably be microorganisms in water deep below the surface of the planet. Dr. Geoffrey Briggs, director, Center for Mars Exploration at the NASA Ames Center, told 'Meet Alaska' that NASA is looking at ways to drill on Mars to look for water - and the life it might contain.
"Briggs said NASA has been working with Halliburton, Shell, Baker-Hughes and the Los Alamos National Laboratory to identify drilling technologies that might work on Mars... Halliburton and Baker-Hughes are working on some very advanced systems, Briggs said, some so advanced they aren't willing to talk much about them. He said the NASA Ames Center relies on working with people in the industry who "really understand the problems and make us face up to the realities ... 'We do appreciate,' he said, 'that this is a non-trivial activity.'"
Ah space, I shoulda known it -- just another place to drill. Maybe in the next decade we could find a way to transport Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the moon; then no one would care what we did to it. Mike Allen and Greg Schneider of the Washington Post wrote an interesting piece on space business, aptly headlined, Industry Hopes Soar With Space Plan, Energy and Aerospace Firms Have Long Lobbied NASA. It began:
"President Bush emphasized American ingenuity, international cooperation and human destiny when he announced his new space policy this week, but the plan also reflected long-held ambitions of the U.S. aerospace and energy industries.
"One industry official said the climate changed last October, when China put a man in orbit and announced plans to go to the moon. Suddenly, the official said, the White House seemed anxious to revitalize the U.S. space program, in effect telling NASA that 'we're not going to let the Chinese take the moon and let us look like fools.' NASA then spent weeks in drills to come up with an outline for getting U.S. astronauts back into space in a big way, using some of the broad ideas that companies had been pushing."
And, perhaps not so strangely, as with so much that happens in the Bush administration, behind vast ambitions and galactic plans of epic proportions there's always the same tiny, overlapping cast of corporate characters, more appropriate to a cozy bedroom drama. Allen and Schneider, for instance, quote Lockheed spokesman Tom Jurkowsky expressing enthusiasm for the Bush proposal: "Today our people in Houston, our people at Cape Canaveral, at the Marshall Space Center . . . are talking to their counterparts at NASA -- at headquarters, at all levels."
In a briefing NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe quickly reassured reporters that Bush's "exploration program" would be "industry-driven." And who wouldn't claim that industry is driven? The space exploration program seems, by the way, to have emerged at least in part from our vice president's office, where the swinging door has Halliburton written all over it. And even if none of this pans out in anybody's lifetime, in a week in which Halliburton agreed to pay back $6.3 million in overcharges for its Iraq operations without even scratching the surface of things, imagine the overcharges in space. I mean, there's no limit in space, is there?
And let's not forget the helium 3 isotope, supposedly to be found in abundance on the moon. Jim Wolf of Reuters wrote of it as "a near perfect fuel source: potent, nonpolluting and causing virtually no radioactive byproduct in a fusion reactor. 'And if we could get a monopoly on that, we wouldn't have to worry about the Saudis and we could basically tell everybody what the price of energy was going to be,' said [John] Pike [of Globalsecurity.org]."
Interestingly in regard to that small cast of characters, Wolf writes: "Among companies that could cash in on Bush's space plans are Lockheed Martin Corp., Boeing Co. and Northrop Grumman Corp., which do big business with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as well as with the Pentagon."
All this and yet, as Dr. Seuss might have written, oh no, that is not all; oh no, that is not all. Wolf adds: "President Bush's plan to expand the exploration of space parallels U.S. efforts to control the heavens for military, economic and strategic gain. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld long has pushed for technology that could be used to attack or defend orbiting satellites as well as a costly program, heavily reliant on space-based sensors, to thwart incoming warheads."
Ah, Donald Rumsfeld. Michelle Ciarrocca of the World Policy Institute discusses just how long our Secretary of Defense has been eyeing the military (and industrial) control of space, while warning of future "space Pearl Harbors." As she points out, "the military has long eyed the moon as a potential base of operations as warfare is moved into the heavens." (Those of you who go to the new Errol Morris film, The Fog of War, will hear a little anecdote by former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara about how the Joint Chiefs tried to scuttle a bit of arms control by claiming, in a blame-it-on-the-neighbors moment -- this was the wild-eyed 1960s, of course -- that the Russians might avoid scrutiny by secretly testing atomic weapons on the other side of the moon.)
Ciarocca points out that the normal cast of characters was well represented on Rumsfeld's "Space Commission" of 2001 and that the new presidential commission to be formed soon to consider the President's space goals will be headed by Edward C. "Pete" Aldridge Jr., former Air Force secretary and presently on the board of... you guessed it, Lockheed Martin.
Even if you don't take all this too seriously, it certainly reveals a good deal about the kinds of dreams that are deeply lodged in the Bush administration's overheated brain trust. For them, space exploration is evidently the final fantasy, the Iraq that should have been: Industry-driven; backed by government; involving a few large corporations; no guerrillas anywhere in sight; totally "privatized"; and, at the end of the "rainbow," energy sources beyond anyone's wildest imaginings, and all ours. Or maybe I'm wrong and this was all preparation work for the next Star Trek movie, Space, The Final Dollar Frontier or the Wrath of Vice-President Khan.
I did notice that, after a couple of days of soaring (or at least hopping) presidential oratory, the plan dropped from sight. Not a mention of it in the State of the Union address; not even a suggestion for a Saddam trial at the International Space Station. Right now all we're left with is two go-carts on Mars, one malfunctioning. Oh well, perhaps it's time for a little humor and the funniest space article of the week was written by Gersh Kuntzman for the Newsweek website. ("Here is what the president said: 'The moon is home to abundant resources. Its soil contains raw materials that might be harvested and processed into rocket fuel or breathable air.' Here is what the president meant: 'My friends at Halliburton are very eager to strip-mine the moon and since most of my policies seem to come from outer space anyway, I said, 'What the hell?'")
But whether mining the moon for a helium isotope is pure fantasy or not (Alien without the Alien, just the big, dull cargo ships plowing through space), the militarization of space isn't and our militarization of Earth is already a fact -- with, naturally, the same small cast of characters pulling more than their weight.
© Copyright 2004, The Foundation for National Progress
