Posted on 03/22/2007 9:46:02 AM PDT by anymouse
OK, don't make a mistake: this isn't really a movie about space. The Astronaut Farmer is the quintessential American Story. That's right; it's the classic, archetypical, consummate, perfected American myth, served up in packaging so homespun, you'll wonder that the actors aren't dressed in quilts.
When it comes to this movie's theme, you already know the drill, because during your childhood, Hollywood saut�ed your tender brain with the potboiler genre known as the Western. And what was the icon of the Western? A rugged individual, hard as tool steel on the outside, and soft as warm Jell-O within; a slouch-hatted pioneer who faced off against the dangerous peoples and broken topography west of the Missouri. A lone man who would ride into town, solve everyone's problems, and then ride out of town, preferably at sunset.
It's the American myth, the Horatio Alger genotype: you can be whatever you want to be, if you just apply yourself. And you can do it without - and sometimes in spite of - the government.
So as the music fades up on this film, we see Bill Farmer riding into town, a hero who wants to trade the western frontier for the final frontier. Farmer (who, despite the suggestive name, is actually a rancher) has a deep, philosophical affection for space. He even made it as far as NASA's astronaut program, but washed out because he preferred attending to his family over attending rocket-jockey school.
But now the kids are older, and Farmer still wants to take a spin around the planet. So rather than going the easy and fashionable route - namely, paying the Russians $20 million and hitching a ride to the International Space Station - Farmer aims to become a freelance astronaut. He figures he can single-handedly accomplish in a year or two what it took tens of thousands of NASA engineers a decade to pull off. That's right: he's going to weld up a rocket in the backyard barn, strap himself in, pull the g's, and haul himself (and ten thousand parts) into orbit [image]. After a lap or two around the globe, he'll fire the retro's, parachute back to his Texas ranch in a padded capsule, kiss the kids, and live contentedly ever after. Have a nice day.
Now anyone who has any idea of the complexity of a modern rocket will find this premise risible. You might as well posit that a Navy pilot who's washed out of "Top Gun" class will bolt together an F-14 Tomcat in his garage, and fly it to the nearest carrier.
But feasibility isn't what this is about. The film is a nod to the growing clout of commercial space companies - efforts like Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites, Peter Diamandis' X-Prize, and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin. Yesterday, if you wanted a ride into space, you had only one type of vendor: the national space agencies. Tomorrow will be different.
The desirability of privatizing the launch industry is often described with the chestnut that "if aviation had remained in the hands of government, a flight from New York to San Francisco would cost $500 million, and refueling and retooling the plane for the flight back would take three weeks." Of course, this sarcastic metaphor ignores fundamental differences between aviation and spaceflight, but it appeals to the American psyche because it's consonant with The Myth. "Leave it to a big organization, and you'll get glacial progress at immense cost."
Needless to relate, it's simply not true that the lone-wolf entrepreneur can inevitably beat the bureaucracy, although there are plenty of encouraging examples. Consider FedEx versus the Postal Service. Or Craig Venter's race against the U.S. Government to sequence the human genome. We like our slouch-hatted, iconoclastic heroes, even if their experience is atypical.
But of course, it is atypical. In most cases, it's "the organization" that gets things done. American individualism - steeped in can-do spirit and basted in Yankee ingenuity - sure sounds nice. But America's top-drawer inventor, Thomas Edison, had 1,093 successful patents during his lifetime. IBM had more than three times that number just last year.
The Astronaut Farmer portrays America the way the country likes to think of itself. And while you might whine that this is delusional, it does have its up side. America will often take on projects that seem impractical or even quixotic, simply because of its inherited frontier culture. Is there some reason that nearly every SETI experiment now running in the world (with one exception) is in the United States? Is it because other countries don't have the telescopes? Don't have the money or the expertise? The answers to these questions are all "no". Then why is this true?
Perhaps it's for the same reason that The Astronaut Farmer could only have been made in America.
Space ping
though the coming attractions show a smug Billybob talking to the feds saying something to the effect that they couldnt even find WMD's...
....so this looks like a typical leftist America hate fest...
I thought this was going to be an article about Neil Armstrong.
They say Neil had his fraternity emblem sewn onto his super-duper space underwear when he and the other guys made the big trip to the moon.
Phi Delta Theta, to be exact.
I think Mr. Thornton is severely overrated.
Astronaut farmer? Where does one obtain the seeds?
However, IBM is not the federal government.
Even if we grant that "the organization" can beat the individual inventor, there is no reason to believe that the organization must be a government one. Indeed, the success of IBM (and other companies) in research and development casts doubt on the need for government funding of research.
(By the way, Thomas Edison was not a solo inventor; he assembled quite a team to support his work. In fact, it has been suggested that Edison invented the modern research organization. It would be interesting to compare the per-capita research output of Edison's lab to that of today's government-funded labs.)
Every one of those patents dreamed up by an individual employee subject to an IP contract with the parent company.
I've got a couple of patents filed due to my work here at another computer processor manufacturer... BFD...
IBM has 355766 employees. Edison was ~6.5 times more productive than the average IBM employee. That means Edison had 1,093 patents to his name - while 5 out of 6 IBM employees have none.
I was one of the 10 people who actually went to see this movie.
The author is correct in describing the movie's sheer stupidity... a single man building and launching a complete Atlas rocket in his barn and orbiting the earth. And landing back on his property.
I've never smacked my head in disbelief so much during a movie. All you science types in particular will be roaring when this plays on cable.
And the bad guys are your typical Hollywood Republican government bureaucrats, all sunglasses and black cars and "You don't take on the United States Government, mister."
Sucked.
My Uncle is a farmer.
He is outstanding in his field.
No. Really. He's out there right now.
(Credit to BattleAxw)
The idea is promoted by people in the government and universities, of course.
Yea, just about as silly as two bicycle mechanics building a plane in Dayton Ohio! If you ever drive down 675, that HUGH airbase is named after them.
Look, putting together the Wright Flyer is decades of technology away from assembling an F-14.
Speaking as a space professional, I find the whole premise of this movie to be beyond laughable. Most laymen simply can't comprehend how complicated space programs are--and how much cost is incurred just by rigorous test and verification programs. My own saying is "Rocket science is easy, rocket engineering is tough."
Any reasonably bright aerospace grad student can tell you how to put a spacecraft in orbit. But to adequately design, test, and integrate tens of thousands of parts and test the system of systems to make it work takes thousands of skilled workers and disciplined processes.
Like hell they are that complex. I guess he never thought of using a solid rocket motor. There are all kinds of tricks that could be used to trim the complexities down.
Government top secret projects of 50 years ago turn into hobbies for good craftsmen.
Great point!
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