Return of a Space Flight Protest Anthem
“Whitey on the Moon,” a 1970 spoken word poem by Gil-Scott Heron, denounced the U.S. space program as a distraction from more pressing needs.
The two recent launches of private spacecraft have been hailed as a milestone, but critics have been skeptical. “We have handed over so much of our fate to so few people over the last decades, especially when it comes to critical technology,” Kara Swisher wrote in The New York Times. “It feels like we are continuing to place too much of our trust in the hands of tech titans.”
The debate echoes an earlier one: NASA’s successful moon mission in 1969 was denounced by some as a waste of resources. “I don’t see what benefit mankind will have from two astronauts landing on the moon while people are being murdered in Vietnam,” the political activist Eldridge Cleaver said at the time.
One person inspired by Cleaver’s words was Gil Scott-Heron. A poet, musician and political activist, Scott-Heron is probably best known for “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” an investigation of revolutionary politics in the age of media. Scott-Heron’s 1970 poem “Whitey on the Moon” mocked the idea of American exceptionalism by looking at the disconnect between NASA’s success in the race to space and the country’s failure to address social problems at home:
I can’t pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)
Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still.
(while Whitey’s on the moon)
The man just upped my rent last night.
(’cause Whitey’s on the moon)
No hot water, no toilets, no lights.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)
The poem became a lasting cultural touchstone for activists. A 2018 cover of the song by Leon Bridges was featured in “First Man,” a film starring Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong. As interest in space travel has been reawakened, the song has received new interest. “I suspect these writers sense — as I do — that we are living in the same dystopian present,” A.D. Carson wrote in Salon. “It is a time in which the ‘whitey’ in Scott-Heron’s poem could be any of the three billionaires who are the faces of the current space race, which is taking place in an era of profound inequity that helped them become billionaires in the first place.”
In the years since the poem’s release, other musicians have been critical of space travel. As private space companies got off the ground in 2016, the hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest released “The Space Program,” dealing with many of the same issues Gil Scott-Heron addressed decades earlier.
It always seems the poorest persons are people forsaken, dawg
No Washingtons, Jeffersons, Jacksons on the captain’s log
They’d rather lead us to the grave, water poisoned, deadly smog
Mass un-blackening, it’s happening, you feel it y’all?
They’d rather see we in a three-by-three structure with many bars
Leave us where we are so they can play among the stars
In an interview after his successful flight on July 20, Jeff Bezos thanked Amazon customers and employees. “You guys paid for all of this,” he said to a laughing crowd. But critics asserted that Bezos’s remark was insensitive to workers, some of whom faced dangerous working conditions during the pandemic. “Amazon workers don’t need Bezos to thank them,” former labor secretary Robert Reich tweeted. “They need him to stop union busting — and pay them what they deserve.”
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