WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE
NASA released a 3-D panoramic view of the Spirit rover’s Mars landing site on Monday, January 3, 2004. PHOTO/Tesla Memorial
The successful landing on Mars by the rover Curiosity has evoked widespread public interest and enthusiasm. So many people visited NASA web sites to get the latest reports and download photographs of the landing and the Martian landscape that they crashed the space agency’s servers.
Hour by hour, day by day, the ten advanced instruments on board Curiosity will be studying the planet which has long fascinated the imagination as the likely next stage for human exploration and development. The enormous expansion in mankind’s scientific knowledge is a powerful blow not only against religious obscurantism but against the reactionary skepticism spread by idealist currents like post-modernism.
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After the successful landing on Mars, the Obama White House issued a brief statement in the president’s name presenting the achievement in nationalist terms. “Tonight, on the planet Mars, the United States made history,” the statement began, adding that the landing “will stand as a point of national pride far into the future” and demonstrates “our unique blend of ingenuity and determination.”
Obama’s science adviser, John P. Holdren, sounded a similar note, saying in a press interview, “there’s a one-ton, automobile-size piece of American ingenuity, and it’s sitting on the surface of Mars right now.” He went on to boast that the United States, with multiple Mars missions, was the only nation ever to land spacecraft successfully on another planet, ignoring the Soviet landings on Venus (ten Venera probes made soft landings and transmitted data between 1970 and 1985), the only spacecraft to reach that planet.
Despite efforts to portray it as a triumph for “American values,” the successful Mars landing is the antithesis of the predatory individualism that Wall Street and its political servants in Washington and in the media invariably present as the only possible organizing principle of modern society. Neither the “market” nor the profit motive played any significant role in launching and landing on Mars the largest and most advanced robot explorer ever sent to another planet.
The work of the NASA scientists and engineers, and their colleagues at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (part of the California Institute of Technology), is a living demonstration of the power of collective social effort and scientific planning. It inevitably begs the question why such methods could not be applied equally successfully to solving problems here on Earth: hunger, disease, unemployment, poverty, environmental devastation, war.
The White House statement pivoted from hailing the Mars landing to praising Obama’s efforts to privatize the space program, described as “a vision for a new partnership with American companies to send American astronauts into space on American spacecraft.” Here reactionary nationalism joins hands with imbecilic worship of the market.
Like every other aspect of American society, the space program is distorted and blighted by the dictatorship of the financial aristocracy. But the effect up to now has been indirect. There is no multi-millionaire CEO at NASA or JPL stuffing his pockets at the expense of the larger enterprise. All of the key decision makers involved in the Mars program are scientists or administrators with a science or space program background. Not a banker or corporate raider among them.
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