NASA cuts: a danger for everyone

I was still awake at 2 in the morning when the first reports of the Russian meteor began filtering in via Twitter, and by morning, full videos of the thing passing through the atmosphere, shattering windows and creating general panic as it went, were all over the Web.

One, which shows a blip streaking across the sky before flashing brighter than a half-dozen suns, is particularly captivating and looks like a scene out of a movie – just not the movie that I ever, ever wanted to see in real life. Had that happened in New Jersey I would have been hiding behind the couch, chain-smoking cigarettes and ranting about how the world was ending.

Thankfully, it was in Russia, and because the 10,000-ton meteor wasn't all that large (in cosmic terms), the video remains a fascinating bit of science instead of an impromptu documentary on how the world ended.

But even knowing how bad it could have been, the event has had one huge benefit: in one fell swoop, that chunk of rock reinforced the faltering notion that space science is, well, kind of important, and it illustrated that in a way that hundreds of broke, frustrated columnists like me couldn't do in a century.

Make no mistake: nothing was stopping that meteor from being three miles wide, and it is a total roll of the dice as to how close these things come to Earth. If it had been that big we likely would have detected it, of course, but that doesn't mean that we could do anything to stop it aside from launching some "Hail Mary" nukes and praying — a pretty poor game plan for saving humanity and ensuring the survival of the human race.

Sound like a movie script? Of course it does. But it’s wholly possible, and it has happened, over and over and over again. One need only look up at the massive craters on our own moon to realize that the biography of the Earth is rife with apocalyptic, world-ending impacts.

But we, in what seems like a permanent mission to swallow the barrel of our own shotgun, refuse to adequately fund our one line of defense against all this (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and in this "GOVERNMENT IS SOOO EVIL!" era, you can pretty much type "NASA budget cuts" into Google on any given day and find something new that’s on the chopping block.

Every year the pool of money devoted to scientific exploration shrinks — down to $17.7 billion from $18.4 billion two years ago — and programs are cut and ideas abandoned because politicians (including President Obama) refuse to devote money to it. That is not how it should be.

I will never understand the zeal with which we’ve abandoned our space program, and the lack of progress we’ve made since the leaps and bounds of the mid-20th century is especially frustrating. But hopefully, the Russian meteor will renew both interest in and concern about our space program and let us move forward again on the grand plans we’ve walked away from.

After all, as the famous Bill Nye succinctly said in a CNN interview last summer: "If the Earth gets hit by an asteroid, it’s game over. It’s control-alt-delete for civilization."

Being as we are the only species to walk the Earth that has both the technology and the ability to avoid this fate, I suggest we take this responsibility more seriously.

Armstrong's death should be watershed for NASA

By Steve Janoski

“You guys just don’t get it,” my father, the old engineer, told me as he stood in his kitchen. “You, your generation... you guys just don’t understand how important it was.”

Being just over two decades older than I, we typically don’t have the generational disconnect that other families might; we have the same politics, listen to the same music, and generally see things the same way. But for once, I could not argue with him — this was a gap neither of us could bridge.

And even though he was just eight years old when Neil Armstrong landed on that chunk of rock that’s haunted humanity since it first looked up at the sky, that event had such an impact on him that to this day he thinks it marvelous, and there is no way that I, being born in 1984 and brought up in the age of the routine space shuttle mission, could appreciate the momentousness, or feel the disbelief, that the world felt on July 20, 1969.

I like to imagine that for those few minutes, nothing else mattered. Not the hatred that humans level against one another or the misdeeds of men past, or even the irony that the same nation that left a plaque on the moon reading “We came in peace for all mankind” was simultaneously napalming children in the rice paddies of Vietnam.

No — the moon landing was one of those grand historical pivot points, like the signing of the Magna Carta or the surrender of the Nazis, that bends everything afterwards towards it and can bring tears to men’s eyes when they think on it.

That night, it stripped Walter Cronkite of his powers of speech and left him -wringing his hands in disbelief — for once, even he was just another member of the human race — and it is still impossible to look at the picture taken by Apollo 11 of that little shimmering blue ball, teeming with life and rising from the unimaginably desolate ocean of darkness, and not realize how fragile all of it is.

“For thousands of years now it’s been man’s dream to walk on the moon. Right now, after seeing it happen, knowing that it happened, it still seems like a dream,” he said.

But it wasn’t. It was real. And it was made possible by the United States government.

It began with the Democrat Kennedy’s legendary pledge to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade, and it ended when Armstrong stepped off the landing craft and onto the dusty surface of the Sea of Tranquility. When the first phone call was received by the astronauts, it was made by the Republican Nixon.

