The United States is spending billions in taxpayer money and untold hours of the brainiest people in America to send rockets into the air, in some cases just to repair space toilets, get a slightly closer look at the stars and to induce mindless robots to dig for dirt on Mars.
It was all sort of fun back in the 1960s and 1970s, when we Americans showed those damned Russkies that we were better than they were in launching chimps and people into the sky. And our Yankee taxpayers heroically outspent their Russkie taxpayers in the the eyeball-to-eyeball space race until their economy collapsed. Then, like a Fourth of July celebration, we watched the once-mighty Soviet Union explode into a dozen dinky little countries whose names all end with -stan.
Now it’s time to face up to a serious new crisis, one that is infinitely more important than the space race. I have a perfect solution, and it may well be an absolutely brilliant idea. It involves a drastic change of direction for NASA’s big brains, from looking to the sky to peering down to Earth and the ocean beneath.
Let’s just call the whole American science fiction Star Trek operation to a screeching stop and give NASA a new set of orders. After all, fellow taxpayers, it’s our money, and more and more of us consider all their current rocket-shooting activities a total waste in space.
Here’s the plan, and listen up, NASA! OK, guys and gals, maybe we’ll let you get back to your rockets in a couple of years, but right now, we have a serious crisis or two here on Earth where you’re urgently needed.
Put all that super brain power to work and quickly come up with a Big Plan (no, don’t call it BP) way to put a cork in the endless Gulf oil leak. With your smarts, you’ll most likely do it in a couple of days. Then, get to work to create clean, limitless energy sources. We want you to find or invent fuels that won’t cause Al Gore to sweat, tree-huggers to get spinters nor polar bears to fall off their ice floes. At the same time your efforts shouldn’t clean out every family bank account in America. Or, at least what’s left after the oil companies have emptied them.
And NASA brain children, maybe the most important reason we need you to solve these pressing problems is so Americans can finally get up off our knees. It’s long past time when we should stop kissing feet and other bodily parts of a bunch of super rich Middle East ragheads and their overpaid American fat-cat oil execs to beg them to stop plundering our economy.
