Xtreme Taxpayer-Sponsored Space Sports

January 2005 was a landmark month in the future of xtreme space sports.

Yet while the events of this monumental month were openly reported in the global press, and even though the first frail foundations of several space age sporting empires were tentatively laid—or at the very least marvelously imagined—little to nothing of any of this has been heard of since.

This exclusive Deep Investigative Deep Web Deep Space Deep Report will attempt to bring everyone up to speed on this issue.

Wherever invaders invade, their sports go with them. The Romans introduced bear baiting to far-off Britain. Then the Brits concocted cricket and exported it to the New World, where it was turned into baseball by the Yanks who later taught it to little Japanese kids to help them forget about atomic bombs.

Later on, via Alan Shepard's moon walk in February, 1971, America—at great public expense—brought the game of golf to Terra's moon. That game of Lunar Links, to the frustration of libertarian economists everywhere, was the beginning of taxpayer-subsidized space sports.

As a team owner says in The Champion, book 5 of science fiction writer Scott Sigler’s Galactic Football League Book Series:

“For centuries, owners of sports teams have understood a critical element of our trade—why spend our own money when taxpayer money spends just as well? And it is free. To us, anyway.”

Socializing expenses to privatize profits is an ancient, current and virtually guaranteed deep space future scam.

If libertarianism doesn’t raise its individualist-voluntaryist head in the coming age of astro-athletics taxpayers worldwide will have the hook of politicized-monetized sports expenditures set ever deeper into their Bitcoin holdings.

(For the record the national Libertarian Party, keenly aware of this ongoing money grab, had already adopted a plank in their 2004 platform against the Government monopoly on space exploration, in support of all peaceful, private, voluntary exploration, and a call to privatize NASA.)

Here’s what happened in the space and sporting worlds of January, 2005:

Los Angeles (AP)—NASA's robot rover, Opportunity, landed on Mars, halfway around the planet from its twin, Spirit. After exploring nearby rocks, "A strange basketball-sized object nearby stood out immediately." Scientists determined it was a meteorite.

"This is what we've been waiting for," exclaimed Surlie Fowler, the National Basketball Association's Director of Extraterrestrial Development. "We get Congress to appropriate a couple billion dollars to have Opportunity dribble that basketball-sized meteorite around the planet to where Spirit is and they play the first Martian driveway basketball game of horse!"

“You know,” Duncan elaborated enthusiastically, “like Larry Bird and Michael Jordan in that Super Bowl commercial. “One robotic arm, off the rock, over the boulder, against the cliff, into the impact crater. Nothing but dust!”

“Of course,” he hastily continued, “We’ll be using real people like astronauts and cosmonauts and spacewalkers and rocketeers, not robotic rovers.”

Frankfurt, Germany (AP)—The European Space Agency "is basking in the glow of recent successes, which began with photographs from the Mars Express craft showing what ESA scientists said was the most direct evidence yet of water in the form of ice on the Red Planet."

"Where there's ice there's hockey," declared a press release from the National Hockey League. "We're demanding that both the American Congress and Canada's Parliament invest a modest few trillion taxpayer dollars to set up the Martian Hockey League. The first game would be an all-star exhibition between the North and South Polar Caps before expanding throughout the solar system. We'll use puck-sized meteorites, which will hold down the costs."

Washington Post—"Opportunity was deliberately driven into Endurance Crater in the belief that the science benefits far outweighed the risk of getting stuck in the sand."

"Ah, sand," mused an unnamed male spokescrat for the International Olympic Committee. "Women's beach volleyball has been one of the most popular events of the summer games. I mean, those skimpy little bikini-like outfits on those sexy female sun-bronzed athletic bodies … er, ahem … I mean, what a great pay-per-view event a Martian tournament would make. We could use millions of OneWorld-issued cryptocurrency to set it up. Of course, we'll have to find some hollow volleyball-sized meteorites to use on low-grav courts, and then add a sixth ring to our logo since Mars is a whole 'nother continent.”

Courtland “Spike” Overnett, well-known sports entrepreneur renown for enriching himself by combining other people’s investments with taxpayer’s money in his “Public/Private Partnership” ploys, was also heard to say, “There’s money to be made with creation of a multi-planet Women’s Professional Beach Volleyball League. Babes, bikinis and billions of beaches. Can’t miss!”

Darmstadt, Germany (AP)–A European space probe has landed on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan after a "2 1/2-hour parachute descent."

"NASA and the ESA need to start training astronaut skydivers right now!" demanded the president of the International Sport Parachuting, Parasailing, Paragliding, Hang Gliding, Wingsuit Flying, Base Jumping and Skydiving Association.

