By: Darien Campo
Concerned Citizen

Just last week SpaceX founder Elon Musk announced his plans to begin work on sending humans to the planet Mars by the year 2022-just six years from now. People around the globe are reacting to the news with excitement, rallying together with a great outpouring of support for the California-based aerospace company. But the whole idea is incredibly baffling to me, because I just don’t get Elon Musk’s sexual fascination with space exploration.

I guess maybe you can call me old fashioned, but I like the way things are right here on Earth. I’m a regular guy: I enjoy coffee, beaches and an atmospheric pressure high enough to support liquid water. So when a guy tells me he wants to spend millions of dollars launching himself on a fancy rocket to some barren rock in the sky, I have to wonder-what kind of elaborate fetish is this guy playing out?

Look, I get it. Space is a “cool” thing now. I’m just as curious about, like, space rocks and stuff as the next guy; but for the life of me I just cannot seem to fathom Elon Musk’s unstoppable need to penetrate the darkness of the infinite void.

What kind of far-out sexual gratification drives a man to shoot rocket after rocket into the sky, watching each one explode, one after another, only to say “Yeah, I’m gonna ride one of those things.”

All of our greatest telescopes have already gone a’knockin’, and scientists can confirm: Mars is empty-no one’s home! So what could he possibly think he’s going to find up there? Does the possibility of extraterrestrial microbial life bring a stirring to his loins?

Maybe the media is to blame. Has the science fiction genre sexualized outer space enough to drive a man to this point? All I know is that Mr. Musk is just one, of a whole generation of young men, who grew up reading things like Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Princess of Mars” books-a series which blatantly fetishized Martian women as extraterrestrial sex objects. It is books and movies like this that give young men the wrong ideas, and next thing you know the government is allocating funds for perverts like NASA.

All I’m asking for is a little practical decency. Back in my day, we took our disgusting, overcomplicated fetishes and shoved them deep down into the back of our minds where, sometimes at night, I can still feel the desire burning away like a match lit eternal-the way it’s supposed to be.

I don’t know what sort of sick fantasies Musk is hoping to play out in the ancient dust of the vast Martian desert, but I want to know why he can’t just keep it to himself.

Just think about it: if Elon Musk would just stop and take a cold shower, we could instead divert all of that taxpayer money to a more dignified endeavour-perhaps a detailed exhibit at the Smithsonian on women’s feet.

Contact the author at dcampo13@wou.edu