This Carbon Based Life

By David Glenn Cox

I think if I were in charge of DOGE, I’d take my chainsaw down to Texas and start cutting up Space X. The most unsuccessful space program ever devised. Filled with big wet dreams and half-filled schemes and after six years they have achieved low earth orbit, almost once. And that ship returned to earth looking like an overcooked baked potato or a hot dog which had fallen through the cook rack and landed in the charcoal. It was burnt to a cinder symbolic of Space X’s ability to burn through vast quantities of government money.

The little space race that wasn’t. Can we beat the Chinese to the moon? I’d be surprised if we beat Uganda to the moon. The Chinese have their own problems. Their lunar lander broke down after thirty minutes, and their recent launch to their space station suffered a broken window. The Chinese use a spacecraft derived from a Soviet model from the 1960s, remember when the Soviets landed on the moon?

Can we go to Mars? Sure, sure, any day now. Just write the check. After six years of government money and research, Space X has achieved virtually nothing. We’re going to have cities on Mars! With ghettos and Walmart’s, and under-funded public schools with gated communities, for you know who. Elongated promised each Star shit would carry 100 people to Mars. NASA looked at the plan and once they stopped laughing, answering. You’d be lucky to fit in twenty and 40% of the payload would be water.

Imagine a two-year trip in an airline seat with nothing to do but look out the window. Spend two hours a day pedaling your exercise bicycle to fight off death. And since there’s 99 other people there, the ship would need dozens of exercise bikes. Are you thirsty? Are you one of those people who likes to wash themselves occasionally? Two liters of water per person per day times 100. Then times 700 days equals 140,000 liters. One liter of water weighs 2.2 pounds times 140,000 is a mere 308,000 pounds or 150 tons.

Of course, we can recycle the water and drink our own piss most of the way. And if our water purifier ever breaks down, we have tools and spares and space repairmen. Sorry, spares take up too much room! It’ll be fine. You aren’t hungry, are you? Use the same figures for food and we’re up to 300-ton launch weight before adding any people. Elongated advertised his Star shit booster would lift 150 tons into low earth orbit. So even on a good day, it overloads the ship by a factor of two, without including any people.

The 150-ton lift figure has been revised down several times now and currently stands at only 300,000 pounds. So the ship is overloaded by a factor six or seven without the people! It’s the Star shit SS. Bernie Madoff! Its six-year mission is to seek out new wealth and new riches. To boldly go where no man has gone before. To the bank as a Trillionaire! Okay, let’s try something easier! How about a trip to the moon? Using our same Star shit only completely redesigned and repurposed inside, we can reach the moon in two years! Only Elongated has been saying that now for six years. No rocket, no orbits, no manned launches. Even if the rocket worked only half as good as Elon’s mouth, we’d be there already.

For Elon, DOGE stands for Department of Government Enrichment. While NASA was without an administrator, the interim administrator gave Elongated a space contract for $2.9 billion. Then she quit her job at NASA and went to work for (Drum roll please!) Space X! But pretend that someday we do reach the moon. Don’t we need a lander? No, we can land a 15-story tall rocket like a pencil on the moon’s unprepared surface. What about all that rocket fuel? Won’t it boil off? Maybe, maybe not! Who can say?

Apollo, with its many different modules, had a built-in redundancy. When the service module for Apollo XIII exploded, the astronauts survived on the Lunar Module systems. Redundancy? What’s that? Oh, don’t worry, nothing bad could ever happen. Just look at our track record, so far! Safety is job number 27! Each test launch costs around $100,000,000. So far, eleven failed missions! But the last launch was almost successful, if you ignore the fact, it nearly burned up on reentry. Had there been astronauts on board, they would have been cooked to a cinder. But Space X is hammering out those last lingering little details.

The other day Space X was testing a new Star shit. A simple pressure test where they filled the fuel tanks with an inert gas. The rocket split open and fell apart. It split the fuck open and fell apart. This after six years and billions of dollars of research. NASA reached the moon in less than ten years from a standing start. Without the fifty years of experience behind them that Space X had. If this had been a government program, it would have been cancelled a long time ago.

But a good con man always has a backup plan in his pocket. Elongated suggests we could use a Space X Dragon capsule to land on the moon. Was it designed for that? No, it was designed to carry astronauts to the International space station. But Elongated is almost certain they could make it work! Sign up today! Volunteers are needed!

You can see now how Trump and Elon got along so well, at first. Both are con men who tell lies as easily as they breathe. But avarice bears no siblings and greed soon broke them apart. Elon recently pushed through a pay package for himself at Tesla of a trillion dollars. Could it be because Elon sees such a bright future ahead for Tesla? Or could it be that there’s no time like the present to cash out and run for it? Tesla cars were once innovative and cutting edge ten years ago, before the competition arrived.

Is Tesla working on a new roadster model? Sure, sure, any day now. When? Soon! How soon? Soon! Are there any new Tesla models? There’s the Cybertruck! Wanna buy a Cybertruck? The windows are unbreakable almost. And it only rusts if you leave it outside or get it wet. Sure, the snow piles up on the narrow headlights, making them almost useless, but don’t they look cool? You can take it off road if you remove some of the plastic parts first.

No moon, no Mars, but rest assured The American public is being taken for a joy ride. Our money, Elon’s joy.

“Our civilization is wonderful, in certain spectacular and meretricious ways; wonderful in scientific marvels and inventive miracles; wonderful in material inflation, which it calls advancement, progress, and other pet names; wonderful in its spying-out of the deep secrets of Nature and its vanquishment of her stubborn laws; wonderful in its extraordinary financial and commercial achievements; wonderful in its hunger for money, and in its indifference as to how it is acquired; wonderful in the hitherto undreamed-of magnitude of its private fortunes and the prodigal fashion in which they are given away to institutions devoted to the public culture; wonderful in its exhibitions of poverty; wonderful in the surprises which it gets out of that great new birth, Organization, the latest and most potent creation and miracle-worker of the commercialized intellect, as applied in transportation systems, in manufactures, in systems of communication, in news-gathering, book-publishing, journalism; in protecting labor; in oppressing labor; in herding the national parties and keeping the sheep docile and usable; in closing the public service against brains and character; in electing purchasable legislatures, blatherskite Congresses, and city governments which rob the town and sell municipal protection to gamblers, thieves, prostitutes, and professional seducers for cash. It is a civilization which has destroyed the simplicity and repose of life; replaced its contentment, its poetry, its soft romance-dreams and visions with the money-fever, sordid ideals, vulgar ambitions, and the sleep which does not refresh; it has invented a thousand useless luxuries, and turned them into necessities; it has created a thousand vicious appetites and satisfies none of them; it has dethroned God and set up a shekel in His place.” – Mark Twain