Space and Politics

[unspeakablehorror]

One thing I maintain is that space exploration and science, as detached as it may seem from the affairs of this world, is actually very political.  Anything with any kind of goals is political.  The questions of who should be researching space, what they should research, and what kind of resources they should be given access to are all questions with political implications.  There's also no such thing as a truly apolitical person, because the purpose of politics is to determine what goals to achieve and how to go about achieving them, and people without goals simply don't exist (even not wanting to do anything is a goal).  Space science is also incredibly relevant to our modern world, and I think it's shortsighted to ignore it as unimportant and completely inaccurate to characterize any aspect of space exploration and science as not having any sort of political implications.