Not Getting It Department

Gersh Kuntzman on Bush’s space program:

Give Bush more credit: He’s not listening sci-fi writers in Hollywood; as always, he listens to the econo-fi writers at companies like Enron, Halliburton, Boeing and Lockheed. As The Washington Post reported last week, the White House started revisiting these companies’ long-held fantasies once China put a man in orbit last year. Suddenly, a new space race was on–and we didn’t want the Chinese to get back to the moon before we did.

Thankfully, Bush campaign contributors are hot on the case! Indeed, a key Halliburton scientist once admitted in Oil & Gas Journal (what? You don’t subscribe?) that human achievement is only a small part of why we should explore space. Rather, it represents “an unprecedented opportunity for both investigating the possibility of life on Mars and for improving our abilities to support oil and gas demands on Earth.” In other words, space exploration is really space exploitation.

He says that like it’s a bad thing.

Idiot.