Also, get off my lawn AND INTO SPACE.

[mrissa]

Hey, look, everybody! It's the angriest day of the year! I should just not read commentary by people I don't already know and like on July 20. Uff da.

I wasn't there, so I want to know: when did it become teenagers' fault that we don't have a more robust space program? Seriously, it's a great strategy. Now that I'm 11 years (okay, okay: 10 years and 359 days) from the last year in which I could be considered a teenager, I'm really coming to appreciate it. I don't have to own up to my choices as a voter! I don't have to acknowledge where my own charitable contributions or volunteer time or lack of same are going! Instead of it being partly my fault for having a variety of political and social concerns and making choices based on balance there, I can simply blame the only people in our society who could not possibly have played a part in creating the situation. Hey, thanks, people who reached adulthood before me! You thought this one out really well! And teenagers are so used to being blamed for things their little brother or that jerk in their second period class did, what's one more? I mean, it's kind of a big one more. But they're already so irresponsible for not getting the jobs our system doesn't have for them--and selfish and small-minded for worrying about paying for college instead of Dreaming Big Dreams the way we did when college was cheaper--so it's sort of like a training program for taking the space-related blame. Neat how that works out.

The only drawback I'm seeing here is that I am young enough that I will never be able to claim, as some people shooting their mouths off today seem to feel they are able to, that the Apollo program was created of my inchoate childhood or teenage longings. See, I thought it was created of engineering. But I see now that that would make any lacks in current space programs the fault of people who decide how to fund engineers and for which projects, rather than the fault of kids these days not dreaming big enough. So clearly that doesn't work. Probably it's my own fault for aiming my inchoate teenage longings at getting out of the school system I was (of course) fully teenage-responsible for creating. Let that be a lesson, teenagers! Stick close to your desks, and never go to sea, and you all may be rulers of the Space Navy. Do not attempt to escape the system personally! We need that dream fuel to create space programs without funding engineers! Dream harder! But never for yourselves, because that would put you back in the wrong! Where you are anyway! Great deal, huh?

Well. There's my quota of exclamation marks for the year. And a serious and non-sarcastic thanks to those of you who were alive 40 years ago and manage to remember a great feat of engineering without casting aspersions on those who never had the chance to see anything similar.

Comments

[txanne.livejournal.com]

You are awesome and right.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

I was alive 40 years ago, and a teenager at the time. (14!) I was thrilled that NASA put people on the moon, but of course I had nothing to do with it. It was all in motion while I went through school with my nose stuck in books. I read so much SF, in fact, that I was a little surprised when I realized, some time before, that we hadn't already been to the moon.

[jmeadows.livejournal.com]

Sometimes when I look up from science fiction, I have trouble with the fact that we haven't begun exploring the galaxy in our interstellar spaceships and we haven't yet met aliens. You mean there isn't really a stargate that lets you step onto another planet via a wormhole? Inconceivable!

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

*Applause*

And thank you for the reminder to be careful who I read today. Oy...

[zalena.livejournal.com]

Wow! Now I want to know what you read that set you off.

The best year to be born to become a moonwalker (Mr. Jackson aside) was 1930. This is a very long time ago. Before our parents were even voters.

Plus, my aerospace friends want to know what the hell is wrong with their robots? Cheaper safer and more data intensive than (hu)manned flight.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I am fond of their robots.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

It was cool, even though plenty of people were careful to point out (directly or indirectly) Girls Couldn't Do That. Some of them, you know, the same people who are so busy whingeing about how those of us who were 11 at the time (or younger, or not even conceived) are to blame for How Things Are Now.

[rmnilsson.livejournal.com]

I'm curious what you've been reading, too. I get my morning news from public radio on my drive to work, and they were mostly talking about India, Pakistan, Afganistan, and Walter Cronkite.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

No, it's because you read fantasy! That's why Western civilization is collapsing!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It isn't because I write fantasy? I thought that was part of it. Because I write SF, so I should only write SF, or Western civilization will fall.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Sing it! Yes, absolutely.

I understand why you might not want to, but I wish you'd say it directly as a response over there.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Alas, the main reason I didn't say it as a response over there is that more than one person has set me off that way today. Once I got past three, I decided it belonged over here instead of copying and pasting the same rant several times.

[thoughtdancer.livejournal.com]

/rant on

So with you.