"What earthly human would dare deny public funding for this? There are solar system records out there just waiting to be set. Interglobal records! Galactic records! Universal records! Wormhole records! Parallel Worlds records! Why, we could even send a special spacediving team out to make a pinpoint landing in that famous Restaurant at the End of the Universe!"

Houston Chronicle—NASA's $330 million Deep Impact spacecraft is designed to see what comets are made of by blasting "a crater the size of a football stadium" in the comet Tempel 1."

"And that," beamed a member of the National Football League's expansion committee, "means there's no problem for taxpayers. The city of Arlington, Texas paid half of the Dallas Cowboy's $650 million stadium from the taxes they raised and now taxpayers all over the country and around the world are being suckered into funding arenas and stadiums and Olympic sites so what’s the problem? The Deep Impact project has proved that for a mere $330 million apiece we can blast stadiums all over the Heavens. We'll have the Haley Comets playing the Saturn Ringers, the Milky Wayfarers taking on the Vulcan Mind-Melders, the Pole Star Stars against the Planet of the Apes, the ..."

Author’s note: Could this have been the inspiration for Scott Sigler’s Galaxy Football League?

As for the next item, while the Rosetta probe was successfully launched in 2004 rather than 2005 an earlier AFP article noted that “The launch window closes on March 17, after which the only other possibility would be…” guess when!… “in January 2005…”

And even then its first orbit of Earth occurred in 2005:

BBC News—Europe's Rosetta mission has launched successfully and is now heading into space on its daring journey to chase and land on a comet. the spacecraft's long Solar System journey will take it around the Sun four times, around Mars once, the Earth three times and into the asteroid belt twice.

The Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile, governing body of Formula I racing, is demanding trillions of dollars from the taxpayer funded World Bank to set up an outer space race course. Said FIA president Sir Morgan Duesenberg-Bugatti III, "This will be better than the Monaco Grand Prix, where all we do is stuff like race up the hill from St. Devote into Casino Square, accelerate past the Hotel Metropole, take the hairpin turn at the Monte Carlo Grand Hotel, a sharp right past the fountains, open up through the tunnel, and then do it all 77 times again. How boring!"

The CFO of the organization then explained how a special worldwide tax on every auto owner could be used to subsidize automakers like Maserati, Ferrari, McLaren and other classic nameplates to build spacer racers to compete with Tesla for the future Formula Sun Grand Prix.

And in related 2005 news…

Aero News Network, January 31, 2005—The world's first untethered spacewalker, an astronaut who snared two crippled satellites on the first space salvage mission, and a Space Shuttle Commander who overcame an engine failure to reach orbit have been chosen for 2005 induction into the US Astronaut Hall of Fame.

“That’s exactly what we need!” enthused Space Sports Hall of Fame advocate Faye Moss-Hall, “a place to enshrine our greatest interplanetary sportspeople for all time. It could be placed in orbit and called The Satellite Sanctuary of Space Sports Superstars or something catchy and important-sounding like that for our Stars of the Stars. We would have displays for Polar Icecap Ice Hockey, Rock Soccer, Boulder Bowling, Space Base Baseball, and all the others. It could be paid for by a special space tax on the solar system-wide streaming audio-visual telemetry viewing rights, a tax that would be passed on to the viewing fans of course.”

President Eisenhower warned Americans about the massively politicalized military industrial complex and the power-profit-ego nexus that it has created and perpetuated.

Without the privatization of space exploration and a free marketplace in the space-based interface of all peoples it will be up to libertarians to warn against a future sport-power-politics-privilege nexus designed to make a few fabulously wealthy at the expense of all humanity—and the tax-subjugation of whoever else we find out there.

It’s up to all freedom-loving people to help keep the future of Xtreme Space Sports like today’s nascent Space Games Federation and the theoretically future Galactic Football League free and voluntary!

The Future of Space Exploration The first Space Race pitted the USA against the USSR. Today’s space race features private sector adversaries like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Bigelow Airspace, Virgin Galactic, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin.

Should the Space Station be privatized? The Trump Administration is looking at privatizing the ISS in the hopes that “industry could continue to operate certain elements of capabilities of the ISS of a future commercial platform.”

The Libertarian Party Before It’s Time The 2004 national LP Platform called for the end of the government monopoly on space exploration, championed the peaceful uses of outer space and advocated the privatization of NASA.

Field of Schemes From the government-subsidized Olympics to massive taxpayer-funded facilities millionaire owners suck in the taxbucks while fans shell it out. There’s little reason to think these current scams won’t continue into the cosmos.