Funny, I always thought that part of Doctor King's dream was the coming of a day when nobody would notice the color of anybody's skin, a day when their accomplishments would speak for themselves.
On Martin Luther King Day, al Gore was acting badly and accusing President Bush, in his attempts to protect the United States, of "repeatedly and insistently" breaking the law, the same laws that his administration stretched in their own surveillance. Later, Hillary Clinton, not to be outdone by this stuffed shirt's braying, announced with all the ugliness she could muster, to a packed congregation, that the US House of Representatives is run like a "plantation," as only she'd know after a multi-million dollar junket to a real Jamaican plantation in april of 2004, where her traveling squad occupied 40 rooms on Uncle Sap's nickel.
and while all this pandemonium was going down, a diverse group of terrific kids from the University of Colorado, who were responsible for a major contribution to the New Horizons Mission to Pluto, our most ambitious space program in years, were sweating out its launch on Wednesday.
almost everything about Pluto is uniquely american. It was the first and only planet discovered by an american, Clyde Tombaugh, back in 1930. and now the first expedition to this icy world floating at the edge of the solar system is being led by an american team, kids included.
Pluto, just about as far as you can get from the Democratic politics of hatred and racial immolation, is located about 3 billion miles from Earth. and to give you an idea about the scale of this voyage, imagine this: if you hold a scale model of the Earth, some four inches across, in your hand, Pluto would be located about 50 miles away.
Pluto is named for the god of the underworld, and PL are the first two initials of Percival Lowell, the american astronomer who first started looking for this far off icy world due to the perturbations he found in the orbit of Neptune, the farthest known planet at the time.
and Pluto is unique because it, along with its moon, Charon and its other two smaller moons, contains the building blocks of the nascent solar system, all kept in a deep freeze, near absolute zero, since its formation some four or five billion years ago. By flying by we'll see what the old neighborhood used to look like, oh, three or four billion years ago. Before we moved in and it started its slow decline.
New Horizons will become the fastest flying spacecraft the US has ever launched, passing the Moon in just nine hours. By the time the space craft gets to Pluto, it will be moving at over 50,000 mph, allowing just a day for close-ups of the mysterious planet and thus dictating the absolute criticality for the operation of its instruments.
The New Horizons Mission is the first major NaSa undertaking featuring a major sensor system designed by a team of student physicists, which in this case, will determine the amount of interplanetary dust encountered. The students will be able to calculate the mass and speed of the individual dust particles picked up on their grid as a result of the electrical signals they generate as the spacecraft moves through three billion miles of interplanetary space, as well as their relative density.
and you would think that this program, because it is so unique, and so exclusively american, would be right up the Democrat's, or somebody's, alley. It puts our badly tarnished educational system in the best light it's been under in years. It's got a terrific bunch of kids who dreamed up and designed an incredible batch of high-tech engineering of a sufficient caliber to rival some of al Gore's own inventions--something that the US is said to be woefully deficient in on the world stage.
and this lack of political interest is what I just don't understand. How many times do we go to Pluto? Well, just this once. are we going there again? Probably not for a really long time. What did it take to get there? a whole lot of hard work, including one high-school student who had to set up a web site in his bedroom to generate a tremendous on-line petition to urge Congress to get behind New Horizons. So why isn't this more of a story? More of an american success story considering it was an american who found the darned thing, that it's an american expedition going there and it's american students who designed a critical on board system? You'd think the politicians would be all over this one, like a cheap suit on a circus chimp.
I guess it would have taken a politico's staffers just a few minutes to check out the TV news and to take a look at the students to notice their smarts and the fact they're fulfilling their dreams. and another few minutes to get their bosses on board with a terrific all-american success story, made for the 30- second bite on a day about dreams. The story is right in front of their noses.
But no, the silence is deafening. The Democrats either wail about chimerical apparitions or wallow in the epithet filled gutter while the Republicans are mum on the issue.
Come on, there's a whole bunch of smart kids who'd love a trip to the big city and a chance to squeeze under the big inclusive dome and have their photos taken with the movers and shakers and the guys and gals who paid for the ride.
Doggone it, go to the Colorado web site and check out the list of all the students who contributed to the program. Look at the kids' pictures. Look at their smiles. See america as it really is. Look at the hopes and dreams of their parents and their brothers and sisters reflected in their eyes. See our hopes and dreams and the visions of Martin Luther King come alive on the screen. and by looking at their faces you'll see no evidence of the racist anger and the lies which motivate so many of our leading politicians. Keep looking and you'll see the determination and the will to make a better world and the excitement in exploring outer space. The things they're accomplishing are so amazing. and their relative youth insures that when New Horizons enters Pluto space that they'll still be at the screens, watching the big board, guiding it in, even with a four and a half hour time delay, in 2015.
I can't imagine a politician dedicating this much time to any single topic.
The students who have helped design the New Horizon spacecraft, which will eventually leave the solar system after barely kissing diminutive Pluto, will have something that al Gore and Hillary Clinton will never have and can never hope to have. They will have treasure beyond compare, items more valuable than the richest emoluments of office.
They shall have stars.
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