#Protest outside & inside of #MaineSpaceConference

By Bruce Gagnon,
Published on Organising Notes, 7 November 2023

"About 200 people attended the conference which was intended to ramp up the establishment of Maine’s campaign to enter ‘the space race’.

"The event began with Dr. Terry Shehata, Executive Director of the Maine Space Grant Consortium, introducing a NASA headquarters speaker who was described as ‘Our sugar daddy, we need to keep him happy’. The NASA representative talked alot about reaching students across Maine and beyond in order to build their support for everything space. After all, in just a few years these students will be taxpayers and the aerospace industry wants to ensure that their generation supports massive federal spending for Moon and Mars missions and the #militarization and #nuclearization of space.

"The aerospace industry calls it an investment. I learned this years ago at a similar conference at the #KennedySpaceCenter in Florida. In a workshop on ‘updating the center’s museum’, the director told the assembled they were retro-fitting the museum on a Mars theme. He bragged that they brought in thousands of Florida students each year that ‘would soon be taxpayers’. That is now a national NASA organizing strategy to keep the aerospace funding pipeline humming for years to come. Get to the students and sell them on the ‘wonders of space’. Let’s all be astronauts!

"Maine State Sen. Mattie Daughtry (D-Brunswick) led a plenary panel discussion that promoted the joys of the space gold rush by promising loads of good paying jobs, little-to-no #environmental impacts from launching rockets, and heavy emphasis on teacher and student recruitment. Daughtry was the prime sponsor of the bill in the state legislature to create the Maine Space Corporation with its 17-member board that heavily represents the aerospace industry.

"Almost all the plenary speakers talked about the wonders of #MaineWilderness that enables us to see the starry #NightSky. Sadly none of the speakers noted the irony that due to the space gold rush, launching thousands of #satellites is ruining the dark view. #Astronomers complain that it is becoming near impossible to do astronomical research because of long-strings of blinking #satellites in the night sky.

[...]

"While many of the speakers made grand claims about jobs to come from #Maine’s participation in the space gold rush, the evidence is otherwise. One of the other speakers at the conference talked about space manufacturing becoming increasingly done via robotic and computerized operations. This would increase ‘productivity’ and increase profit but reduce the need for so many workers.

"Other places where #RocketLaunch sites have been created like #KodiakIsland, #Alaska and #RocketLab in #NewZealand promised lots of jobs (which never materialized) and only civilian launches. In both those cases virtually all launches so far have been for the US Pentagon. In the case of Rocket Lab it has been taken over by #LockheedMartin.

"Many of the people attending the Maine Space Conference were investors who are eager to ride the space rocket to grab profit and notoriety. Like any gold rush the long-term truth turns out to be quite different than the original sales pitch promises.

"It is incumbent upon Maine citizens to pay attention to this issue before taxpayers in the state get handed a huge bill for costs that were never made clear during this early round of pie-in-the-sky promotion."

Read more:
https://space4peace.org/protest-outside-inside-of-maine-space-conference/