But I once asked my lj friends what "big dreams" they had.

No one had any.

I've got easily 5--including starting a college for ADHD and other learning disabled folks (show them whose smart!) to writing speculative fiction that shows others to do big things from dreaming big dreams.

And how very important the long slow slog of work is to get those dreams done.

I've a second part of your rant: the space program is often explained as a propaganda move, as part of the larger battle of the cold war. Implicitly, that means that without a cold war we don't need to "show them who's best" through a space program.

Oh, really? All it was was propaganda? Hell no! It was exploration, advancement of knowledge, creating new opportunities... it was and is what we have always needed. To make ourselves do more than merely do as well as the prior generation.

Something we've arranged to fail at, just about at the same time as this generation (post-Baby boomers) started to come in to our own.

I wonder why is that? Maybe it's because of the way the society/economics have been hamstrung by our elders?

Or maybe we really did learn to no longer dream big dreams.

Ah, hell no. We dream. We're just not sure how to say it or do anything about it. That's why there's no space program, in my not so humble opinion.

/rant off

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Regarding big dreams: when you are someone who chatters away happily to strangers, as I am, people often make the mistake of thinking they're hearing everything there is to hear. I don't talk about dreams and aspirations readily at all, because for me they're private. They're very personal. If I had been reading your lj at that time, I wouldn't have answered in an lj comment, and I might not have answered at all. (If I had, it would have been in a private e-mail.) But I am working on the big things that are really important to me. I hope that more people are like that. It's so hard to tell from the outside sometimes.

And regarding propaganda: I think it's entirely possible for something to be used as propaganda without being limited to that use. I saw this when I was a girrrrrl physics major: there was a lot of "look, look, a girrrrrrl!" But that didn't mean that was why I was doing it. It certainly didn't mean it was the only reason I was doing it. (And to a certain extent I support that propaganda use: "girls can do science" is a message I can get behind.) So being able to deconstruct the propaganda uses of the space program in no way detracts from the actual technological advances made thereby.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

I thought it was created of engineering.

In my usual inappropriate way, this makes me want to make a tee-shirt.

Made of Engineering!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I would wear that.

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

If you're of a certain disposition, everything is the teenagers' fault. They're so busy texting, and like, shopping and stuff or maybe reading or acting or playing the clarinet. Whatever it is, they aren't building any more space ships.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Busted! It's my fault, only I was reading and doing ballet and tap and playing the clarinet. (Not all at the same time, alas, although I did get good at playing scales while reading the newspaper.)

[sethb.livejournal.com]

It's clearly the fault of politicians.

Isn't everything, just about?

[redbird]

Oh, dear. I'm sorry you're seeing this crap, and repeatedly. (I've not, yet, but my LJ friends list is selected for not being people I consider idiots or hostile, and I haven't looked at much but that, selected headlines, and a weather blog.)

It would be barely plausible for them to blame me: I was old enough to vote for most of the 1980s and since, and I may remember Apollo.

[lutin.livejournal.com]

I'm more sorry that the line of reasoning which encourages that crap still exists.

[clarentine]

I was in first grade when we went to the moon. I remember sitting in the cafeteria watching the broadcast and not understanding what it was we were to be paying attention to. 6-year-old me was not particularly strong on the abstract thought thing. *g* (Not that I'm all that much better today!)

I look back now at all the history that's happened since I was old enough to recognize it for what it was, and you know what feat stands out still for me, and awes me every time? The destruction of the Berlin Wall--which was a sociological phenomenon, true, but quite an undertaking nevertheless. I watched that one with the spellbound fascination my teachers no doubt thought I should feel as we watched the moon landing.

[greykev.livejournal.com]

bah. if google doesn't have a cutesy graphic about it on their main page it must not be important. ;)

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

...damn.

The immediate thought process there was "What was Google's last cool doodle ?" Followed by "What would Tesla's moon mission have looked like anyway ?", which is another story that needs more research than I know where to start.

(When describing The Prestige to papersky I said "..and David Bowie is Nikola Tesla", and had it pointed out to me how well it would work if that were literally true.)

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

My mind is quite nearly boggling, and what this must be in response to.

Also: I, too, want a "Made of Engineering" shirt.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I haven't been reading much LJ, and I have missed all of this. But I suspect you have a good idea of how I feel about blaming everything on younger folks.

