Contributors

Friday, December 15, 2017

Buying Space Votes in Alabama

I was riding home from the new Star Wars movie today when Ira Flatow and Annalee Newitz were discussing Donald Trump's announcement that he is directing NASA to send Americans back to the moon, and eventually Mars. As Newitz said, such an initiative is meaningless without significant funding, and since Trump's tax giveaway to corporations and the wealthy will blow a gigantic hole in the budget, it will certainly come to nothing, just as George Bush's moonshot initiative did.

I was puzzled and dismayed when Trump announced the policy. Puzzled because it makes absolutely no sense for someone as stupid, callow and selfish as Donald Trump to care about the space program. And Donald Trump is spectacularly stupid: one of the pronouncements he made last February was that he wanted the first test flight of NASA's heavy lift rocket -- the biggest rocket ever -- to be manned.

This man is a total idiot. Doesn't he remember Apollo 1? No, of course not. During the 1960's he was too busy fighting his personal Vietnam, banging every woman in New York with a pulse. He couldn't be bothered to notice that three American astronauts had died in a fire atop an untested Saturn V in 1967.

You just don't put human beings on an untested rocket. It needlessly complicates an already complex mission, but it's also immoral and a public relations nightmare.

So, why the announcement? Maybe it's his phallic fantasy: after taunting Kim Jong Un with "Little Rocket Man," perhaps Trump's motivation was his desire to be Big Rocket Man. As he signed the document, Trump was thinking, "My rocket's bigger than your rocket!"

I was dismayed because his endorsement discredits the manned space program. Trump praising NASA automatically puts it on the liberal shit list, just when space was coming back in vogue with the help of Elon Musk. Musk has revitalized support for space exploration among liberals with his reusable rockets, electric cars, solar panels, and hyperloop mass transit.

But, listening to Flatow and Newitz talking, I suddenly realized that the real reason Trump had announced the NASA initiative was totally cynical. It was made on Monday, the day before the senate election in Alabama.

Alabama has a lot of highly educated people who work at NASA and related space technology companies in and around Huntsville. Polling told Republicans that support for Roy Moore was very soft among wealthy, college-educated engineers and technicians who work in the space industry.

Trump was not-so-subtly trying to buy votes for Roy Moore from space industry workers by making the announcement the day before the election. But they wouldn't have it: Doug Jones beat child molester Roy Moore with a coalition of blacks, women and college-educated white suburbanites and city-dwellers.

So, remember this: Donald Trump never does anything for anyone. If he supports you or your cause, he's just working an angle: it's only temporary because he needs you for something in the next couple of days or weeks. After that he'll throw you overboard. Just ask the dozens of people who've left his administration after less than a year, including Anthony Scaramucci, James Comey, Michael Flynn, Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer, Omarosa Manigault Newman -- the list goes on and on, and gets longer every day.

Since Alabama voters defied Trump, I'm predicting that he will punish the state: NASA's budget -- and Huntsville's in particular -- will suffer for it. Trump's just that kind of guy.

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