08/29/2025
Our moon seemed like a reasonable goal 40-to-50 years ago. But then again, smoking a pack of ci******es a day also seemed acceptable at that time. Employees could smoke in the workplace, and prisoners could smoke in prison. As we all now know, all of that changed, with increased medical and scientific knowledge.
In terms of space, increased knowledge — along with a few irrevocable, tragic accidents along the way — has made the idea of sending humans into space seem less credible, less safe, and not to mention, from a psychological perspective, less — sane.
Therefore on many fronts, it now seems clear that unmanned space exploration has essentially replaced — one might say, has far surpassed? — manned space exploration. And the one holdout now appears to be Musk — imho. — md.
“NASA was born at the height of liberalism’s faith in government, and its demise tracks the decline of that faith,” Franklin Foer writes. “As the United States lost confidence in its ability to accomplish great things, it turned to Elon Musk as a potential savior, and ultimately surrendered to him.” https://theatln.tc/fMBC42JV
At its peak, Apollo employed a workforce of about 400,000. The lunar program cost an astonishing $28 billion, somewhere north of $300 billion in today’s dollars. “From the vantage of the present—when public faith in government is threadbare—it is staggering to consider the heedless investment Americans allowed Washington to make in a project with little tangible payoff, beyond the pursuit of global prestige in its zero-sum contest with the Soviet Union,” Foer writes.
On August 4, 1969, 15 days after Neil Armstrong’s giant leap, NASA pitched the Nixon administration on its vision of sending humans to Mars. But Richard Nixon was hoping to retrench. Many of the leaders who had carried the agency through the space race began to depart for the private sector.
Since the founding of SpaceX in 2002, Musk’s business decisions and political calculations have been made with a transcendent goal in mind: the moment when he carries the human species to Mars. For Musk, “space offered the possibility of seizing the world by the lapels and announcing his greatness,” Foer writes.
Musk views Martian colonists as humanity’s last hope, the counterweight to a dark age that could follow Earth’s destruction. “But what’s dark is his vision of abandoning Earth and investing the species’ faith in a self-selected elite, one that mirrors Musk’s own values, and perhaps even his traits,” Foer continues. “The idea is megalomaniacal, and is the antithesis of the old NASA ideal: for all mankind.”
🎨: Fernando Pino* / Bettmann / Getty / Heritage Images / Getty / Manuel Mazzanti / NurPhoto / AP.