It’s been up there for 24 years now. Hanging over our heads. We present the International Space Station.

It looks huge, right? As manmade things in space, maybe it is.

But it is actually tiny: about the size of a football field (300 feet by 120 or so feet, counting sidelines). And it weighs all of 450 tons (that is the capacity of 4-5 railcars hauling gravel or coal). Woopie!

What is big about it is the government boondoggle it represents and continues to do.

It cost $130 billion dollars over ten years (1998-2007) to put together and costs $3 billion dollars (or more – directly) a year. It is a joint effort by 15 nations (counting the States as just one).

And NASA just awarded (to SpaceX) a $843-million contract to design and build a new vehicle able to destroy the thing around 2031 – seven years from now. If it makes it that long. And “only” if it only costs $843 million and does not explode in cost as most NASA (and military, h

It was designed for 15 years’ functional life, so 2031 would be more than twice its planned life. Planned by short-sighted bean counters working for governments. During which time it cost more than a trillion dollars in 1998 dollars (double that, at least, in 2024 bucks).

So the idea is to splash the thing into the South Pacific, away from shipping lanes and airliner paths and inhabited places. Meanwhile, we have to mine or grow everything in it: no recycling allowed. (Cost prohibitive, we are told.)

It didn’t have to be that way, of course. Government treats everything (except its power) as a throw-away. Sure, we learned a lot doing it, and from it. But even 25 years ago, we humans knew how to do it better.

For one, do it privately, and not as a government boondoggle.

Note that although we consider companies like SpaceX and Blue Origins to be “private” spaceflight providers, they really are often just government contractors: it isn’t private investments that fund them. It is money stolen from taxpayers (past, present, and future) by government. In some ways, to speak of SpaceX privatizing spaceflight is like saying the Air War in WW2 was won by Grumman, Boeing, and North American Aviation. (Government contractors that built, among other things, the Mustang (P-51), B-29 Superfortress, and the F4F Bearcat.) With stolen money, of course.

So billions and billions of dollars are thrown away for political purposes, and because of the political compromises that built these things as throwaway systems. Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Apollo Program was parodied as what Columbus’ voyages to the New World would have been like. The Nina, Pina and Santa Maria might have departed from Spain, but what arrived on San Salvador island? A pinnace. And what would have made it back to Spain? Three men clinging to a (small) liferaft. But only after nearly a decade of burning, sunken, and abandoned ships stretching across the Atlantic or sold for scrap to Italians or English merchants.

Now, I am sure that NASA is frustrated that it must contract with Musk’s SpaceX to design, build, and operate a predatory spacecraft to destroy what should have been an achievement by humans lasting for centuries. After all, they could have padded their own wallets with all of that near trillion bucks. But we could also be sure that NASA would fail – just as it has done since it tried to launch the first manmade satellite into earth orbit. And after years of delay. All at our taxpaying expense.

The NASA saga is at least more successful and less distressing than, say, the US Postal Service or college loan program. But that is scant comfort.

Again, compare: It has been 55 years since Armstrong and Aldrin landed at Tranquility Base. Yet today, the population of Luna is exactly ZERO. 55 years after Columbus “discovered” the New World (1648), the Spanish had established the city of La Paz in what is today Bolivia: one of dozens of cities and towns established, and with probably a half-million colonists or more. To say nothing of Brit and French and Dutch and other settlements.

We know: it probably isn’t “fair” to compare the Spanish conquest of Latin America to a conquest of the moon. But the technology of circa 1500 was less than minuscule compared to the technology of the late 20th Century. To say nothing of what we have in 2024.

Yes, the Spanish conquest was sponsored by government. And partially funded by government. But the conquistadors were really as much entrepreneurs as any modern American business buried under government regulations. And the Spanish empire, at least in its first century, paid for itself. (No, we do not discount the brutality and greed and homicidal nature of the Spaniards: whatever their motives. Do not think too much about this comparison.)

We could have exploded across the Solar System the way the Spaniards exploded across Mesoamerica and South America. Without the brutality of 16th Century colonialism. (No Moon-dwelling indigs or Martian natives.) Even with the technology of the 1960s and 1970s, we could have hundreds of thousands living in orbit and Luna – and Mars and at least in orbit around Venus and in the Asteroids. Instead, we have less than a dozen (maybe 20 with the Chinese station) above atmosphere.

Because we have traded liberty and risk for what? Certainly not security and/or safety. Rather, for the greed of a self-proclaimed elite that lords it over us. And bleeds us dry for stupid and ridiculous reasons.

Think on these things.