Demand More

The United States is going to the moon. At least, this is the public declaration that came from the US space agency NASA last week. On December 6, 2006, Scott Horowitz, NASA associate administrator for exploration, announced at a press conference that the agency plans to build a permanent, livable base on the moon within 20 years. The base will be used as a launching site for missions to Mars, as well as for analysis of the Earth from space.

It is hoped that by 2020, four-person crews will make week-long trips while power supplies, rovers and living quarters are built on the lunar surface. Once the base is completed in the mid-2020s, astronauts will stay for up to six months at a time to prepare for longer journeys to Mars.

For a nation that has lost two out of five space shuttles over the last 20 years to human error, the plan to go to the moon is ambitious at best, foolhardy at worst. For a nation that is now spending $1 to $2 trillion dollars on a failed war effort in the heart of the Middle East, the plan is nothing short of lunacy.

While NASA did not give specific estimates of cost for this venture, the original Apollo missions — which simply wanted to land on the moon, not set up a permanent mission — cost the United States an estimated $135 billion in 2006 dollars. Costs for a long-term manned settlement will be equally high, if not higher. Technology must be researched that will allow people to live in space for long periods of time; spacecraft will have to be designed which will ferry people back and forth; rockets will have to be funded and built to propel people out to the moon; the costs are truly extravagant, and as with all government expenditures, are almost certainly being underestimated at this point in time.

Consider NASA’s announcement within the context of another news item from last week, this one almost totally ignored by the mainstream press: the richest 1% of adults in the world own 40% of the planet’s wealth, while the bottom 50% the world’s adult population owns barely 1% of global wealth. The report, from the World Institute for Development Economics Research at the UN University, also found that North America, Europe and some countries in the Asia Pacific region, such as Japan and Australia, account for 90% of total world household wealth. The rest of the world — Latin America, Africa, Asia — get the remaining 10%.

And what are the rich countries spending their money on? Not on rectifying these disgusting levels of inequality, but enforcing them. The planned colonization of the moon, if it were to occur, would be the next chapter in a long sorded history of human conquest. The United States does not go to the moon to benefit the human race — it goes to benefit itself, and more accurately, a small subset of Americans who have discovered the large profits that can be reaped from war, conquest, and exploitation. It is no coincidence that Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor, has also been granted the right to build NASA’s next moonship. American tax dollars, derived from the public, are funnelled to the benefit of a handful of corporations and a handful of people. The common good is sacrificed so that this planet-dominating technology can be ever improved, exploitation made cheaper and more cost-effective, oppression made more profitable as an enterprise.

Human beings and nation states have no right to colonize the solar system when there is so much that must be done here on Earth. The continued depravity of war, the scourge of gross disparities in wealth and power, the ongoing destruction of the planet and the challenge of climate change are problems that beg for attention. Pie-in-the-sky fantasies of outer space conquest are puerile in the face of the continuing challenges of life here on planet Earth.

It will be a sad day if and when the rocket’s bright glare announces the dawn of human settlement in outer space. We have trashed and devastated the resources of one planet; yet we seem eager to spread our Midas touch of chaos and greed beyond the confines of this tiny blue home. I realize that many people today look up at the heavens and see the promise of wealth, fame and power, a beckoning frontier of human expansion. This is what the Europeans saw when they first landed on the Americas, and what their cultural descendants continue to see when they look with hungry eyes at the Moon, and Mars after that. But in spreading this perspective, we have only spread suffering. If we cannot change as a species, then we ought to contain our damage to ourselves. We have no right to curse whatever other sentience exists in the universe.

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