Yes, folks: It’s officially over! The Space Shuttle Enterprise (named after the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek: No kidding!) was retired today after a last flyover of Washington, DC. The current economic realities dictate we must focus on other stuff now for our own country’s survival, so we can no longer afford to dominate in the area of space exploration. Or at least, that’s what we’re being told by news commentators. But this is a big downer! Isn’t there a better way to convince people that it’s a good thing to end the space program? How about telling children who are astronaut-wannabes that it’s really more about sitting around bored out of your skull for hours and days at a time while you have to pee and poop in a bag and live in your own body odor than it is about exploring new worlds or contacting and fighting aliens to the death at Vasquez Rocks: That ought to make them lose interest fast!
Oh, but won’t this make us vulnerable to an even bigger threat, like in those 1950s movies, where all the alien invasions were always allegories of Communist takeovers? That’s right: I’m talking about Commies from Space! We’re asking for it now! You know all them alien races are commies! They’re not going to attack Russia or China: they’re sympathetic to them! They’re only coming to eradicate the Capitalist menace from the universe before we start drilling for carbomite, or exploding moons looking for latinum and stuff: You know it’s true! But how else are we supposed to pay off our national debt without taking over distant moons and eradicating hippie alien cultures so we can get that sweet, sweet unobtanium? It’s our only hope! (Help us, Obi-Wan Kenobi!) James Cameron has shown us the way, and he warned us of how we might be defeated by eco-terrorists! That’s why we’ve got to send out the big guns! They’re hoarding that latinum and unobtanium just to starve us out! And we can’t let that happen, now can we?
So, just to wake everyone up so they will stand up and demand that America conquer the universe (like Flash Gordon did), we’ve got to scare everyone out of their complacency with new Commies-from-Space horror and alien-invasion movies! That’ll get all our big bully kids yearning for space exploration: with it no longer permitted to beat up and bully other humans, they’ll want to journey into the deep vacuum of space to find beings they can beat on! After all, in space, no-one can hear you scream, right? (That was the slogan for the movie Alien, in case you didn’t know.) So it’s perfect for bullies: They’ll never get caught by having their victims yell for help! They can yell all they like: no-one will ever hear them! (Mwa ha ha!)
BTW, in case you didn’t know, this is what Vasquez Rocks is:
It’s a national park area in the California desert with neat-o-looking rock formations which have been featured in lots of horror and sci-fi movies and TV shows, from The Werewolf of London (1935), to Captain Kirk’s death-match with the Gorn in Star Trek. I have even been on a production team that shot a pilot TV show up there (and it’s HOT!!! I can’t imagine that guy in the foam rubber Gorn suit running around there in 118-degree temperatures! Yuck!).