That kind of achievement required the devotion of both parties, and the understanding that this was something that was worth it, and that we had no other choice than to take everything we’d ever learned, even through our wars, and put it into the hands of a bunch of kids at NASA and say, “We have faith in you. Do this great thing, and we will support you.”

Over the years we’ve gotten away from that, and both parties bear the blame; even President Obama made me do a face-palm when he announced the most recent cuts to NASA’s budget, which led to the scrapping of the plan to put a man back on the moon. Although some have this misguided belief that private enterprise will take up the mantle, that will not happen unless there’s enough profit in it.

Simply put, that isn’t acceptable.

Those cuts even stirred Armstrong, who generally preferred to live the quiet life on his Ohio farm, to make a rare public appearance to protest in front of Congress.

“America is respected for its contributions it has made in learning to sail on this new ocean. If the leadership we have acquired through our investment is simply allowed to fade away, other nations will surely step in where we have faltered,” he said. “I do not believe that would be in our best interests.”

Armstrong could not be more right — government exists for two reasons: to take care of children and the elderly, and to fund exploration.  If it can’t do that, why bother having it at all?

And for someone like me, who spent his childhood trips to Disney World marveling at “Spaceship Earth” and wondering what the future would hold for us…well, I think it’s time to work on creating a new pantheon of American heroes before all of the old lions pass on.

Email: janoski@northjersey.com

Some pansies for your "man cave"

Thursday, March 10, 2011

BY STEVE JANOSKI

Once, before sheetrock and plywood and cement and mortar, men lived in caves. It was probably miserable, but it did the job of protecting us from rain and snow and saber-toothed tigers.

We're fortunate now that we've learned to build our own structures out in the light, and if we don't build it, we buy it.

For some reason though, there seems to be some kind of movement to return to this primordial idea of living in a cave, and it's catching on like a wildfire among the males of this generation.

Consequentially, much is being written about the ever-more popular "man cave" where supposedly, men can go back to being men.

This cave, I guess, is where you put all the things your wife says aren't allowed upstairs, like a pool table, or a bar, or your... nevermind.

Websites have even formed around the idea - mancavesite.org says that it's been going since April of 2008, and its mission statement says that the site is meant to provide a "centralized location to showcase your man cave and share ideas with others who have a similar passion."

Pictures abound of proud men standing in poorly decorated rooms with sports posters, bars made of plywood, and couches that look they've been pulled off the curb after the rain.

I think they should rename the site, or at the very least, change it to something that's more reflective of what they're about.

How about: "We're a group of men who are so spineless that we've let our wives cast us off to the basement, where we vainly hope for respite in what looks like a mix of a 14 year-old's bedroom and the inside of a dive bar in Clifton."

I've long held the opinion that for at least the past 50 years, this country has been moving far too much to the soft side when it comes to men.

Gone is the image of our fathers - men who wouldn't let you cry, men who told you to walk it off, men who looked at your gaping wounds and said with squinted eyes, "Ah, that probably doesn't need stitches."

Now we're supposed to be sensitive. Understanding. It's OK to cry, it's ok to quit, it's ok to sue someone when they punch you instead of hitting them back harder.

We've outlawed dodge ball, tackle football, and peanut butter in the schools, and many kids have even embraced that sort of androgynous style of clothing that I thought died when Bowie's Ziggy Stardust phase ended.

"Testosterone" may as well be a four-letter word, and frankly, we've become a nation of emasculated she-men, whimpering in the corners and afraid of doing things that were once the norm.

But this "man" cave is the final straw; women might as well just nail that basement door shut.

Maybe it's my youth or the fact that I'm not married talking, but how about actually enjoying the whole of the house you live in, instead of leaving it to the wife to decorate while you take refuge in a basement that looks like the inside of a dorm room?

I don't have my own basement to take over, per se, but I have kind of taken over the basement of my parent's house.

There's no couches or college posters in it though - there's a heavy bag, a speed bag, a weight bench, a barbell, and stacks of plates that rival what the best jail in the country has to offer.

The linoleum floor has been broken up by deadlifting too much and the smell is less than appealing.

I don't want to spend more time down there than I have to, really; it's a punishing place, more of a dungeon than a cave. But, should I ever make enough money to own my own house, my new basement will probably look strikingly similar to my old one.

All of this doesn't mean that a man should try to take over his whole house at the expense of his wife, though.

All I'm saying is that should some unfortunate women find me fit to marry, I'd plan on having some kind of say in what the house looked like so I could enjoy the thing myself - and I sure as hell wouldn't plan on being pushed into the damned basement either, like some kind of incontinent animal that can't be trusted to sleep in the nicer rooms.

And by the way - if you're going to put a bar in your basement, at least sell some liquor and make some cash that thing, or bust it up and throw it out.

E-mail: janoski@northjersey.com