"Was all that money I made last year for Whitey on the moon? How come there ain't no money here? Hm! Whitey's on the moon!"- was a line in one of Gil Scott Heron's 1970's spoken-word classics. It criticized the discrepancy between the heroically celebrated moon landings of 1969 and the reality of life of the poor population, especially the African Americans. Civil rights activists such as Ralph Abernathy protested to save the vast costs of such projects and instead use them for social projects. These protests have not only gone largely unnoticed, but have been forgotten today, at a time when utopian dreams have turned again to space.
Would it not be a good time to talk again about fair distribution of wealth, in an era of technology that has not kept its promises? Instead, the eyes of private companies are directed towards aims such as Mars, the neighboring planet which, with its conditions, is far less suitable for human life than the deadly zone in the immediate vicinity of the crashed nuclear reactor Tchernobyl, shortly after its explosion. Wouldn't today be the time to slightly change the sense of the famous speech of John F Kennedy: "We choose to [end poverty] in this décade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win[...]"?