Mars needs steaks and women

There’s a scene early on in The Right Stuff, where one of the astronauts, John Glenn I think, balks when he sees the plans for the space flight are for it to mostly be controlled by NASA and the astronauts will basically just be passengers, like on a ride at an amusement park, and it pisses him off and he says no, the astronauts want to drive, and the engineers give in to him, I guess because he has so much charisma. Not likely such a scene ever took place but it is probably blown up by some incident that might illustrate two different trends in space travel.

One is exemplified by these voyagers that we have roaming the universe, which I think are great, traveling way beyond where any human could have ever survived and sending back these fantastic photos of planets and moons. The thing that surprises me the most is how different every moon and planet is from each othe. You kind of think, bunch of rocks, how interesting can they be, but they are very. The other kind is manned spaceflight where the hand of man actually puts its foot down somewhere. The fans of this are more into the adventure and the achievement of man, and not that interested in finding out scientific facts.

I did go to NASA’s page and I couldn’t find anything about a manned mission from Mars, but I do remember a story about people volunteering for the flight, so somebody is talking about it. I’m dubious about the whole thing because, well it’s just so damn hard and expensive and not likely to be worth it. Even if the hills there are full of gold or platinum or whatever by the time they pack them up and send them back to earth their cost will be way more than they are worth.

I suppose those dilithium crystals would be worth it, but likely when they discover them they will be saying to each other, hey we’re not Earthlings anymore, we’re Martians. Why are we sending our dilithium to those Earthling despots? In fact now that we have the crystals why don’t we build our own warships and send them to earth so that we can bring back real steaks instead of this soy crap, and how about some celebrities while we are at it?

Did you see Cosmos last night.  The topic was global warming and they made a persuasive case. But I have to say they were a bit heavy-handed about it.  They always are, with the ominous music and the scenes of fish gasping for air and all.  Well the fate of mankind does hang in the balance, but still they could be a little less strident about it.