I’m gonna post what may be a Controversial Opinion™ knowing I may get hate, and honestly I’m ready to hear counterarguments because I kind of wish I didn’t feel this way. I just need to vent: the thrill is totally gone for me with contemporary manned spaceflight. Like, I really do not care about whatever SpaceX is doing, though I will admit they are at minimum competent, especially compared to the other billionaire-lead space projects (which I give even less of a shit about and think are pathetic tryhards). And even beyond that, I feel pretty much no enthusiasm about stuff like the Artemis Program, a Mars landing, etc.
I do understand it is stupid to feel this way because it’s not like NASA didn’t contract stuff out to private companies from the start, and it’s not like Lockheed, Grumman, Raytheon et al., are paragons of ethical virtue. But to put it in the most basic terms, I hate Elon Musk and I find the weirdly fervent community there is around SpaceX cringey. Like, were people hardcore stanning Rockwell in the 80s cause they built the space shuttle? I don’t think so. I dislike everything about the whole vibe of SpaceX; their founder, their fanbase, even their aesthetics (still salty over the spacesuits, they look like a bad costume, and I think the big touchscreen control panel in Crew Dragon is so ugly and stupid even if that is The Future™ or whatever).
So you might think, ok, you just want this stuff to be done by someone else. And yeah maybe that is part of it, but like I mentioned above, I am aware that going with a traditional defense contractor isn’t really better, ethically or practically—I’m not some kind of Boeing Starliner stan. Sure I hate Elon Musk for being an exploitative billionaire who treats his workers poorly and posts cringe on social media, but is that really a worse thing to be than a US defense contractor that profited off wars in the Middle East and is also known to be unreliable on these projects? It’s not even like one is the “lesser” of two evils.
Then there’s also the fact that I just feel empty when it comes to things that seem like the fulfilment of my childhood wishes, stuff I should be hyped about. When I was a kid I used to write stories about majority female shuttle crews, but 15 years later the prospect of putting a woman on the moon makes me feel absolutely nothing, apart from the frustration of “too little too late.” I don’t feel empowered, I just feel tired.
Maybe that’s what growing up is, and maybe this was unavoidable/inevitable when I became a cynical socialist but god, I used to believe in this stuff. As a kid near the end of the shuttle era, it was bittersweet to see the program end but I had hopes for what would follow and I was excited that I’d be able to grow up and see it happen. When I was in high school/college and I got more interested in the Apollo missions, I longed to be able to experience something of that magnitude in my lifetime, but now that that opportunity is theoretically within reach I don’t feel any sense of awe, because it doesn’t seem like a big step forward anymore. Now manned space exploration feels like…putting a grotesque billboard ad in the middle of a beautiful landscape: it’s no longer raw or extraordinary.
More and more my interest in spaceflight is just becoming an exercise in nostalgia and I have mixed feelings about that that I won’t even get into because this post is already long af, but I just….I didn’t want it to end up like this? I didn’t want to end up like this? Girl help…
