In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream | Space

TRUST BUT VERIFY: We all find ourselves forced to dance with the devil from time to time; the trick is to not get visibly aroused while doing so.

It’s unseemly.

I bring this up having watched last week’s showdown over all the additional rocket ships that Elon Musk, all the colonels at Vandenberg Space Force Base, plus a sizable smattering of elected officials — including Congressmember Salud Carbajal — want to start blasting into space. As showdowns went, it was Godzilla versus Bambi. I’ll let you guess who played the deer. In real life, the commissioners had no real authority other than to rubber-stamp an agreement — already hatched — to allow Elon Musk and his SpaceX company to increase the number of launches from Vandenberg from six to 36 a year. In real life, Musk and SpaceX are already blasting about 18 a year up into the heavens, where they plant hundreds and thousands of Starlink satellites into low orbital space so you and I enjoy better cell reception. About 15 percent of these launches, however, carry military payloads that are deemed essential for national security purposes. Because the military has no independent launch program, we the people must rely on private operators like Musk, a certifiably mad, mercurial genius, to ensure our national security…

Source www.independent.com