JimK:  I DIDN’T FIGHT A WAR SO YOU BASTARDS COULD RUIN MY GRASS!

“I blame the fantastic and unbelievable shows about space flight and rocket ships that are on today,” Aldrin said in an interview during an ice cream party held by the National Geographic Channel at the Television Critics Association press tour in Beverly Hills, Calif., this week. “All the shows where they beam people around and things like that have made young people think that that is what the space program should be doing. It’s not realistic.”

Holy crap.  I mean, this is why heroes should just fade away, really.  Nothing good ever comes of once-great men hanging around and looking for attention decades later.

This is just asinine.  Buzz Aldrin would never have gone to the moon if it weren’t for the fantastic imaginations of the science fiction writers which propelled the early days of the space program.  I’m sure it’s not every one, but I am willing to bet that a minimum of 95% of the engineers, math geeks, computer programmers and even the janitors at NASA were inspired to reach out toward space by Heinlein, Asimov and the like.  One wonders if Buzz simply forgets about those books, and about the space movies of the 50s and 60s.  Full of fantastic and unbelievable stuff about space flight and rocket ships.

This just smacks of an out-of-touch old grump yelling about kids today, with their hair, and their clothes.

The biggest reason that not many kids are excited by NASA anymore is that NASA is too frigging busy selling climate change and not busy enough selling the Mars missions.  There is really exciting stuff happening.  Instead of telling us about it, what little budget they get for public yammering is wasted by James Hansen (NASA director).  He’s just not that interested in space.  He’s not interested in making anyone else interested in space.  Shit rolls downhill.  His apathy for the point of NASA - space exploration - trickles down.

Did you know that the Phoenix Mars lander is Twittering from Mars?  Well, someone sends Twitter updates from Mission Control but they write them as if the lander itself was updating us.  I follow it.  Why is this not widely known?  How cool would kids think it was to get Twitter updated from freaking Mars?  And yet only 28,627 people follow the MarsPhoenix Twitter account as of this writing.  That is a damned shame.  They even answer questions!  It’s one of the coolest things on the internet, and no one knows about it.

Tell kids what is going on with Mars, and how it could lead to someday seeing a human being walk the face of the Red Planet.  Tell them how it could be them.  Show them the rockets and the computers and the modules. Show them the current spacewalking suits.  Show them all the technology we all use every day that comes from the space program.  Start prompting the media to cover launches again, and not just when things go wrong.  James Hansen could single-handedly turn this thing around, and Buzz Aldrin could help.  Instead it’s a bunch of “get off my lawn and your modern music is just noise” from Aldrin and “You’re all going to die in exactly the opposite way from what I breathlessly predicted 20 years ago!” from Hansen.

Not awesome, guys.  Space is awesome.  NASA could be awesome again.  You just gotta make it happen.