5. Musk (Countdown to Election Day)
5. Musk (Countdown to Election Day)
Revisiting Greek Mythology
In Greek mythology Daedalus built wings so he and his son Icarus could escape from imprisonment on Crete. When both tried them out, Icarus ignored his father’s warning not to fly too close to the sun and his wings made of feathers held together with wax burned and melted from the heat. The son perished.
Daedalus was right of course about the danger of getting too much sun although George Hamilton, who is alive at 85 and still presumably tanned to the hilt, represented the modern Icarus of our day for me at least superficially. Realistically, maybe I should assign the role to Elon Musk. He certainly knows no bounds but despite his accomplishments someone pegged him as the uncool guy’s idea of being a cool guy and I can’t do any better than that.
Musk may be an innovative genius but he has turned into the social media host for the most evil and toxic among us. What used to be Twitter is now a cesspool that the likes of Alex Jones and other purveyors of hate swim in including the man who might be the American president again. Musk hands them flippers and a mask when they want to dive in and a towel to clean off when they climb out if he’s not doing laps himself.
But I digress. In our lifetime we have begun human exploration of space a safe distance away from it. Although it has been 52 years since a man walked on the moon, in that time our species has landed robots on our nearest planetary neighbor and somewhere speeding through the universe is a spacecraft that was launched in 1977 with a recording of Chuck Berry’s Johnny B.Goode for whoever or whatever intelligent life might be interested and capable of listening to it.
I know that remote control is the sensible way space exploration has to proceed but whose names will be remembered in the future? I don’t think Neil Armstrong ranks up there yet with Christopher Columbus.
Years ago I interviewed the former astronaut Gene Cernan who bemoaned the fact that it is machines and not people exploring and tasked with making discoveries in our stead in space. Cernan was in fact that last person to set foot on the moon in 1972. He had a great soundbite: “You’ve never seen a camera have a ticker tape parade in New York City.”
But recently, there are a couple of present day patrons of space exploration who have gotten their feet wet in the stratosphere.
In 2021 Richard Branson was launched 53 miles into space on his company’s Virgin Galactic Unity 22 rocket. Nine days later Jeff Bezos blasted 66 miles up on his Blue Origin company’s New Shepard rocket.
Since 2020 Elon Musk’s rocket company Space X has launched 15 humanly crewed launches. Musk has yet to be aboard any of them.
“You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great - and that’s what being a spacefaring civilization is all about. It’s about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past. And I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars.” —Elon Musk
But maybe Musk has decided he’ll partake in the excitement only when he’s more confident any feathers and wax that might be taking him to those stars won’t burn and melt.
And here’s a link to the story I did in 2002 with Eugene Cernan’s participation…