Michael Ramirez Essay: To The Moon! 02-25-24
From America's Premier Editorial Cartoonist
Lunarcy
Michael P. Ramirez, February 25, 2024
America is, once again, on the moon. Intuitive Machines landed its Odysseus Moon lander about 190 miles from the Moon’s south pole after a dramatic descent when it discovered its laser finders were not working. With some quick thinking by the mission control team and a little good fortune, NASA had an experimental guidance system on board called Navigation Doppler Lidar, which allowed the lander to hit its target at the Malapart A crater.
The Lunar and Planetary Institute’s cheat sheet describes the ND&L system as “a laser-based sensor capable of providing precision vehicle velocity vector and altitude. The lidar data is used by an autonomous Guidance Navigation and Control (GN&C) system to precisely navigate the vehicle and execute a gentle touchdown.” It is a replacement for the radar system that is lighter, enables higher performance, is lower risk and is more accurate.
How lucky can you get?
It wasn’t the only descent that Intuitive Machines had to sweat out. After the CEO of Intuitive Machines revealed that the lander had actually tipped over and was lying on its side, shares in the company began their rapid descent.
The good news is that even on its side, the lander will be able to send back good data. It is still an exceptional accomplishment. It is the first Private spacecraft to land on the moon.
Even though we first landed on the moon around 55 years ago, it is a very difficult feat to achieve. Lunar missions have had more than a 50% failure rate. There have been three recent failures in just the last year. Russia’s first lunar lander in 47 years, the Luna 25, crash landed on the surface of the moon in August of last year. Japan’s lander, the Hakuto-R suffered the same fate in April. Another American private space company, Astrobotic Technology’s Peregrine lunar lander carrying another NASA payload, had to abort the mission after it suffered a propellant leak shortly after it launched on Jan 18th.
There have only been five countries that have successfully had a controlled or “soft” landing on the moon. The Soviet Union was the first in 1966 with Luna 9. The United States followed that with the Surveyor 1 spacecraft, which touched down four months later. China, India, and Japan have all successfully landed on the moon. China landed its Chang’e-3 spacecraft in 2013. India landed its Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft in August of 2023. Japan had the best precision landing, landing within 60 yards of its target on Jan 19th of this year. Unfortunately, it appears to have landed upside down with its solar panels facing the wrong direction. But enough sunlight has been absorbed for it to relay information back.
The U.S. is the only country to have landed astronauts on the Moon. The first was in 1969, on the Apollo 11 mission. The last one was Apollo 17 in 1972.
For those of you looking forward to our race to Mars, it’s less a race and more of a long haul. It took Odysseus 6 days to reach the moon. The moon is 238,900 miles from the Earth (according to Alexa). Mars is, on average, about 140 MILLION miles away, from 33.9 million miles to 250 million miles, depending on our orbits. NASA engineers estimate a trip to Mars will take about seven months.
NASA plans to land humans on the Moon in 2026 with the Artemis 3 mission. Part of that exploration will be to determine the habitability of the moon and whether there is life in the polar regions that contain water.
Most scientists agree there are no signs of intelligent life on the moon, but can you imagine what they would be thinking with all these countries crashing lunar landers and probes onto the moon's surface? “Look, those two landers smashed into the ground. That one over there is upside down, and the latest one is lying on its side.”
If they were scanning our airwaves, I am certain they would be wondering if there were signs of intelligent life on our planet. I wonder that every time I turn on CSPAN. And I am certain they would implement an efficient immigration plan to prevent politicians from coming to the moon.
There are no signs of intelligent life in the leadership of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security or in our ridiculous immigration system. As a security issue alone, you would think our immigration system would want to know exactly who is coming into our country.
Biden is now contemplating some executive actions, not necessarily as a solution to our migrant problem, but rather as political cover for the border crisis for his reelection.
The first thing he could do is remove the “welcome mat.”
At the three-year mark, the Biden administration is immersed in a record border crisis.
According to incomplete Homeland Security records, there have been at least 6.3 million migrant encounters just on our southern border. 2.4 million migrants have been allowed in the country. To avoid overcrowding in facilities and the court system, the Biden administration has implemented a “catch and release” program, where rather than holding them in detention, border agents are releasing migrants to communities while they await hearings in immigration court… never to be seen again.
I am for a legal immigration program. I think our diversity, taking the best of each country and combining it into what we call America, makes us extraordinary. But we need to delineate between legal immigration and illegal immigration. America is very generous when it comes to immigration. According to the Migration Policy Institute, America attracts the largest number of immigrants in the world. Immigrants and children of immigrants constitute 28% of our population.
There are good reasons to regulate immigration. I’m a free-market capitalist. Rather than having a system that just focuses on familial links for immigration, America should be absorbing dynamic and innovative people who will make a positive contribution to the future success of our country. We should also be able to fulfill the needs of employers who need laborers through a competent guest worker program.
America is not supposed to allow people to seek refuge here for economic adversity for good reasons. We would be overwhelmed. If we allow everyone trying to escape economic hardship for any reason to seek better financial opportunities in the U.S., large portions of South America would be abandoned (I exaggerate, but then that’s what editorial cartoonists do).
The per capita income in the U.S. is $70,480. The highest gross per capita income in South America is in Uruguay, and it is $18, 030. The average in the southern continent is around $10,000.
A better solution is to have a guest worker program where they can work here temporarily and send money back to improve the lives of their families and retain an incentive to return to their homes. We want people to improve their own countries and change them from within.
The distance from our southern border to Canada is around 1,919 miles away, but Canada has an efficient guest worker program. I don’t understand how Canada can have a functioning guest worker program, but we can’t.
At a distance of nearly 239,000 miles, we will soon inhabit the moon and make it a waystation for deep space exploration. The most difficult part of space travel now is leaving Earth’s gravitational force. On the moon, it would be much easier. The moon’s surface gravity is 1/6th of the Earth. We would use less fuel, and the propulsion system would largely be hydrogen-based. The pools of frozen water in the southern polar regions of the moon would be like our interstellar gas station.
NASA’s Artemis mission will soon send people back to the moon. Jackie Gleason would be proud. He played Ralph Kramden in the 50s sitcom The Honeymooners. Gleason coined the phrase to reference sending his wife, Alice, played by actress Audrey Meadows, “to the moon” when she made him mad.
Republicans have an opportunity to move toward remediating the border problems. They should take it. They barely have a majority in the House and do not control either the Senate or the presidency. There were nearly 250,000 border encounters in December of 2023. 26,000 more then the previous peak in May of last year.
Impeaching Mayorkas will not move the ball towards the goal line. There is no question he is completely incompetent and should be fired. But that is the prerogative of the executive branch. This feckless impeachment is a cynical political move that will result in nothing. Conservative legal scholars all agree that there are no real grounds for an impeachment. Mayorkas will not be convicted in the Senate, in fact, they may not even take it up.
Congress should focus on forcing an achievable solution. By concentrating on Mayorkas, you achieve little but set a precedent of politicizing the impeachment process.
One of my favorite lines from the movie Enter the Dragon is when Bruce Lee is teaching one of his Kung Fu students to not only concentrate on the technical aspect of the movie but to feel it, feel the reason, the essence, and the totality of the movement. He says, “Don’t think. Feeeeeel! It’s like a finger pointing away to the moon. Do not concentrate on the finger or you will miss all of the heavenly glory.”
Congress has given the Homeland Security Secretary the finger, but it’s time to do more than say, “Mayorkas, to the moon!” Let’s move on to doing something substantial instead of just political theater.
Have a good week,
-m
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