The Waste Shuttle

John Derbyshire on that monstrosity of wastefulness, the space shuttle, and our ongoing obsession. Link. Excerpts:

Like the monster in some ghastly horror movie rising from the dead for the umpteenth time, the space shuttle is back on the launch pad. This grotesque, lethal white elephant – 14 deaths in 113 flights – is the grandest, grossest technological folly of our age. If the shuttle has any reason for existing, it is as an exceptionally clear symbol of our corrupt, sentimental, and dysfunctional political system. Its flights accomplish nothing and cost half a billion per. That, at least, is what a flight costs when the vehicle survives. . .

Having no practical justification for squirting so much of the nation's wealth up into the stratosphere, our politicians – those (let us charitably assume there are some) with no financial or electoral interest in the big contractor corporations who feed off the shuttle – fall back on romantic appeals to Mankind's Destiny. . .

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. . .