“I had one man try to rip my mask off. I’ve been screamed at, I’ve been told to go back to my country,” she said, after someone heard her speak with an accent.”
My uncle was at the Battle of the Bulge, and I was told that, just like in the 1965 war movie, he was a cook…and then he was given a rifle and sent into the fight. The Canadians were also fighting the Nazi’s and the Japanese Empire and over 44,000 gave their lives in the struggle against totalitarianism. Now a new variant of fascism, called Trumpism, is spreading across North America and Canadian truck drivers seem to be the next super-spreaders.
My journey from a completely apolitical disinterested consumer to staunch progressive began around 2003 when I was helping my wife research a college paper for her situational ethics class. I suggested the paper address nuclear weapons and now I am sitting here almost two decades later writing a blog entry about…Fascist Canadian Truck drivers. The twists and turns are easy to see if one reads a few books about the cold war.
We had Nazi Scientists building us a Moon rocket, then we had a committee building the shuttle on the cheap, which was a disaster (two actually), and now we have a borderline sociopath billionaire hobbyist building a new stainless steel shuttle with the very same critical flaw; no escape system. America also has a critical flaw that could see it burned to the ground; neoliberalism.
It was no surprise the shuttle failed as it had no real purpose as there was no plan to expand humankind into space. Now the new shuttle supposedly does have a mission- to make Mars the second home of our species. There are so many things wrong with the shiny shuttle and going to Mars plan it is difficult to even start explaining. The same can be said for the Trumpist neoliberal psychopaths who just might manage to burn it all down.
Lately I have been reading about CRISPR gene editing and this gives me some hope that the ultimate solution to all the world’s problems is a possibility. That problem being death of course. As always, I hold to the fundamental tenet that as long as we are driven by a limited lifespan we are doomed not only as individuals but also as a species. If not a fountain of youth then perhaps a way to freeze people without damage until a cure can be found. I can dream and pray for that.
While the “Freedom Convoy” epic unfolds, I am thinking about the shiny and what could have been. I imagine the shiny with an escape system and a pair of pressure fed boosters attached to either side of it. They could have built it back in the 70’s but nobody except a few visionaries like Philip Bono that Vertical Take-Off/Vertical Landing (VTVL) was the way to go for reusable launch vehicles. A pair of monster pressure fed ocean recovered side mounted boosters, extending above and perhaps initially providing propellants to the core engines, and a reusable core like the shiny, might have been a continuation of the space age. Instead, LEO shuttle was the end of the first space stage.
A shuttle mounting either a crew module or a cargo module, but never a combination, was the path not taken. An unmanned cargo module would have been able to take hydrogen-oxygen Earth departure stages (EDS) into orbit without endangering a crew. An earlier launch placing a CSM/LM stack into orbit to dock with the EDS would have continued the space age. The critical requirements for the shuttle program should have been full reusability and a cargo version capable of placing an EDS into orbit.
It is never too late to take two steps back and turn onto the correct path. As with Human Space Flight Beyond Earth Orbit (HSF-BEO), there is also progressive taxation and progressive wages…supporting the Nordic Model for the United States (universal health care and free college tuition).
I will keep praying.
Ice on the Moon 