Revive the US space program? How about not | Nicholas Russell

Space exploration is an incredibly expensive and unnecessary way to ignore the many problems here on earth

It's been a half century since Gil Scott-Heron recorded the spoken-word poem Whitey on the Moon for his 1970 debut album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox: I can't pay no doctor bill/ (but Whitey's on the moon)/ Ten years from now I'll be paying still/ (while Whitey's on the moon)."

The year before, the same administration that successfully led Apollo to the moon assassinated Black Panther deputy chairman Fred Hampton and party member Mark Clark. Police had raided the Stonewall Inn and the US supreme court had only just ordered the desegregation of public schools in the south. One in 10 families lived in poverty, Black people at a rate three times that of white people. The US space program was a sprawling and expensive endeavor, perhaps too complicated a subject to understand in one sitting, but its cost was apparent. An inner city" high school teacher quoted in a 1969 article from the Nation said: Every time one of those things blasts off I can't think of anything except all that money we need here on earth.'' While the fantasy of out there" was trotted around the world as the next step in human advancement, people on the ground were suffering.