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Of course he's touching it... YouTube

British science fiction writer J.G. Ballard published "The Dead Astronaut" in 1968. This was at the height of the Space Age. In 1969, American humans landed on the moon. But in the short story, the space industry (launch pads, command control, rocket movers) were the ruins of a past civilization. The glory was gone. Weeds grew through abandoned spacesuits. Ballard wrote.

CAPE KENNEDY has gone now, its gantries rising from the deserted dunes. Sand has come in across the Banana River, filling the creeks and turning the old space complex into a wilderness of swamps and broken concrete.
In 1977, Ballard wrote that "[e]ven before the Space Age had begun I had a hunch it would be short-lived—basically because NASA and the Russians had left the imagination out of space, one mistake the S-f writers never made.” In 1982, he published the prose-poem “Memories of the Space Age.” Space, it turned out, would be not the place. The moons and planets were certainly there, but our hopes for peace and off-worlds were not.

NASA's mission changed. In 1999, its Earth Observatory went online. The project monitored changes in the climate, the melting of the ice on its poles, and so on. True, there were exciting space adventures after the Space Age. Unhumanned spaceships visited the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and revealed the wild variety of these and other worlds. But NASA became more and more about this planet, as the information it collected and shared was incredibly useful to climate scientists. The rest of the world's space-faring civilizations—Russia, India, Japan, Europe, and China—were kept busy with telecommunication satellites.

This is why, on the surface, it is surprising that Trump and Pence are pushing space travel so hard. What are we supposed discover out there? What is this "infinite potential" that Pence is tweeting about? And if it's something, where is it? The moon? Beyond our solar system? The Oort Cloud?

And what is this amazing thing that Trump says will make us wonder, "How did we do it without space"? What does he have in mind? What is he trying to express with this whirling void of words? And the more you think about his statement, the more your thoughts become like beams light being pulled and sucked into a black hole.

All of this language is super-vague because what Trump and Pence want from space is exactly nothing. And the more infinite it is, the better; because this vast nothingness will keep NASA going further and further away from where life matters—the earth, the planet whose changing climate it has been monitoring since 1999. Instead of looking at and providing data of the only planet that we shall ever call home, Trump and Pence want us to look at the stars, at the "evermoving wanderers from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures." If this means more money for NASA, it's happy to explore nothing for evermore.