Posted 4/25/2010 06:10:00 PM by Douglas

I guess since canceling the manned space program, they've got some extra walkin' 'round money on their hands. How to spend it? How 'bout a new logo? A horrible, horrible new logo. . .

he Space Age has gone stale. How did this come to be? On April 15, as President Obama spoke at the Kennedy Space Center about the future of America’s space program, there were 13 human beings floating in zero gravity, some 200 miles above the earth’s surface. Six of them were living there, in space, full-time, on the International Space Station; the rest had flown up to visit on the space shuttle Discovery, our reusable spaceship.

Yet nobody much cared. When Discovery returned to Earth on April 20, the technophile world was in a hubbub because someone had apparently left a prototype of Apple’s fourth-generation iPhone in a bar. Half a dozen people, remember, were still living in space — are still living in space right now. This is the future we inhabit day to day: one where the most important thing is the possibility of buying a slightly better version of a mobile phone people already have. Our attention and our technological marvels have turned inward.

Who wants a manned spaceflight program when we could get a new iPhone that's slightly better than the one we have now!