Barbarian at the Gates

Onward Unto Pluto! with Dr. Harry Spangler Hello, this is Dr. Harry Spangler, and I'm here from NASA to tell you about the latest nonsense that is threatening our great agency. Of course, I'd much rather be telling you about my pet project, the glorious New Horizons mission to Pluto, but with the cutback in staffing dollars, these days I'm forced to address pretty much any penny-ante concern that NASA pulls out of it's rear end. However, I think that you'll agree with me that this is a matter of great significance. When President Obama recently spoke to NASA in Florida, my heart was filled with the joy of limitless possibilities as he talked of missions to the Asteroids, Mars, and beyond. Surely there was the possibility of a manned mission to my beloved Pluto within my lifetime! Just two months earlier he had called for an end to our foolish flirtation with The Moon, and now he was focusing on the full Universe. Sadly, a gaseous cloud has obscured that universe, and that cloud is named Stephen William Hawking. Yes, Stephen Hawking, celebrity physicist, and writer of books even I can't understand. I once tried reading a copy of 'Information Loss in Black Holes' on the recommendation of a colleague and before I got halfway through it I wanted to put a black hole in my head. And what am I? A rocket scientist, thank you very much. (My colleague later told me that he had recommended the book as a joke, and I retaliated in kind by telling his supervisor that he was downloading internet porn on his NASA computer. Sadly our professional relationship turned sour after that when my clever response turned out to be true.) I have always feared Hawking, with his mechanized voice and impenetrable theories of space-time. And now he has moved to frighten the world at large by warning of the dangers inherent in space exploration. Making contact with aliens is just "a little too risky", Hawking warns in his Robbie the Robot drone. "I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans." On the other hand Mr. Hawking, may I remind you that it went smashingly well for the Europeans, as well as for many of the Native Americans who were able to adapt to the infinitely more advanced civilization that the heirs of Columbus would within a few centuries bestow on them. And yes, the Europeans benefited as well, with bountiful new offerings such as corn, turkey and tobacco, although I say with some sadness that my present employers require me to go outside to a secluded area in order to enjoy the latter of these gifts. You sit there smugly on your prime time TV show displaying shocking pictures of peaceful herbivores lazing under a foreign sun being brutally attacked by flying yellow lizards and expect us to not respond? You, sir, are a brute and a fear-monger. You may have your own show on Discovery, but NASA has it's own cable channel, although it pains me to admit that our ratings are currently in the toilet. Two short weeks ago, the future for NASA was so bright that we had to wear protective eye goggles, but now one man dares to try and turn the nation against space exploration with the laughable concept of alien domination. Stephen Hawking, your words come too late, and we will shout that message from the rooftop, which at NASA headquarters is rather high up. Our flag is planted on The Moon and our robots crawl upon the faraway surface of Mars. The Voyager probe is now in interstellar space carrying it's golden record with the sounds of whale songs and Johnny B Goode, and our radio transmissions are on their way to distant stars. And yet no scary beasts invade the planet Earth. It's too late to turn back now, Robot Boy. As far as NASA is concerned, it's onward unto Pluto. We have nothing to fear but Stephen William Hawking.

goodbye moon

Onward Unto Pluto! with Dr. Harry Spangler Hello, this is Dr. Harry Spangler, and I'm here from NASA, where it is my delighted surprise to once again be speaking to you about the tiny frozen world known as Pluto. Yes, lovers of the ninth stone from the sun, as I've illustrated above through the magic of photoshopping, the astronomically impossible has finally happened - Pluto has eclipsed the moon! Two short months ago, the media was awash with wall to wall stories about water on the moon, and they spent endless hours of speculation on the means mankind would use to retrieve it, even though, as I astutely pointed out, to obtain even one meager eight ounce serving would have required the pulverization of 116 pounds of lunar firmament. Little did it matter to the moonstruck media, as they ceaselessly filled their airwaves with images of artists conceptions of future water processing plants at their imaginary moon colony in the Cabeus crater. What a difference one rotation of Planet Earth on it's axis makes, and this dawn now reveals a new reality, one in which our lunar companion is put back in it's rightful place as little more than a celestial bauble. President Obama has delivered on his promise of hope and change and ended at last the folly that is moon mania. We've been there, we've done that, and it was boring. Now the spotlight can return to Pluto! And just in time, too. Did you know that in only two weeks we'll be celebrating the 80th anniversary of Pluto? I will, anyway. Of course our frozen friend itself has been around much longer than eighty years, but it was on February 18th, 1930, that Clyde Tombaugh placed two photographs of the ecliptic plane, taken at a six day interval, into his mighty blink comparator in order to see if anything had moved. Viola, he might have shouted, or perhaps he cried Eureka. We shall never know for sure, unfortunately, because there is no existing video which documents that momentous night when a tiny point of light would be recognized as the ninth planet in the solar system of the star we call The Sun. It was not yet Pluto, but it was close. Tombaugh was in a race against time to name this dark and icy world before someone else did, and so, counterintuitively, he opened the process to the public, where the name 'Pluto' was proposed by eleven year old Venetia Burney. The new planet was christened on March 24th of that very year, thereby forever protecting Planet Earth from residing in the same universe with a planet named Tombaugh. But I digress, although in my defense I can only blame my passion for talking about the storied history of the planet Pluto. Which I would assume, given the media's obsession with the topic, you well know was brutally stripped of it's membership in the planetary brotherhood by the sinisterly named International Astronomical Union in 2006, who then reclassified it as a 'dwarf planet'. I used to be bitter about this celestial unkindness, blaming it all upon the discovery of Eris, but gradually I began to take a certain comfort in the fact that few common citizen have even the slightest knowledge of Eris, thereby ceding Pluto the mantle of greatest dwarf planet of them all. But once again I digress, as my purpose here is to update you on the details of my primary project, the progress of the spacecraft known as 'New Horizons' - the grand exploratory mission to Pluto fortuitously launched back in the Bush years when America still had more money than it knew what to do with. It is with extreme pleasure that I tell you that the New Horizons craft has now traversed over half the distance to it's destination. Many of you may have missed this thrilling development, lost as it was in the tabloid-like obsession the media has showered upon each and every little lunar tidbit, but on December 29th NASA announced that New Horizons is now closer to Pluto than it is to Earth and is safely on track for it's rendezvous with Pluto in July 2015, where it will thrill us all with nine days of intense scientific excitement. Clyde Tombaugh's ashes will be along for the ride, but sadly there will be no human hand to sprinkle them upon the frigid surface of the planet Pluto - not on this voyage, anyway, but now that our silly fixation with the moon has finally been set aside for grander things, it is only a matter of time and will before humankind finally sets foot on the glorious arctic world of Pluto!