There Truly Is No End To Our Depravity, Then.

You know, I'm like many of you; I've found it hard, these past few years, to be proud of being an American. We squander international goodwill, run rampant over other cultures, pass judgement over ancient religions and deride everyone who believes differently from us and blah blah bleeding-heart-liberalcakes. You've heard it all before, if not here then elsewhere.

But I think today I found the topper: the evidence that we have truly, as a culture, lost our collective frackin' mind. (And no, contrary to what you might imagine, it has nothing to do with Lindsay Lohan.)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Here on Earth we get rid of our old clothes by dropping them off at the Salvation Army. But what do astronauts at the international space station do?

Friday, they will stuff an old spacesuit with discarded clothes and a radio transmitter and toss it out the door. Complete with helmet and gloves, off it should float like a lost soul in space.

The transmitter will send recorded messages in six languages to amateur radio operators — known as hams — before eventually re-entering Earth's atmosphere and burning up.

The stunt will precede a six-hour spacewalk by Russian flight engineer Valery Tokarev and U.S. commander Bill McArthur to perform maintenance and photography tasks.

The project, known as SuitSat-1, was the brainchild of a Russian ham radio operator. It will send several words in code for schoolchildren listening on the ground. Radio operators will be able to pick up the messages by tuning into FM frequency 145.990 MHz.

Along with the radio transmitter, it also will have internal sensors to monitor temperature and battery power. As the empty suit floats along, it will transmit its telemetry — temperature, battery power and time it has been in space — to the ground.

On a NASA Web site, students and others can track the spacesuit's location. The suit is expected to pass once or twice a day in the U.S., between midnight and 4 a.m., according to NASA.

"We expect the ham radio operators on the ground to be able to receive the suit signal for several days," said Kwatsi Alibaruho, flight director for the spacewalk at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Y'all, we're littering space, now. And we're proud of it. We're calling it "education" and writing press releases about it, and nobody is looking at this and saying "Of what possible scientific value is this?" Because if there were scientific value to it, they could have created an actual object to do it--a little radio transmitter with instruments to measure temperature, power, etc--instead of the high-tech equivalent of a scarecrow.

Now, this may have been "the brainchild of a Russian ham-radio operator", as the article claims. But only an American mission commander would actually go through with something this silly.

I don't know why this makes me so angry, but it does. Maybe because of all the billions of dollars spent puttering around in space, while back on Earth there are people living on the streets and schools closing and senior citizens who can't pay for their medications and their gas bills in the same month. Maybe because the lead to this story makes it so typically American--we view the world as our trash can, but even THAT's not big enough anymore; now we need the whole UNIVERSE!

Personally, I hope the Vogons pick up on the radio transmissions, infiltrate the communications system on the space station, and stage a marathon poetry reading. But that's just me.