Posted by Randy Barnett:
John Derbishire on the Space Shuttle:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_06_12-2005_06_18.shtml#1118958000
I am often in disagreement with John Derbyshire, so if you are like me
you are likely to miss his lively NRO article on [1]The Folly of Our
Age: The Space Shuttle Program. Here is how it ends:
My experience of pointless make-work, which is much more extensive
than I would have wished when starting out in life, is that people
engaged in it know they are engaged in it. Whether they mind or not
depends on the rewards. For a thousand bucks an hour, Iâd do
make-work all day long â aye, and all night too! Astronaut salaries
donât rise to anything like that level, of course; but there are
rewards other than the merely financial. I hope no one will take it
amiss â I am very sorry for the astronauts who have died in the
shuttle program, and for their loved ones â if I quietly speculate
on whether, being engaged in such a supremely thrilling and
glamorous style of make-work, one might not easily be able to
convince oneself to, as Astronaut Bowersox says, âbelieve in the
program.â
None of which is any reason why the rest of us should believe in
it, let alone pay for it. There is nothing â nothing, no thing, not
one darned cotton-picking thing you can name â of either military,
or commercial, or scientific, or national importance to be done in
space, that could not be done twenty times better and at one
thousandth the cost, by machines rather than human beings. Mining
the asteroids? Isaac Asimov famously claimed that the isotope
Astatine-215 (I think it was) is so rare that if you were to sift
through the entire crust of the earth, you would only find a
trillion atoms of it. We could extract every one of that trillion,
and make a brooch out of them, for one-tenth the cost of mining an
asteroid.
The gross glutted wealth of the federal government; the venality
and stupidity of our representatives; the lobbying power of big
rent-seeking corporations; the romantic enthusiasms of millions of
citizens; these are the things that 14 astronauts died for. To
abandon all euphemism and pretense, they died for pork, for votes,
for share prices, and for thrills (immediate in their own case,
vicarious in ours). I mean no insult to their memories, and I doubt
they would take offense. I am certain that I myself would not â
certain, in fact, that, given the opportunity, I would gleefully do
what they did, with all the dangers, and count the death, if it
came, as anyway no worse than moldering away in some hospital bed
at age ninety, watching a TV game show, with a tube in my arm and a
diaper round my rear end. I should be embarrassed to ask the rest
of you to pay for the adventure, though.
References
1. http://www.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/derbyshire200506160749.asp
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