ASTRONAUTS ARE VICTIMS, NOT HEROES by Peter Moss Bush is mining the grief and exploiting the sorrow of the loss of life in the Columbia space shuttle disaster on February 1, 2003. And for what? Bribes from the megacorporations who make components and build aerospace vehicles at taxpayer expense. The media cooperates all the way. Nobody questions the justifications, much less the necessity of the space program. The media and the politicos hope the nation's memory is short enough to have forgotten that the program was initiated to pre-empt the Soviet domination of space for military purposes. The Soviet Union, which was "the evil empire" of the time, had to be stopped, and based on the good-offense-is-the-best-defense theory, the space program was funded under the cheer-leadership of JFK. But the Soviet Union is gone and the waste of lives and money continues unquestioned for decades after it is no longer defensible. Other "support" for space travel is even flakier. One has-been astronaut was broadcast saying: the sunrise and sunset viewed from outer space is the most beautiful thing he ever saw. Obviously he had never seen the great masters in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, the Prado and the world's many other great museums. Then too, the White House tenant said that space is where the victims chose and wanted to be. I have never heard any official say that stoned is where the cocaine or heroin addicts want to be, even if once in a while one of them overdoses and dies. And yet, cigarette addicts often complain that it is their choice and government has no business interfering with their free will trying to save them from a horrible and premature tobacco death. All this is the result of conservatism and a carefully cultivated and pervasive national thinking handicap. But I repeat myself. If elected, I would propose a bill to have a national debate on the mass media with equal time/equal space for pro and anti space travel voters, followed by a national referendum whether to continue funding it while children go hungry and millions get no health care and Bush is robbing Social Security to shoot up Iraq and enrich the rich. I may not be conservative but I can be more patriotic than they.