How the West Wasn't Won

Nigel Assbackwards writes "Finally, after years of being furtively passed between trusted friends, the legendary NASA satire "How the West Wasn't Won" is available at spacefuture. And Oh!, if only all space agencies were as loud and as totally ace as WideGroup's MirCorp intro."

Comments

not all that funny

[urbazewski]

I found this a tedious read, heavy handed and predictable.
The Onion packed more humor into one fake headline:

"NASA delays shuttle launch out of sheer habit"
than that essay manages in endless paragraphs. (disclosure: I worked at the NASA Ames Research Center.)
annmariabell.com

Wow, what a great analogy.

[adrizk]

When I started reading this article, my first thought was "I don't seem the similarity" - but after a few (of the many) paragraphs, I begin to see the similarities between the race to open up the west, and the opening up of the "final frontier".

For example:
Expiditions into the west, just like flights into space today, were enormously sensitive and complex. Just like spaceflight, a slight glitch or design flaw in a wagon could cause the, usually spectacular, instantaneous death of everyone on board the wagon in the first few minutes of the expidition. Often with damage to others who happened to be near the site that the wagon set off from.

Also, before wagons full of supplies started arriving, the American west was TOTALLY devoid of life. In fact, if you just sent a naked person or animal, or even bacterium into the west, it would die almost immediately from any number of causes - asphyxiation, radiation, extreme cold or heat. Before the original Americans started sending wagons into the west, it had been utterly uninhabited, and totally inhospitable to human life.

Thank god private individuals were able to overcome all of these nearly impossible scientific and technological challenges and open up a radiation blasted sterile wasteland to human habitation.

So the lesson is that all we have to do is convince ourselves that space travel really isn't inherently difficult or expensive, and blame everything on big government.

Great article. Great analogy.

Re:Nice but...

[Artifex]

the metaphor falls short with the fact that you cannot send people to harvest the Moon

It falls short far more quickly than that. You can gradually expand into a desert; there is no gravity-well-equivalent to require a geat expenditure for a small gain like the early space missions.

Also, at least while still close by, there's not as much risk of sudden death in a "mission" through the desert. If your wagon breaks down, you can look for sparse-but-extant resources to sustain you until you return (or, you know, given the timeperiod this was written, they could have used shortwave to call base and ask for help). If nothing else, you don't have to carry your environment in your wagon, just food, water, blankets, and some weapons to fend off animals.

You don't make special calculations for every bit of the trip; if you give up, you can return and sneak back into town early Sunday morning, instead of having to arive at one special spot equipped for you at noon on Friday.

Which brings up another point: spacecraft are a bit more different from cars than a long-distance wagon is from a farm wagon. The ultimate failure of this story lies in the pretense that an evolutionary progression is the same as a revolutionary leap, and that the attitudes of the people paying for each should be the same. We want to see real results, whether that be pacemakers, communications satellites, or Tang, that everyone can benefit from.

We don't want to pay for infrastructure for the rich to take vacations, or for pure science experiments that we can't immediately see results from. Give us dreams and the belief that we if we set out in our own creaky vehicles, at least some of us will make it out there, and that we won't be under the thumb of our original governments, and that we all will have a chance at better lives when we get there.

Wagons, ho!