If anything symbolized the ascendency of America in advanced technology and human imagination, it was the NASA space shuttle. Now in its historic last mission, after soaring to the sky as nearly one million people watched, it will rendezvous with the International Space Station. Atlantis will be the 135th shuttle mission after 30 years of flying to deliver supplies and spare parts to the orbiting space lab.
Then it will begin its descent, like America itself, back to earth, to retire its imaginative technology, to let go of the team that created it and the workers who helped build and launch it. The nearby town, Titusville, that housed this amazing scientific community will be a ghost town, a Welcome to Hard Times town.
It’s ironic that in an era when we are stressing the creation of jobs, the administration will let go the last 6,300 members of a team that may never again be assembled. That cumulative knowledge will be blown away in the wind like the auto workers’ and all the workers’ of our fallen manufacturing infrastructure. That’s one great job, Mr. Obama and both houses of Congress, the Whore Houses of Wall Street.
Of course, no jobs will be lost on Wall Street despite its cocaine-like gambling addiction, knowing its billions in derivative losses will be returned by the FED and USG, i.e., taxpayer money for bailouts and easements. Their continued theft of billions in compromised securities will continue, enticing still more fools to buy homes and cars they can’t afford and face foreclosure. The Bank of America will pay its slap-on-the-wrist $10 billion fine for selling hundreds of billions of toxic paper and business will be as usual.
The inspired vision of a young, later murdered, president to go to the moon and back, that dream too will fade and die in the firmament of nations like a burnt-out star, despite the fact that Richard Nixon had extended JFK’s vision in January 1972, announcing the shuttle’s birth to the nation.
But not to worry! Unemployment benefits may be extended. The debt ceiling will be raised by another rubber-brained Republican-controlled House. The payola will be passed among the greasy hands.
Small businesses, the greatest engines of job production and employment, will be denied loans by the too-big-to-fail banks for more profitable interest outlets, including US Treasuries, and we will sink below sea level like a lost shuttle if not crash and burn on return, as we are crash and burning in five Middle Eastern wars, now at a cost of $1.3 trillion dollars and more than 7,000 American lives.
Like the 16 percent unemployed (the real number), when Atlantis touches down to be retired, its final mission will be as a showplace to educate the public about spaceflight and (god forbid) inspiring the young to reach for the stars and become astronauts one day, not investment bankers at Goldman Sachs. Atlantis, named after that fabled city under the sea, will be hauled to a museum, put in mothballs, as pretty soon we all will be unless we start throwing stones at our oppressors.
They are not creatures from outer space. They are the Fed, investment bankers, market speculators, derivatives creators and hawkers, the cadre of thieves whose actions to exploit and even topple our and the world’s economic system is treasonous and warrants a wall, a blindfold, a line of straight shooters to bring home their true reward. Maybe those brave shuttle pilots would like the job. After all, they’ll be out of work, too.
But NASA will be looking beyond low-earth orbit in its descent. President Obama challenged it last year to send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025 and then on to Mars by the mid-2030s. That’s the same Obama who agreed to cut the current budget, speaking eloquently from both sides of his mouth.
How about we offer it as an amusement park ride located on the Florida coast for the Richie Riches of the world, sort of like the Wonder Wheel or Cyclone Roller Coaster at Coney Island for the working class. At least it will put the soon-to-be let-go workers to work again. Hey, get your star-corn, freshly-popped, shoot the moon and win a cupie Astronaut! Come to NASA Park, one and all, kids of all ages! There’s more to do, more to see! Meet the robots!
Then, too, privatization of government technologies is always a drear possibility, given what gimmicks, what prices, ballooning budgets, and strange applications they will end up facilitating.
Fortunately, we have identified the enemies of our lives and dreams. They are not Russian, Chinese, Middle Eastern, from the Caucasus, Africa, or Iceland. They are the saboteurs within, the fifth column of profiteers marching in lockstep to their Bilderberg masters, Schwein Hunde, who are just following orders, like Eric Prince and his R-2, to pillage, rape the treasury, and kill the nation’s spirit, so they can scoop up the gold and plant it in Cayman Island and Bahamas’ banks.
These are the new generation of Red Coats sent here by King George Bush, his sleazy court and the Bank of England to overturn the freedom of our colonies and imprison them in debt, revolving credit and Homeland Insecurity. These folks will be the victims of asymmetrical warfare, a Minute Man in every shadow. He will be the forgotten municipal worker of endless townships and cities across the country. Two million guns that Americans own will surface in a volunteer army.
Nevertheless, with the space shuttles gone, NASA will depend on Russian Soyuz vehicles to carry astronauts to and from the space station, scheduled to operate until at least 2020. NASA would like private American craft to become this taxi service, but that probably won’t happen for at least four or five years. Fuhgeddaboudit!
All of this has been pushed so far off in space and time, that Atlantis will probably remain in a museum, with the last of the great orbiting spacecrafts like Endeavor and Discovery will be headed respectively to the California Science Center in Los Angeles (catch that Steven Spielberg) and Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Mmmm, sniff that dust.
Hopefully some day, they will be rediscovered like dinosaurs and become a national fascination again, showing a part of our by-then-hidden past and its anthropology unknown before. Or perhaps by then the Men from Mars will have arrived to try to befriend or destroy us, depending on the director, and bring the people together to text the big-headed, little bodies of Los Alamos again. The future is as strange at least as the present and this giant step backwards we have taken as a nation. Who would have thought that when Camelot crumbled it would take our history down with it?
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer, life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.
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