Norman Spinrad's "Subjectivity" (short story, free): Nonsensical but funny parody of some genre tropes

Several old genre tropes here, but this story did make me laugh at a few places:

1. A government does something, anything, so a bored & restless population won't destroy the society. Howard L Myers' "econo-war"(?) series of dozen odd stories is primarily about this, but a lot of other authors have used it too.
2. Mind drugs & hallucinations: My favorite story of the class is Rog Phillips' "The Yellow Pill" (download), may be the only one primarily on this subject that I've actually liked. This story features the super-drug "Omnidrene".
3. How extreme loneliness affects individuals. See, e.g., Tom Godwin's "The Nothing Equation" (download), & Eric Frank Russell's "Tieline".
4. A stubborn & crazy government.
5. Monsters.

Story summary.

Solar Government has decided that man will go to stars. So a ship capable of traveling at half the light speed is built, capable of carrying 10 individuals to Alpha Centauri in a 16 year round-trip journey.

Only problem is: the ship gets lost & never returns; its crew going mad out of boredom. Next ship is built. And next... Every time, a new kind of crew is tried. Until the novel & crazy experiment with 13th ship which "succeeds" beyond everyone's imaginations...

Fact sheet.

First published: Analog, January 1964.
Download full text from Project Gutenberg.
Rating: B.
Among the stories edited by John Campbell for Astounding/Analog.
Related: Stories of Norman Spinrad.