Space travel is a triumph of intellect but a tragic failure of reason
Space exploration was largely impossible in the Financial Age. Science had to ride the coattails of industry, and space travel could not be monetized unless the price was low. But space travel was enormously expensive, and it could not be made cheap without massive investment in research and infrastructure that no one was willing to make. It was a giant game of chicken -- any corporation that spent the money to make space travel affordable would have opened the way for others to exploit their investment. Whoever made the first move would lose, so the vast potential of space went unrealized.
Of course there was some space activity. Orbital boosters can also carry warheads, and such it was that in a great orgasm of technological innovation the United States of America lofted Neil Armstrong, and the few others who followed, to walk on the moon. They did a little science as a pretext, but mostly they just walked, showing the flag in a pointless exercise of militaristic posturing, a last gasp of the dying power structures of the obsolete nation-state. The fact that this happened in 1969 proved that relatively low technology was sufficient for the task. The fact that as national governments became more and more financialized the funding dried up proved that corporations had no interest in space, let alone space science. That's what the quote above means. However great the adventure, the price meant that to pursue it was considered irrational.
And yet space beckoned. After decades of stagnation, a huge consortium of industrial, aerospace, media and other industries began the project of returning to the moon using mid-twenty-first century technologies and -- of course -- the best of modern financial "discipline". Humanity's second stroll on the moon would turn a profit. This massive global organization, whose stated goal was nothing short of the monopolization of space and space technology, without irony or any sense of shame called itself "The Syndicate."
They missed the centennial of Armstrong's famous small step by two years. Some of that was an international graft scandal that halted the project for a year (although it was later alleged that The Syndicate manufactured the scandal in order to stretch out the schedule for obscure financial reasons, which was easier to believe than the notion that governments had any power or will to challenge them), and some of it was ongoing cost overruns that required constant sources of new revenue. You see, when a corporation sets out to make a profit it doesn't matter if it succeeds at doing anything else. As long as contractors were getting paid they didn't care if anyone ever walked on the moon.
Nonetheless, 102 years after the first time it happened, Else Erdwalde stepped in lunar soil. Except her boot left the imprint not just of human aspiration, but of the corporate logo of the shoe company that had built it.
And yet any triumph was irrational by their standards. 2 years later The Syndicate dissolved. The patents reverted to their parent companies and the assets were sold at auction. The financial geniuses had decided they were worth more money that way, and they were probably right. Erdwalde's team used their emergency vehicle and blasted away, wrecking their lunar habitat and obliterating her footprint that had until then been carefully preserved. Humanity was confined to an ever-shrinking Earth for another 60 years.
The next humans in space were not there for profit or military glory -- they were there to explore. Science, the bastard stepchild which had always had to beg for scraps, now led in an unprecedented explosion into the unknown. Driven by the inherently positive meritocratic cycle of discovery, the vast depths of space lured us with a siren call. Intellect no longer fights reason, and the children of the Reawakening have inherited the universe.
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