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Category: Spaceship

202 • Apollo 11

202 • Apollo 11

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An astronaut’s moll named Amanda
Went down in the NASA moon-lander.
Neil and Buzz got away
But she’s there to this day
Penning anti-US propaganda.

Year on year we remember Apollo 11 and its plucky pilots; yet we hear little of the lonely martyr who renounced our planet, choosing instead to rail against its greatest nation from a nearby satellite. Sadly this marooned dissident’s solitary effusions register as mere pinpricks alongside the crass proclamations, 51 years later, of the Overgrown Baby whose vacuous tweetings make his country a daily laughing-stock across the entire world.

201 • Unhappy houri

201 • Unhappy houri

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The great Russian cosmonaut, Yuri,
Was fired into space with a houri.
But when they came down
His face wore a frown
And hers wore a mask of cold fury.

Though the literal truth of this fragment is debatable, it is a parable fit to illustrate any sermon about the moral and ethical implications of sex in space. (The Kremlin evidently didn’t expect the Creator to take pity on the lonely Gagarin, and fashion a companion for him by repurposing a redundant rib).

181 • Opportunity missed

181 • Opportunity missed

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At the edge of the old aerodrome
There hovered a shimmering dome.
Some alien lord
Tried to lure me aboard.
‘Forget it,’ said I, and went home.

At first glance there’s a rare honesty about this recollection: no ‘alien abduction’ ensued. Yet the narrator’s peremptory rejection of the ‘alien lord’ is probably a gesture of self-disgust from a speaker disappointed at having subscribed to garish 1950s’ sci-fi tropes, themselves anaemic emblems of dissatisfaction with the inescapable dystopia we have imposed on ourselves.