At the beginning of the year, President Bush announced the US was headed to the moon and Mars. The first reaction for many was puzzlement. Since when had Bush had any interest in science? Even his enemies have never accused him of being a nerd. In fact, Bush’s Yale transcript shows his lowest score was in astronomy with 69 percent.
We can definitely discount scientific motives for this endeavor. Even as the president waffled noble sentiments about exploration, Nasa said there was no money to maintain the Hubble telescope. The Hubble has added more to our knowledge of the universe than all the other elements of the space program put together. But the only money Nasa can find for it is a few hundred million dollars to ensure it falls into the Pacific – rather than onto people – when it is taken out of orbit.
To explain the presidential interest in Mars, let’s think back to what people said about Bush’s obsession with Iraq before the war. ‘Saddam tried to kill his father’ was widely touted as the reason behind Bush’s call to arms. If there’s any truth in that theory, it could be that Bush recently watched Mars Attacks!, the movie in which the US president, played by Jack Nicholson, is taken down by Martians whose behavior is gratuitously beastly – indeed, positively Baathist.
Going after Mars could actually be politically savvy. An invasion of the red planet is sure to win support from diehard cold-war warriors on both sides of the house, many of whom think the recent absence of communists is a cunning commie plot. It also draws attention away from the administration’s failure to find Osama Bin Laden, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Saddam’s money or the home bases of the Iraqi resistance. Clearly, they are all hiding on Mars.
In addition, everyone knows there are black holes in space – could one be responsible for swallowing the budget surplus the Bush administration inherited? Maybe that’s where the Parmalat billions went, following the federal red ink down the black rabbit hole.
There are, of course, good scientific reasons for going to Mars. When greenhouse gas emissions produce enough global warming to melt the ice caps and flood earth, it will be nice to have a back-up planet that actually wants greenhouse gases. A place where we can drive SUVs to our hearts’ content, confident that even the greenest of ecologists will approve our carbon monoxide emissions.
There are military angles as well. Remember – the US military does deserts, not mountains. From the pictures the Mars rover sent back, our sister planet offers a great training ground for desert maneuvers in case we go after Syria, Iran or Libya when we can’t find the WMDs or Osama Bin Laden on Mars.
Of course, we must include our British allies, who will be keen on revenge for the Martian attack on London described in Mr Wells’ graphic dispatches. It will be payback time for our friend Tony Blair, who is sure to want to send some troops, as long as his chancellor is prepared to spring for the space suits and helmets.
But why get into flights of fancy? There could be a very down-to-earth explanation for Bush’s announcement. As he himself has said, ‘Along this journey, we’ll make many technological breakthroughs. We don’t know yet what those breakthroughs will be. But we can be certain they’ll come and that our efforts will be repaid many times over.’
One might interpret that as a reference to the many R&D contracts in the offing and how some big companies will get paid lots of tax dollars to pave the yellow brick road to Mars. Democrats, traditionally Keynesian, should be overjoyed by this prospect. Keynes suggested the government should bury money in bottles and then pay people to dig them up to break out of a recession. Putting billions in rockets and shooting them to the moon and Mars is just a more technologically refined way of doing the same thing.
So we were right to be cynical – the invasion of Mars has more to do with pork barrels in orbit and snouts in the trough on earth than it does with expanding the human frontier.
