To The Moon

Once upon a time somewhere in what is now modern France, early man was building simple tools and painting pictures of his exploits on the walls of caves. One day a member of this ancient community with less of a sloped forehead than the others came up with an idea for a remarkable device. The wheel. Early Democrat cavemen were aghast. “What do you need a wheel for?” they demanded. “Why waste our time and effort building something we don't need when we can use that effort to feed the hungry?”

Skip ahead a few years…”what? You want us to fund a trip to where? In our ships? Go back to Italy and get them to fund it, Spain needs all the money we have to feed our people and build roads for all these wheels we have.” Shortly thereafter, “an automobile? Why do we need a horseless carriage? We have plenty of horses and all these roads and all these wheels, who needs to go that fast anyway?” “Computers? There might be a need for maybe 8 computers total! What kind of idiot would invest in computers?” Then came Walter Mondale, Democrat Senator from Minnesota. “We don't need to keep sending men to the moon.” Mondale argued that the money would be better spent here on earth, feeding the poor, writing out welfare checks, increasing the scope and reach of government and buying votes for his fellow Democrats. So we stopped going to the moon. We spent what little money that was left for NASA on shuttles to take us where lots of men had gone before…orbit.

Along comes George W. Bush with a proposal to establish a manned moon base as a jumping off point for Mars. I don't think 15 minutes had passed before the heirs to Walter Mondale's vision, again in the Democrat Party, true to historical form, came out against it. Of course these days it is difficult to know what Democrats are actually against and what they oppose just because President Bush thought of it. It has the same effect though. Stagnation.

“Why go to the moon when we have all these problems right here on Earth?” comes the familiar response. 'Who has time to be visionary when there are taxes to be raised, votes to buy and elections to win?' The view of the Democrats and other shrill opponents of space exploration is that we should be timid, myopic and anti-Bush. The opponents of technological progress understand that the last time we went to the moon, the impact on the economy was stupendous. It fueled the computer revolution and ushered in the information age. The United States benefited immensely from the space program. They know. They also believe that a rising tide while lifting all ships reduces the number of people willing to vote for them. Democrats know that the educated and prosperous aren't as likely to elect elitist socialist leaning politicians as are the poor and struggling.

Plus, technological advancement requires that public schools improve the quality of education and not just the quantity of funding. The Teacher's Unions, the main stockholder in the Democrat Party, oppose anything that might require their members to actually earn the increases in funding. Their solutions to education in America are more buildings so they can have more and smaller classrooms so they can hire more teachers so the union can take in more dues. Kids? Well they're the afterthought. But a push into the kinds of technologies needed to sustain people on the Moon, Mars and beyond have to do with curriculum not infrastructure and increased labor.

We should go to the Moon again and on to Mars for lots of reasons and economic growth is just one of them. We should go because we can. We should go because it is in our nature to explore the unknown and push the envelope of knowledge and man's ability to control our own destiny. Let the timid and the weak minded sit on the couch and cheer for the mediocre. My only regret is that I am too old to go and have to stay here and listen to the constant whine from the opposition.