collected writings

let's send george w. bush to mars

NOTE: This article was originally published March 2001. How's that for predictions...

As I watched Mir, the old Soviet space station, reenter the atmosphere and splash into the Pacific, I reflected on what truly was the end of an era. That era of course is the space race, the Cold War byproduct that produced incredible technological feats and created some frightening moments as well.

The space race was born out of a contest to see who, the United States or the Soviet Union, could blow up the other first. The nation that could launch a satellite or a spacecraft into orbit could also build missiles to carry nuclear warheads across the world. The tension this created (i.e. Sputnik, etc.) has no modern day counterpart, however, I think the technological and scientific advances the space race produced overshadow this tension.

The decision to send people to the moon was a completely political decision, designed to show everybody how superior the United States was, and only one scientist actually went to the moon, on the last trip. But look at where we are now.

The telecommunication and information industries, by far the most progressive industries in existence today, got their start from the space race. Mir itself carried out countless scientific experiments and was the first, and for a long time, only platform where the human body exposed to zero gravity could be studied.

When a United States spacecraft docked with Mir, it was the location of one of the first goodwill gestures between the two superpowers of the Cold War, and a sign that international cooperation during our voyage into space and away from our home planet was not only feasible, but absolutely necessary. It was the precursor to the International Space Station of today.

I question, though, where our journey into space will go from here. It is dominated no longer by competition, but by a more ambiguous spirit of cooperation. I want to hope that Mir's death will not be in vain, so to speak, but will usher in a new and exciting space age, one with Mars as the end result, just as the moon was thirty years ago.

However, from the looks of how things are, a goal like Mars is a long way off.

I am sure that George W. Bush must feel like the American population vastly underestimated him during the election process (bear with me, this will tie in later.) There were many doubts about Bush's political leadership and intellectual capabilities, so much that the majority of his term served so far has been comprised of attempts to prove to everybody at home and abroad just how capable he is of running this nation.

Many of his decisions have a feel of an underachieving son trying to live up to his overachieving father (I am not calling the former president Bush an overachiever, it's just an analogy.)

I think that deep down, somewhere, George W. Bush wants a war to fight, to prove himself to the nation, and to enjoy the high approval ratings that his father experienced during the Gulf War. He has taken steps, rough-handedly throwing Russian diplomats out of our country and proceeding with plans for a national missile defense shield that would violate terms of the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty signed by both the Untied States and Soviet Russia, to effectively start the Cold War back up.

However, war is neither W. Bush's problem nor his answer, certainly not the Cold War, and it is not the best way to secure a legacy, that intangible thing that all Presidents desire.

Therefore, I have a proposal. Assuming that George W. Bush feels that he is underestimated and that he desires to prove himself, I think the best thing that he could do is start the space race again, this time with Mars as the end destination.

Kennedy once said "I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth."

Eight years later his vision was met. If Bush were to set a similar goal, with a similar timeframe, we could go to Mars and he would be remembered as the President who told us to go to Mars, and got us there.

The technology exists, and Bush would be become not a mediocre president who tried to follow his father in war, but a president who succeeded in unifying our nation and the rest of the world under a single larger and, I think, important goal.

H. G. Wells said it best in Things to Come ;

"Rest enough for the individual man, too much and too soon, and we call it death. But for man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First this little planet and all its winds and ways, and then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him, and, at last, out across immensities to the stars. And when he had conquered all the deep space, and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning."