I first learned about this event in high school when we watched October Sky in my physics class. It's not that we in America were not looking to the heavens before. Mankind has been dreaming about the stars for thousands of years. The idea of touching the stars and swimming through space is exciting to us. I feel giddy just thinking about it. With the recent demise of NASA's shuttle program, I am forced to ask the inevitable question: "What now?" Seriously, this program lasted less than half a century. It makes me sick. Now I am being extremely ethnocentric here with my "America is #1" talk, but I was raised that way. The first awareness that I had of Patriotism was when I was in Kindergarten.
What bothers me most about the end of the shuttle program is that our government would rather turn to commercial companies to build future shuttles to space. So this is about capitalist gain now? Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am hate Communism (It's fine on paper, but it can never work as long as the element of man is involved. Read Animal Farm if you don't believe me.), but I was hoping that it would be my government colonizing the Moon and Mars rather than Virgin Mobile or something horrible like that. What was it that they said in Fight Club? "When deep space exploration ramps up it will be the corporations that name everything. The IBM Stellar sphere. The Microsoft Galaxy. Planet Starbucks." Yeah well it's funny how that works, right?
Anyway, I will leave you with a little Fallout connection.
See anything odd?
Excellent post..but has me pondering the future of the Yuengling galaxy...hmm...
ReplyDeleteThat sounds like a delicious place, but I worry about the quality of the brew again because past experiences have shown me that wherever they set up shop, that's the water that they will use as their base. Their bottling plant in Florida is an excellent example!
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