Textual Pornography

This SpaceX launch got me thinking about my favorite piece by The Onion, “Holy Shit, Man Walks on Fucking Moon” from Our Dumb Century. It’s basically a news story on the landing of the lunar module of the Apollo 11, liberally laced with profanity:

Neil Armstrong’s historic first words on Moon: “HOLY LIVING FUCK“

I’m going to go ahead and read far too much into this piece.

The straight line distance from San Francisco, CA, to New York, NY, is about 2,600 miles. The Earth’s circumference is about 25,000 miles. The distance the Apollo 11 travelled was about 623,000 miles, counting back-and-forth travel and orbits around the Earth and Moon.

In 1969, we stuffed three men into a pressurized metal box, strapped it to a giant tube containing millions of pounds of rocket fuel, exploded them off the planet, and sent them to travel twenty-five times the distance around the world through a freezing vacuum.

And it worked on the first try! For the first time in the history of people, one of our own set foot on a celestial body besides the Earth. One that, at its shortest distance, is about 221,000 miles away.

The reason I love that piece from The Onion isn’t so much the crass nature of it, but that, out of everything I’ve read about the first Moon landing, it best captures the correct emotional response. We put a person on the fucking Moon. Can you believe this shit? Science: what the fuck.

The SpaceX launch of the unmanned Dragon capsule is clearly not as important or monumental as Apollo 11. It aims merely to be the first commercial space vehicle to dock at the International Space Station, which so far as only hosted spacecraft from government space organizations. It hasn’t even succeeded yet; the docking will happen in a couple of days, if it even happens at all.

But last night, I watched the successful launch of what could be the first commercial space vehicle to dock at the International Space Station. It was amazingly exciting to see it reach orbit and unfurl the solar array. Space travel is still exceedingly impractical, but who knows what will happen as private companies like SpaceX become able to launch shuttles on their own.

Fuck.