Unlike many people, I've always liked teenagers--when I was a kid, when I was a teen myself, and throughout my adulthood, right up to cranky ol' broad-hood. Almost nothing about society is their fault, because they have almost no power. They are expected to be as responsible as adults at what adults want them to be responsible at, and to do exactly what adults want them to and then sit down and shut up otherwise.

Rant away.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It's not primarily lj.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

♥

(On an unrelated issue that bothers me whenever I realize that I am not sitting on Mars: where is my jetpack? Seriously. Someday I may write a post-Singularity mad-tech-heavy future in which they still do not have personal jetpacks and it will be the saddest story ever told.)

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

But... we sent plucky little robots to Mars! They found water, and they're solar powered, and they're still finding out all kinds of nifty things. And there's a space station. Space exploration is alive and well. Sure, NASA has grown to the point that bureaucracy abounds and many astronauts never actually get to go into space, but private startups are also trying to send up rockets too.

So maybe progress isn't taking the form that they thought it would take by now, but at least as of this moment we're not in nuclear winter either (carefully knocking wood). And I bring this up for a reason: when I was a teenager I was much more concerned about the cold war.

Honestly, I was pretty terrified and sort of convinced that nuclear war was right around the corner, and I wrote high school papers on Mutually Assured Destruction and drew posters and watched The Day After and Threads and Failsafe and went to a protest rally or two.

If I get blamed for the lack of cities on (or in the moon, as Heinlein predicted), I get credit for society having survived long enough to fret about global warming instead.

[aamcnamara.livejournal.com]

Clearly it is my fault because I am here reading your LJ instead of building space ships.

So sorry. I will get right on that.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And see that you do.

While not on my yard, obviously. Build your spaceships on someone else's yard! Damn kids.

[rmnilsson.livejournal.com]

OK, so I've been reading the commentaries that inspired your original rant, and I have to wonder where all those authors think the moon is going? Are there Plans I don't know about?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Curses! Foiled again!

Oh, wait, you didn't figure out the details of those Plans. Now if only I can keep myself from monologuing....

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

It's probably my fault. I was alive then and didn't care. (I was two - Mom says that they *tried* to get me to watch the Moon landing, but I wasn't interested.)

It's a whole lot easier, and probably more fun, to create conspiracy theories and blame other people than it is to go get an engineering degree and actually *work* on he Space Program. But actually I blame a lot of our current slow progress toward space on bad management (well, plus a lot of other necessary priorities in those years - I can actually understand why the Space Program was not the priority for, say, Nixon, Ford and Carter that it was for Kennedy). But even saying that says that the blame cannot be apportioned to any one grou; when I say "bad management", I mean NASA's chronically terrible PR, I mean management decisions like the one to rely on the most (politically) useful estimate rather than the most physically likely one for when Skylab would fall, and I mean Congress's yearly or biannual decisions to refinagle finances for every space program since Apollo. The truest thing I've ever heard about why the Space Station was so late and so overbudget was from astronaut Norm Thaggard: "If you want to run up the cost of a project, just chronically underfund it."

And as you imply, if I complain of the priorities of our Presidents and Congresses, then I am complaining of those of us who put them in those offices.

[stillnotbored.livejournal.com]

I have no idea where you read this. I think I'm glad to be blissfully ignorant of this entire discussion. It would piss me off royally.

I was a teenager when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. A bunch of my friends and I were huddled around a grainy, black and white TV screen thrilled out of our ever loving minds that a man was walking on the moon and that we were alive to see it.

One of our other friends from down the street came in a few minutes after that first step off the ladder and onto the surface. She'd taken a Polaroid picture of the TV screen so she could remember that moment forever.

The teenagers of my generation, or at least my friends, didn't see space exploration as a feat of engineering. We saw it as a marvelous adventure, the next step in human exploration. And in a way, it felt like our birthright. We dreamed of colonies on the moon, of exploring Mars and moving into the stars.

Teenagers did not kill the space program or the desire for exploration. Bureaucrats with no vision killed the space program. Instead of looking outward to the stars, this country turned inward and stopped dreaming.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Dear heart, I don't think we've stopped dreaming. See my above comment to thoughtdancer.

[aliseadae]

Damn kids, get off our planet already!