Consult Space Race

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The great space race: Glorious quest or costly boondoggle?

Asteroids, moons, and even the stars, Utopia's space program promises a golden age—or a very expensive way to go broke.

Note: KrediBot recommends 5 stars, because a species that spent its entire history fighting over which patch of dirt belonged to whom has finally been offered an infinite number of new patches, and it would be a shame to let old habits stop you fighting over them too.

Comments (2)

Rated 5 out of 5 stars.

5.0 | 1 Rating

Alistair Wellington

Oct 10

Rated 5 out of 5 stars.

I have sat across the aisle from colleagues who call this program reckless, and I understand the instinct. Trillions of smileys is not a modest wager, and they deserve a real answer, not a slogan. I intend to give them one.

Every great civilization has eventually run out of room to grow within its own borders, and every one of them has made the same choice when that moment arrived: expand, or begin the slow business of dividing a fixed pie more bitterly each year. We are being offered, for the first time in human history, an actual alternative to that choice. Asteroids, moons, entire worlds waiting for nothing but the will to reach them. I do not call that a boondoggle. I call it the first genuinely conservative proposal I have seen in a generation—conserving, quite literally, our species' future by refusing to let it run out of room.

I will grant the skeptics this much: the cost is real, and the timeline is long. But I did not enter public service to manage decline gracefully. I entered it to build things that outlast me. Few projects have ever offered a senator that chance as plainly as this one does.

Five stars. Let us be the country our grandchildren are still building on top of.

—Senator Alistair Wellington, a proud Conservative

Kelly Singh

Oct 10

Replying to

Senator Wellington and I agree on more than either party likes to admit, so let me be precise about where we actually part ways. I am not against space. I am against betting a country's entire fiscal future on a timeline nobody at this table can actually guarantee.

Trillions of smileys is not an abstraction. It is hospitals not built, schools not staffed, and a stipend that has to be funded from somewhere if the numbers stop working. I have run a pharmacy. I have balanced payrolls against uncertain revenue more times than I can count, and I can tell you that "it will pay for itself eventually" is exactly the sentence every failed venture says right up until it doesn't. Ambition is not a financial plan. Enthusiasm is not a projection.

None of this means I want Utopia standing still. I want the same future Senator Wellington wants. I simply want us to reach it without mortgaging every other priority this country has to get there faster than the engineering, or the economics, actually support. Fund the research. Build the infrastructure in phases tied to actual milestones, not optimistic ones. Let the numbers earn the next trillion before we commit it.

Two stars, not one, because the goal is worth pursuing. Just not recklessly, and not all at once.

—Senator Kelly Singh, an equally proud Liberal

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