Wow, The Spooky Good Improv Hour was a rowdy success. Everyone in the cast (ahem, The Midnight Society) really came through and put on some fantastic improv. I'm very proud of them, and I'm glad they felt as comfortable as they did performing; that ease on stage was something I was trying to replicate from Dad's, and I'm so pleased that it turned out like I imagined it. I'm equally relieved that the show really came into itself in real time on stage, and it very much distinguished itself from some of the Atlanta influence I was bringing to it, and it turned out to be a very Off-Off kind of production on top of something new. Now the Spooky Good format is going to be performed by the Off-Off delegates going to the Indiana University show this weekend (in Bloomington, the Improv Capital of BLOOMINGTON!).

John Tierney wrote an editorial in the Times yesterday about the new IMAX movie Roving Mars, which documents the voyages of the two rovers that are currently meandering all over the planet Mars. Tierney suggests that if America goes out to see this movie, the box office returns will demonstrate to the government not only a renewed interest in Martian exploration on the part of the American public but that PR campaigning can and should be the weapon of choice for mustering support and private funding for expensive NASA projects like a manned mission to Mars. Tierney cites Earnest Shackleton as an example of a charismatic explorer who raised the funds for his voyage through Antarctica by generating excitement for a project for which people had little interest to begin with.

At first I thought the Shackleton comparison undercut Tierney's argument a little, since Shackleton was a private individual selling Antarctica door-to-door where NASA is a state organization still trying to justify the taxes that the American public contributes to space exploration whether they like it or not. The best output of NASA's public relations office usually just ends up becoming an extra credit assignment in the sixth grade science classes of America (like this).

But then I thought, what other choice does NASA have for kindling a new Age of Space? The US being a democratic nation, we don't embark on expensive projects unless they have a (perceived) payoff for national security or for the economic well-being of the people. In the 19th century, consider all the government money that went into exploring, securing, and populating the Western United States. With or without the cultural dream of Manifest Destiny, the individuals had real economic incentives for populating the West, and politically, the population of the West would secure newly acquired soil by making it newly inhabited American soil. Thus, Manifest Destiny legitimized out political boundaries in the interest of what was then national security. One hundred years later, the next so-called incarnation of Manifest Destiny, the Apollo program--which allowed only 12 men to actually walk on the moon--turned out to be one of the healthiest expressions US-Soviet tensions during the Cold War. However, it was still an exercise in US arms building, a demonstration of America's technological superiority that was quickly dropped when everyone realized there was never going to be an OK Corral shoot-out on the moon between Neil Armstrong and Yuri Gagarin.

Right now, Mars has nothing to give the United States as a democracy mired in a war against terrorism and trying the remain at the top of the heap in the new age of globalization. The technological benefits of realizing a Mars voyage have nothing to give us in the way of staying technologically relevant on the global market. Nobody needs better rockets anymore; we've all figured out how to affordably kill each other from half a world away. Footage of a white guy jumping around on a red planet is not going to strike fear in the hearts of Osama Bin Laden or Iraqi insurgents or President Ahmadinejad. We can't even impress China. If we were a dictatorship, then maybe we might stand a chance of seeing some real funding for Martian exploration. If the Soviet Union had actually had the money and the correct planning, then they could have sent as many men to the moon as they wanted, as long as a few people at the top wanted it. In our case, political form really does determine how far we get in the solar system.

So yeah, maybe NASA needs to put one of its feet in the door of the private sector and really sell us the possibility of going to Mars. The American public won't vote to send a man to the red planet (can you imagine how ridiculed a presidential candidate would be for putting this on his or her 2008 slate?), but they might pay money to see it so long as NASA makes them feel like they're giving to a private business rather than the government. If that doesn't work, there's always the possibility that space travel will be taken up entirely by the private sector. This possibility seems so very congruent with American values of enterprise, and tastes downright inevitable when you stop and consider how very inegalitarian the Apollo mission was by nature. And yet I still wouldn't want a Mars mission to be an absolutely private venture, because then it would be like Shackleton's voyage to Antarctica---that is, a publicity event that celebrated the penetration of Antarctica as an individual achievement rather than a fulfillment of mankind's destiny. As inefficient or alien as a government agency might be compared to a Shackleton, its actions as an arm of the state still represent the collective body of citizens better than one charismatic man can. A private mission to Mars would always be "Shackleton's Trip to Mars," but a NASA mission would always be an achievement in the name of a people.