Check out this article I just wrote for h+ magazine on re-sexualizing space now that Obama has cut NASA’s budget to nothing.
I can’t say that I’m particularly surprised by Obama’s new plan to scarper plans of government-funded human space exploration. NASA’s till has been empty for decades—yet with this continued elimination of space agency funds for getting people into space, it feels like we’re letting go of something vitally important.
We weren’t supposed to just get up there to plant some flags and analyze some rocks, and then give up because we’d won the game of King of the Hill. What happened to the Great Dream?
It’s been twenty years since the Cold War ended. Now, in our global bureaucratic paper shuffle, it feels like we’ve lost some of the fight, the big project, the sense of having a goal. Now we’re drowning in our lack of motivation, bereft of that big vision of space that, for a small period of time, gave us a forward imperative, something inspiring enough to get our minds out of our collective crap, our business-as-usual-on-planet-Earth nonsense. Resource skirmishes, religious friction, global warming, and Obama just don’t really cut it in the same way the Space Race did; now, in the twenty-first century, it seems like we’re just coping and making do instead of pushing forward. We’ve taken a big step backward from “one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind.” We lost interest because space isn’t sexy anymore—and that’s the problem right there.