Twitter
Facebook
Reddit
Digg
Tell us what you think!Send a letter to the editor about this or any other article in The Maine Campus.
According to Russian officials, N’Sync’s Lance Bass is not going aboard their Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station on October 28. The Russians have given Bass numerous extensions on the payment deadline, but he’s been unable to come up with the $20 million. He has, however, been training for the mission and working on a “documentary” called “Celebrity Mission: Lance Bass.” In Bass’ place, they are sending a cargo container.
It seems like great news, because we can watch an arrogant little punk from a boy band not get what he wants. Still, I can’t help but think that the mission could have been a good thing, and not just because he’d have been off the face of the earth for ten days.
Space travel is getting almost no attention these days. In the days of the first moon missions, Americans would crowd around their televisions for each moon landing – excited at how far our technology had come. Skip to today, where you might not have known there was an International Space Station up there. Our governments are still spending billions on space programs, but nobody cares or has any idea what they’re up to.
Lance would have brought space travel to a new demographic. Not our demographic, granted, but rating-starved news stations would devote several hours per day to Bass space adventures. Perhaps they could give Lance something to read aloud that would explain what the scientists around him were doing. The teenybopper fans would hang on his every word and learn something about space, while their parents would chuckle whenever he mispronounced words.
There’s another silver lining to Bass going up on a Russian spacecraft. The Russian space program must be desperate for cash if they would subject themselves to ten days of Lance Bass for just $20 million. I’m imagining him boarding a shuttle built in the eighties, now held together with duct tape and Bondo. We could watch him go pale, live on CNN, while he realizes the shuttle is so old that they painted over the letters “USSR” and wrote “Russia” in its place.
However, bringing space travel to a new demographic has another possible result that could be very annoying. In one episode of The Simpsons, NASA elected to bring an average guy into space to improve ratings. Then, about two years ago, NBC was planning a reality show where the winner would go aboard the space station Mir. Luckily, Russia’s Government said no, citing that Mir had lived its last days and would fall into the Pacific Ocean soon.
I’m sure the idea is back now. They could call the show “Space Camp,” and viewers could watch a dozen twenty- and thirty-somethings training to go to space, and vote every week on who would be eliminated. Given the recent, annoying success of “American Idol,” you can be sure that this would be broadcast until your eyes bleed and you never want to hear about space again. Oh, and the most attractive female on the show would win.
So, Lance, I feel your pain. Not really, but man, I’d have loved to see your face the first time they gave the navigation computer a good kick: “You have to do that sometimes. I told them they should have replaced this four missions ago. Maybe this will be the mission where we go off course and burn up in the sun?”
Tony Reaves is a freshman journalism major.
