I don't know what depresses me more: the fact that American taxpayers have spent five million dollars on a treadmill for astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS), or the fact that NASA allowed the treadmill to be named after comedian Stephen Colbert.
Disclosure: I am not in journalist mode. I haven't called up a single one of my contacts at the American space agency to find out if this is a giant Internet hoax. But NASA's official web site does seem to support the Colbert claim.
It's a fitting development for the history of the ISS, a hulking contraption that has cost us (the American taxpayers) something like $100 billion for little demonstrable scientific or even political gain. (Some have reported that our international partners, the Russians excluded, have felt not so much inspired as bullied to sink their own taxpayers' millions into their minor contributions.)
Astronauts spend weeks, sometimes months aboard the orbiting lab. Six or seven of them are up there right now. Can you name them? Tell a friend what they're doing? In truth, much of the time that astronauts spend in the ISS is frittered away repairing the station itself; and so it will be, until the assemblage is taken apart and "deorbited" - allowed (or forced) to re-enter Earth's atmosphere.
Meanwhile, each time we launch a space shuttle, the first thing we do is look at its belly to see if it has been damaged by its own foam insulation - in which case it might not be safe to ride back to Earth. "Phew," you can imagine NASA officials saying; "once again, we've gotten away with it." Gotten away, that is, with the utter failure either to develop, with NASA's leadership, a new way to get men and materials into Earth orbit, or (my preference) to encourage the private sector to do so.
Admittedly, the costs are minor compared to those of our interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in an era when American workers have lost a third of their retirement savings (while managers of bailed-out banks continue to draw multimillion-dollar bonuses); when public-sector and private-sector pensions alike are seriously underfunded; when school buildings are crumbling and entire neighborhoods succumbing to foreclosure; when families are bankrupted daily by uninsured medical conditions - this, I submit, is no time to spend billions annually merely to keep human beings in Earth orbit. That we are capable of doing so has already been amply demonstrated. So have the medical and psychological effects of prolonged weightlessness and confinement. Still unclear is a compelling reason to commit so much money, material, and considerable human talent to so strikingly an unproductive venture.