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National review
Bernie is lost in space
Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders really wants billionaire space entrepreneur Elon Musk to stay on the ground. “Space travel is an exciting idea, but right now we need to focus on Earth and create a progressive tax system so children don’t go hungry, people aren’t homeless and all Americans have health care. The level of inequality in America is obscene and a threat to our democracy, ”Sanders recently tweeted, responding to Musk’s pledge on Twitter to make human civilization multiplanetary. Despite the moving and groundbreaking history of space exploration and the incredible possibilities for its future, Sanders’ views on space are increasingly common among social justice activists and may soon control public policy – despite the fact that math doesn’t add up. You could end NASA and wind up all of SpaceX, but barely make a dent in the funding of a single year of the anti-poverty budget that American taxpayers have been funding since the 1960s. NASA has spent $ 22 billion. dollars last year and SpaceX’s total value is around $ 75 billion. Meanwhile, the kind of government anti-poverty programs Sanders wants to spend Musk’s money on is already costing taxpayers around $ 393 billion a year. But even that is a radical departure from the $ 97 trillion agenda Sanders campaigned on. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to calculate that liquidating all of SpaceX would only fund 0.073% of Sanders’ proposals. But Sanders’ anti-space flight fantasies could come true under a Biden administration, given the growing influence of those who believe space exploration and social justice are incompatible. According to Pew Research, 72% of Americans believe it is essential that the United States remain a world leader in space. Yet left-wing opposition to space travel may soon reign supreme at NASA, albeit out of step with public opinion and basic budget calculations. Under President Obama, activists managed to transfer money from the functional parts of NASA, like its robotic exploration program, planetary science programs, technology development programs, and many future missions to Mars, to areas that do not produce anything tangible, such as the environmental science program and “awareness”. All of this was done without any savings. NASA has actually been reduced to holding bake sales in an attempt to convince lawmakers to bail out unfunded programs. Things changed briefly under the last administration, which increased NASA’s budget from $ 19.65 billion in 2017 to $ 23.3 billion in 2021. Given the left’s tendency to reflexively reject all politics linked to former President Trump, Biden may well cut the budget and revert to the policies of the Obama years. In addition, there is an upward movement in academia to label the pursuit of space exploration “racist.” The anti-travel strand of critical race theory has spread out of the Ivory Tower and into daily left circles, prompting the Washington Post to explain “How Imperialism Shaped the Race to the Moon” and The Nation to ask: “The colonialism of spaceflight? “The awakened bureaucrats inside NASA are already using the election of President Biden to abandon plans to return to the moon and send astronauts to Mars. Their new goal is to conform to awakened dogma and abide by focus on anti-colonial theorists and ethnic studies activists rather than launching spacecraft. Renaming astronomical objects and space centers may soon take NASA’s priority over scientific research and travel to the world. space. “One could argue that the effort to colonize space is likely to lead to new forms of inequality: changes in tax revenues and administrative priorities devoted to it,” said Michael Ralph, professor of space. anthropology at NYU, in a quote from an article titled “The Racist Language of Space Exploration. “He saw this as distinct from”[supporting] other social institutions that benefit people like health care, education, infrastructure. Likewise, Kimberley McKinson, professor of anthropology at CUNY, asked, “How should Americans understand SpaceX’s goal of colonizing space in a world now indelibly changed by the murder of [George] Floyd? She explained that the efforts of “rich white men,” including Musk, “to colonize Mars and their fantasies for the future of humanity must be understood in the context of the racialized histories of colonization on Earth.” Space terminology “tends to be still colonial: ‘colonize Mars’ and ‘explore’ and ‘develop’, for example,” said Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, professor of physics at the University of New Hampshire, in Gizmodo. “These are deeply strained terms that have traditionally referred to the problematic behaviors of imperialists with those we would call ‘indigenous’ and ‘people of color’ often victims of violent activity.” The result of the left’s anti-space flight views has been stagnation. NASA has not been able to send single astronauts into space since July 2011. Before SpaceX, the United States humbly paid Russia $ 90 million per American astronaut to access the International Space Station (ISS). It is a sign of the decline of American expertise in space that the United States paid 84% of the cost of building the ISS in the first place, but now has to ask the Russians, our former rivals. of the space race, to take a ride. The deal was not only embarrassing but also dangerous, as the Russian rockets used to transport American astronauts were built from faulty metal that has since been recalled by Moscow. In addition, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin threatened to cut off American access to space, saying: “I propose that the United States deliver their astronauts to the ISS using a trampoline. . ” Almost everything involved in the Russian space industry is run by Roscosmos – a corrupt government body that has individuals targeted by US sanctions on its board. Still, in an arguably offensive twist to Sanders and his progressive cronies, Musk’s reusable rockets solved America’s space access problem. SpaceX performed its first commercial orbital crew launch in May 2020, carrying NASA astronauts to the ISS for a relative windfall of $ 55 million per head, according to the NASA Inspector General’s office. Musk has shown that America’s private sector can do what its government cannot. The first launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket costs around $ 62 million while the second launch of the same booster costs only $ 15 million. If NASA’s public sector space shuttles existed today, each would cost more than $ 1.6 billion per launch, more than 29 times the price of the original Falcon 9 launch. more impressive than government estimates suggest that developing new launchers for NASA’s Space Exploration Initiative would cost up to $ 500 billion and take three decades. SpaceX did the same job almost 1,700 times cheaper and about eight times faster, spending $ 300 million to develop the Falcon 9 in just over four years. This is a prime example of the ability of the private sector to overcome government bureaucracy. And exactly the kind of free market achievement that Sanders and his anti-capitalist colleagues wouldn’t recognize if it were written in the sky.
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