Der Spiegel Has Landed

America has nothing to fear from a robust and competent European Space Agency. Sure we've cut way back on the commitment to space exploration, the thing that defined us as an international power in the early days of the Cold War, driving us to fight past the disappointment and fear of the Sputnik launch to leave the Soviets far, far behind (about a quarter of a million miles, give or take) on our way to being the first and only nation ever to successfully pretend to land on the Moon.

And yes, sometimes the rockets we still try to send up to space explode just after taking off, but hey, those are the unmanned ones. Nobody dies means it doesn't count as a failure. Just because Russia sends rockets up to the International Space Station all the time without incident doesn't mean it's easy. They're carrying people. They probably have to go through way more rigorous tests just to keep their insurance.

And OK, yes, there was the incident with the SpaceShipTwo exploding and killing a man, but even though that's based here, technically that's Richard Branson's project and he's a shifty foreigner of the British persuasion. Plus it's not even space they're working on, it's like one suborbital high-atmosphere parabola they're planning on flying so people like Tom Hanks and the gay one from *N Sync can have something else to high-five each other about over their dinner of peasants and rubies.

I think specifically to rub it in our faces and I guess maybe to make a chemical survey to better understand how comets could potentially have provided the building blocks for life on Earth, the ESA has "on purpose" crashed some kind of space junk into a comet. Sure they did. Think about that for a second, what's more likely: they threw what amounts to a microscopic speck of nothing into the an area of vast emptiness so vast and empty that it's very name--space--literally means vast emptiness and managed to hit a totally different microscopic speck of nothing, both going like thousands of miles an hour, hundreds of millions of miles from Earth. OR did some comically small diesel-burning delivery truck get lost in the borderless blob of 21st century Europe only to turn up half way to Jupiter where it got T-boned by a snowball. Before you answer, consider: the French are involved.

The last time the Europeans went out blindly looking for something, you know what they found? Not fucking India, that's what they found.

And I'm sure by now all the native inhabitants of the Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko are all either dead from smallpox or forcibly converted to... well, not Christianity because fuck knows there aren't any Christians left in Europe. Atheist homosexual socialism or whatever it is that passes for religion over there now. I've been to Europe and as far as I can tell the only thing they worship is cigarettes.

You want to feel good about space? Go look up the latest data from the indestructible zombie rovers we have still infesting the surface of Mars. Or better yet, go see Interstellar. Is it a great movie? Nope. But it's got real space heroes in it. American ones like Matthew McConaughey and that poor girl nobody really likes. Watch that and you'll learn that (spoilers) love and feeling all the feelings matters just as much as math and science. Which is exactly the right message for Americans today. Because we're pretty terrible at the last two.