Not Moving On

I was going to write about some other things, but my previous post about the loss of the SST seems to have spawned.

You see, I got an email from an online shoe store advertising these shoes:

I got these pictures from blog.sivasdescalso.com

These are Nike Air Max Lunar90 SP Moon Landing, a limited edition (of course) release commemorating the 45th anniversary of One small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.

And that, of course, made me think of Game Theory's Nine Lives to Rigel Five. Warning; if you don't like Paisley Underground kind of pop, don't bother watching this, it will probably just make you mad.

Side by side slide by space and time
Yeah the Neil Armstrong telecasts of Nineteen Sixty-Nine
Proportion distortion I saw in those shoes
And I learned a kind of ego that I doubt I'll ever lose

Says the first verse. (Full lyrics here)

Well, I always liked that song and I knew the late, great Scott Miller and I shared certain disappointments. I didn't realize how well they'd been documented, though, until today when I read this:

"Nine Lives to Rigel Five," according to AllMusic's Stewart Mason, "obliquely concerns one of Scott Miller's favorite topics, the disconnect between childhood wonder and adult reality."^[5] In the original Star Trek episodes of the 1960s, the star Rigel and its numbered planets had been mentioned numerous times. Mason wrote, "Anyone who was a kid during the '50s and '60s space race had been told by no less an authority than Scientific American that by 1984, we'd all be living on the moon and driving personal spaceships, and the fact that we're not is, on some level, still something of a disappointment."^[5]

You can read the context here.

Now, I promised this would not be a political blog - well, not overtly - but I am disappointed that, rather than projecting ourselves into space, we, meaning humanity, are more directly involved in shooting down airliners full of vacationers and researchers and blowing up families who happen to be living over tunnels. In other words, the trend is not up, but down, down, down.

I've read that Americans lost interest in space because of other, more immediate and pressing geopolitical concerns at the time (an elephant walks into a room. "Hello! My name is Vietnam" "Later, Vietnam, we are still talking about the SST and the moon and stuff. elephant leaves)

Looks like we're still more about war. But I would like to post this link to an article about a possible new supersonic jet. It's still a ways off and might, like jetpacks and weekend trips to Mars, never arrive. But it's my farewell offering to Scott Miller. RIP, buddy.