Mars

[Belacqua]

However, in my old age I am starting to sour on space exploration a little bit. In my younger days, I would have been chomping at the bit to strap myself in on top of a missile that was going to be launched into space.

It's funny timing that I saw this just now. I was thinking about this stuff today for the first time in a while. 

I also loved the space stuff when I was a kid. We'd get up early to watch the launches on TV, and knew the names of all the astronauts. Every big cardboard box we got was employed for "astronaut training," and it's a wonder we didn't break any bones. 

Then my first job after college was doing exhibit design for a space museum with a big collection of NASA artifacts. That was great. And the real action was after hours when the bosses went home. We'd stay late and put on the space suits and climb in the capsules. There's a photo somewhere of young me saluting the camera in Gus Grissom's backup suit. And we had a kind of contest going on -- I was first to have sex in our Lunar Module. 

The main thing that impressed me at the time was the high quality of the stuff. I'll never forget the satisfying click that you heard when you plugged the air hose into the valve on the front of the Apollo lunar EVA suit. Compared to the car I was driving in those days, it was like advanced alien technology. That was inspiring. Did you get that sense in your work with satellites? Were they also made to high specs? 

But even then the arguments for why we should spend the money on that instead of preserving and improving earth life seemed weak to me, and given the general decline since then, I agree that (if anybody asked me) I'd vote to pay for universal health insurance and clean water in Flint. 

But what got me thinking today was teaching a class on Nietzsche's idea of human flourishing. The author of the text we are using sees Nietzsche as aiming not for morals but for "health, power, flourishing, splendor, vitality, growth, and so forth." And on the way home it occurred to me that going to the moon was a kind of splendor or vitality. Not because it makes sense, but because it's wonderful. Normally I'm an art-type guy, but the arts are pretty much splendor-free any more. So that feeling of loving space travel because it's really cool came back to me a little bit.