To the heavens

+R.I.P. Gorby. I was privileged to chair a meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in Parliament around 16 years ago, when he came to talk about his environmental campaigning. He arrived at Carriage Gates with a single police outrider (which we had to argue for) and as his Jag pulled through the entrance he was 'warmly' greeted by a group who mistook his car’s passenger for Tony Blair. Such is life. My memory of him is firmly of a warm, friendly and modest man. People may now ask what is his legacy? That is a very mixed picture which contains a lot of unintended consequences. The end of the ’Iron Curtain,' the Cold War and all the rest—the reunification of Germany—are consequences of his actions, but where it went wrong was the unmitigated disaster of Gorbachev’s removal by that piss artist oligarch’s friend, Boris Yeltsin (and his anointed successor). Gorbachev was not working to transform the Soviet Union into a free for all capitalist state, but clearly wished for a reformed mode of socialist democracy. The triumphalists in the West wanted no truck with this. Gorbachev’s dream was thwarted by forces whose friendship, a la Thatcher was as cynical and destructive as one could imagine. These ‘friends’ are reaping what they sowed—and we’re all paying the price.
 
+I was disappointed to hear Martin Rees on the radio yesterday talking about the best way to go to the Moon, Mars, etc., etc. Martin Rees—the  former Astronomer Royal and president of the Royal Society—is an admirable scientist but I think he’s lost his way. He asserted that it would be better for the likes of Elon Musk to spend their billions on seeking to send humans on space explorations rather than national institutions such as NASA. This suggests that the exploration of our near planetary orbs will be better served by capitalist ambitions. What Rees seemed to be saying is that governmental exploration should focus on pure scientific objectives. In other words, the taxpayer should not be paying for NASA’s Artemis program. In a short interview it could be that Rees didn’t convey the complexities of the issues, but I would have thought he could have had more sympathy with the views of many of his astronomer colleagues that Musk’s peppering the sky with his satellites is destroying their vision of the heavens—all in the name of making money. And just wait for the lawyers to get their hands on disputes about who can claim territorial mineral rights in the Mare Crisium (for example)?