Escape Velocity

"I wanted to be a spaceman

That's what I wanted to be

But now that I am a spaceman

Nobody cares about me"

-Harry Nilsson, "Spaceman"

"So you're a literature major... What do you want to do with that?"

"I want to be a writer."

"So like, what kind of stuff do you want to write?"

"Fiction."

"What kind of fiction?"

"Well um... actually, I want to write... science fiction, among other things."

This is a conversation that I have been having a lot lately. I feel like the epitome of lame when I tell people that I want to write science fiction. I might as well take to playing Warhammer, wear coke-bottle glasses, and frequently describe things as "purely plasmodial!"

Growing up, I wanted to be an astronaut. That was until I first got on a roller coaster and spent the next hour praying to the porcelain gods. I also found out that my eyes are not up to snuff. I am not physically perfect enough to be an astronaut, and I probably don't have the grades either. I am not good enough to be an astronaut. I will never go to space.

Nor will you, most likely. No matter where on earth you are, you are less than 65 miles from outer space. I am closer to outer space right now than I am to Concretestan. It takes maybe ten bucks of gas to get to Concretestan with current gas prices. To outfit, launch, and maintain a space shuttle flight costs somewhere on the order of $1.5 billion. And that won't even get me escape velocity. Funding an Apollo mission in today's dollars would cost somewhere around $145 billion. Building and launching spaceships is incredibly costly and requires more numbers than could ever be held in my brain. I am not intelligent enough to build spaceships. I am not intelligent enough to send people to space.

I know why I write, and that is because through writing, I can make anything happen. I may not be perfect enough to man spaceships (with the exception of my beloved Spaceship Earth), I may not be intelligent enough to build spaceships, but I can write about spaceships. And by writing about spaceships, if I do it well enough, I can take anyone to space.

In all reality, there will likely not be another man (or woman) on the moon for the next thirty years. NASA will continue to receive less and less funding, along with the European Space Agency. China, or maybe India, could potentially send more people up, but as of right now their space programs are still nascent.

We blew our wad by winning the space race. We rushed into space exploration without taking time to do things right, and in doing so we missed out on a lot of opportunities. Getting to the moon turned into a pissing contest for national pride, rather than an opportunity to create a sustainable space program that would maintain continued progress. Space exploration is not as advanced as we think it is. Despite the optimism of some scientists, my generation will all be dead before someone walks on Mars, and our children and their children will be dead before we get to the other side of the asteroid belt.

I will be providing the next best thing to going to space. I want to go to space, and I'm sure many others do as well. That is what I want to write science fiction. That is what I want to tell people when I have the aforementioned conversation. But I just watch the wheels turn in their brain as they realize how unbelievably lame I am.