Small Step

I've definitely mentioned this before, but I've never owned a cat. I still technically don't, but there's one attempting to lay across my torso as I type this just the same. It belongs to my oldest son and my oldest son, while he no longer technically belongs to me in a legal sense, actually lives here in the very literal sense, which means, by the mathematical property of... distribution? Association? Palpitation? Assuagement? I can't remember any of these. The point is, there's a cat here and she's in my goddamned way. She's great, but she also has physical mass, which seems like an obvious thing to point out but it's a feature she is entirely unaware of. The saying is "ignorance is bliss" and while it's great she's not likely to come away with, say, body dysmorphia any time soon, she also has no concept of the idea of herself as an encumbrance. This includes laying across me as I'm trying to type a thing and also finding a way to be directly in the path of one of my feet just as I've committed my full, cumbersome, crushing weight to taking a step. And she does it all with such lithe grace and speed! She's like a ninja if a ninja's primary goal was to get itself kicked by a giant.

But this is not what I meant to talk about today! It was hard to avoid as this creature had chosen to lay across my arms just as I'd begun the picidaean labor of chiseling one of these blogs into being, but distraction-from-the-going-on that has been the case as I've just been reminded today for some reason: did you know we have an incredibly active space program? I didn't! I mean, I'd heard about it in the background, but everything is background when the foreground is all mass murder, global viruses and whatever the fuck is happening with Twitter. Like Twitter, I think news about it has triggered the immediate vacuum of interest with anything having to do with Elon Musk. I know he has something to do with rockets that sometimes work but more often disintegrate in a spectacular plasma ball of self-immolation spreading gouts of wreckage scattering into the atmosphere in an act of annihilation maximally visible to every single other entity except the one it is happening to. I'm still talking about rockets, stay with me.

No, though! Apparently we have rockets that a) don't poop themselves at launch, b) are giant and cool and c) are unrelated to any South African hair plug enthusiasts. Mostly we've been sending people up to the International Space Station using Russian rockets, but that's gotten to be a little geopolitically awkward, so right on time enter: Space Launch System? OK, I guess there's something charming about NASA not really giving a fuck about "branding" as an idea and going with a name so on-the-nose, its impossible to argue with. Even in the 1960s they were calling the giant rockets baller shit like "Saturn V." I was going to suggest they open it up to the public if they can't get their shit together and come up with a name, but you know in that case some un-clever fucker is going to try to call it either "Rocket McRocketface" or "USS Trump Won," in either case: SLS it is!

Guys, we're gonna try to land people on the moon for the first time in 50 years. And that mission launches in like 18 months, in December of 2025. The program is called Artemis. I've gotten so used to NASA shit being planned, announced and disappearing that this really has crept up on me, like a cat under my feet as I'm about to take a step down the stairs. Artemis I has already launched and succeeded! It was unmanned, last year. It took off, orbited the moon a bit (NBD), came back, splashed down in the ocean, all by remote control. Artemis II will do the same thing, but be enpeopled, testing I guess to see if the system will try to come to life and murder the occupants in flight. Given the state of AI at the moment, the worst case scenario thankfully is the computer system might generate a mid-mission speech that heavily paraphrases a thousand other speeches. The worst danger really is someone will immediately fall in love with it and possibly try to fuck it.

Even 50 years beyond the last time we sent people up to poke around on Ole Luna, the process hasn't gotten any safer. You still have to strap yourself to a giant metal dildo as tall as a skyscraper and absolutely fucking rammed full of the most flammable shit ever flammed, light it on fire (on purpose!) and shit your brains out of your feet as it yeets you beyond the protective veil of the gravity that keeps your bones together and air in your lungs. It's so hard to do, Japan just last month became the latest country to fail to park a toaster on the moon's surface. And toasters, famously, do not need to breathe or eat or move their bowels, so that machine is just rocket-plus-momentum and still: whatever the Japanese word for "splat!" is.

It's as likely as anything your reaction to this is "everybody knows this, what are you doing?" but hey, I'm allowed to get excited on my own timeline. There was that time you started wearing Crocs nine months after gross-ass Mario Batali made them uncool, so just watch it. Sure, the GenZ kids made them temporarily cool again, but you don't get retroactive credit. You know what you did. Those pictures of you dancing to Jamiroquai at Coachella 2018 aren't coming off Facebook any time soon.

I suppose I should probably be more worried about the budgeting for this stuff. Everything is suddenly more expensive these days, at an alarming rate, and I don't really understand why, especially big-ticket items. Sports franchises that were bought for a few hundred million dollars less than two decades ago are now with multiple billions. There are loads of things that space money could be better or more efficiently or more compassionately used for. And even at 18 months away, it may come to pass that whomever wins the next presidential election in the intervening interim will decide just that and rubbish the whole thing. We'll have to find some other use for the piñata that is supposed to be a rocket but looks like a sex toy, fire the DJ too late to get our deposit back and put all the catering in Tupperware. But think about this: in the age of streaming, networks really, really need that live programming. If we angle this right, we could get sponsors to foot the bill for the whole thing. Just think: Artemis IV, brought to you by Toyota. Well, given the fate of the last Japanese attempt, maybe not Toyota, but you get what I mean.