Let’s reenact the Moon race!

How Washingtonology explains what aerospace contractors want you to believe

TMQ note: Tuesday Morning Quarterback returns on September 2.

There will be a trailer about football in All Predictions Wrong the week before.

For years American intelligence services practiced Kremlinology, watching for nuances in what was said by Moscow’s state-controlled media.

What about Washingtonology? Our media are highly influenced by the agendas of lobbyists and political factions. The nuance bears analyzing.

Here’s something that suddenly appeared in Washingtonology last month – the Chinese are going beat us in outer space!

July 8, Washington Post – Trump’s NASA Budget Could Cede Solar System to China, Scientists Warn. (Image of the headline is nearby.)

Scientists warn. Never question The Science!

July 11, SpaceNews -- China Eyes Moon, Mars and Space Dominance.

Space dominance. The Chinese are using shell companies to buy mineral leases in the asteroid belt!

No one’s walked the Moon in 54 years. (I capitalize because “moon” could mean any of the 923 known moons, while it feels pretentious to call our local rock Luna.) No one’s walked the Moon in that span because there doesn’t seem any point, other than subsidies for government agencies and profit for aerospace contractors.

As for the Red Planet, even under the most favorable assumptions Mars is $1 trillion away. With current propulsion technology, building a Mars colony would consume the GDP of the entire world.

But we’re ceding the solar system to the Chinese! That’s what The Science says!

The “Earthrise” photograph taken on Christmas Eve 1968 from Apollo 8 in lunar orbit. Photo courtesy NASA.

Think for a moment about the claim we will “cede the solar system to China.” (You’d be doing the Washington Post a favor, since the paper’s headline writers did not think about it.)

Pluto, most distant known planet – there may be others in our solar system, astronomers have been trying to figure that out for generations -- is 13,000 times as far away as the Moon. This suggests the boundary of the solar system is at least 13,000 times as distant as the Moon in all directions.

Perhaps some math-adept All Predictions Wrong reader can figure out the number. A wild guess would be that if Pluto is the outermost planet, the volume of the solar system is at least a trillion times the area occupied by Earth. China is going to seize it all! Scientists are warning us!

Why stop at Pluto? “We are going to conquer the vast frontiers of space,” Donald Trump promised in his recent State of the Union address.

“Vast” is the operative word.

There are at least 100 billion galaxies, each containing from 10 billion to 200 billion stars.

The Dartmouth physicist Marcelo Gleiser estimates the universe is 460 quadrillion times the size of the solar system. That’s 460,000,000,000,000,000 times as big as the neighborhood where we live. We’re going to conquer it.

Outer space settler colonialism! The Washington Post and SpaceNews did not make the same preposterous claim simultaneously because reporters were working their sources. Washingtonology tells us somebody’s budget had just been cut, and insiders were counterattacking through the media.