A Day at the Space Center; or, Lamenting our Lost Space Age

Playground of the Musks: although historic Launchpad 39-A looks empty and still now, SpaceX has the commercial lease to launch from there in the future.

Perhaps I'm paranoid, but it felt like there was something suspicious in the way our tour guide at Kennedy Space Center kept talking about Elon Musk. In my last post, I gushed about how much I enjoyed our visit to the center, but hearing so many times about how this South African billionaire equity dude was a "visionary" and the future of our space program seemed inappropriate.

Every museum is a window into the time and place where it exists. So, while the American Museum of Natural History is a case study in the "benefits" and contradictions of modern American plutocracy, the lesson at KSC seems to be the ways Americans are avoiding the subject of how wealth polarization is an integral part of our national decline, and how it is a process we refuse to acknowledge, let alone understand or attempt to address.

Everything at the space center is a celebration of a specific moment in American history. That period of a few decades — which is emphatically now in the past — when we had a sense of common purpose, and the ingenuity and motivation to do amazing things. We look back at what we did with awe and pride, but when we turn to the present and the future, we have… well, Elon Musk.

We are now at a very low point of the history of our space program — though you hate to say "the lowest" point because it certainly could get worse. We have to rely on the Russian's to get to and from space. The Chinese have the kind of "let's show the world who's boss" gumption that we had 50 years ago. And the void is filled with Musk's SpaceX, and other companies like Boeing, Lockheed, and Sierra Nevada. Each of these is a perfect representation of late-stage capitalism: entities designed to create value for shareholders, not to produce a profit while doing cool and useful things for all of us.

These companies alone are what makes KSC what it always has been — a working spaceport and the 20th century equivalent of Colonial Williamsburg. That's important to the tour guides who now talk about CEOs with the same kind of awe we once reserved for John Glenn and Neil Armstrong, and for the entire regional economy, which with zero irony calls itself the "Space Coast." Guys like Musk are the only viable future in sight — a future that is also seductively exciting and profitable as well.

This is the great fever dream of privatization — the twisted logic that things that ought to be free of the greed and callousness of the market should be handled by anything other than the government. It is a dream shared by the stunted adolescent boys who think Ayn Rand is a great thinker, and the centrist Democrats who so admire their own genius and virtue that of course they should get fabulously rich solving the world's problems.

But to have these thoughts at Kennedy is an insult to the memory of what Americans did there. You see very clearly, now that nothing is really being launched from all those disused pads spread all over, that the glory days are well past. That the practical reality of what SpaceX and the others propose (not the fanciful p.r. chatter about going to Mars), is merely redoing what we figured out how to do 40 years ago.

The heroic Space Age celebrated at KSC is the product of a stream of circumstances in the post-War years, when most of the world had blown itself to rubble and the U.S. completely remade the global economic system to our advantage. Back in the day when we had the will to dream big, the willingness to pay our f--king taxes so we could have nice things, and the trust that collective action could do things like send us to the moon. When we had a rival in the USSR that pushed us stay on track.

But that's all well over. We've turned into a third-rate plutocracy where NASA has to beg hillbilly congressmen who believe in the literal truth of fairy tales from the Book of Genesis for change from the sofa.