The new space program…

I was recently encouraged by NASA’s decision to use Space-X and Boeing to send astronauts to the International Space Station.  You might say, “Well, you’re a sci-fi writer, so I’m not surprised!”  Yes indeed, I have written a few sci-fi stories.  I also write suspenseful thrillers and mysteries.  Only one of my stories takes place on ISS (The Secret Lab), so I don’t have any particular agenda.  In fact, I’ve conjectured that the Chinese will make it to Mars first (see Survivors of the Chaos).  Cancelling the Shuttle Program only convinced me more.

I’m encouraged for two reasons.  The first is that it’s high time capitalism goes into space.  I’m talking good capitalism here, the kind that improves products and services and increases the inventive spirit through healthy competition.  Changing the slogan “We have to beat the Russians to the moon!” to “We Space-X engineers and scientists have to beat Boeing’s” is a positive development.  The more competitors, the merrier, I say, as long as there are enough oversight and control to keep things like o-ring mishaps to a minimum (does that company still exist?).

The Times, in solidifying its recent naysayer stances about anything Wall Street one-percenters might not like (choosing sides with Hachette in the Amazon-Hachette kerfuffle is but one example), probably made an error in publishing Brian McFadden’s cartoon strip “The Space Privatization Race” (Sunday, Sept. 21).  Either that, or they wanted to eschew their one-percenter support and appear unbiased (what a concept!).  The strip points out the perils in privatizing space exploration, ending by showing the Koch brothers ready to torpedo the E-type planet that’s been discovered with negative political ads.  Funny, yes, but is the Times for or against privatization? Do I care?  Probably not.  To anyone with intelligence, all the big rags are basically irrelevant anyway.  So is network news.  However, Mr. McFadden’s POV, tongue-in-cheek or not, must be debated.

McFadden’s strip, in fact, is biased toward the negative.  I can cut him some slack, saying that he’s just pointing out dangers I’ve already mentioned.  Capitalism without control is as bad as socialism in the hands of incompetents (considering that most socialists are incompetent and can’t do anything practical, and most capitalists, especially CEOs of big corporations, are greedy SOBs, I’m in a tough place, I know).  But, if we’re going to be comical about it, doesn’t the fact that the one-percenters are eventually going to own all wealth on this planet mean they won’t have any consumers left if they don’t exploit space?  You can only squeeze so much blood from stones until you need more stones to squeeze.  In the Solar System and beyond, there are plenty of stones to squeeze.  (Yeah, I’m mixing methaphors like crazy, but I’m writing this op-ed, not you.)

This is the bleak situation in Survivors of the Chaos, the first novel in my “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.”  Mega-corporations don’t have any other way to become more mega without exploiting space, so they do—at least in this tale.  A clever director of UNSA, Isha Bai, hoodwinks them all into paying for space exploration and exploitation because they have all the money anyway.  The book is dystopian; we don’t need to go that far.  Big corporations aren’t inherently evil, although taming them is a wee bit like training a T. Rex to jump through hoops. However, Space-X is doing a fantastic job in spite of McFadden’s comic-strip list of potential negatives.  The principal fact: Right now the U.S. has no other way to send astronauts to ISS without begging Mr. Putin for a handout.

Congress, in its lobotomized view of budget priorities, cancelled the Shuttle Program, putting screaming brakes on space science research, just like they did with the SSC and particle physics research (if you don’t remember what the SSC was going to be, look it up).  The latter resulted in CERN’s discovery of the Higgs particle; the former will mean that the Chinese will reach Mars first, unless corporations take up the slack.  Too many Dems jumped on the budget-slashing bandwagon of Rand Paul and Paul Ryan—two Pauls that step on everyone’s bunions (actually, in SSC days, both were peeing their diapers, but their congressional ancestry did the job without them—they were more responsible for the Space Shuttle cancellation, along with many other lobotomized, congressional knuckle-draggers).  While many Congress people haven’t yet seen a war they don’t want to fund, science and technology funding has been and remains pathetic.  They say anyone who thinks humans belong in space is a pure romantic, or worse.

I guess I’m that romantic then.  Apparently, so is the leader of Space-X, Elon Musk.  Some old sci-fi novels I read as a kid (you know, by those forgotten authors like Asimov, Heinlein, and so forth) had as hero an entrepreneur with a dream who built his own rocket.  In Star Trek: First Contact, it’s Zefram Cochrane and his warp drive, for those who don’t read and only do movies, but the idea is almost as old as sci-fi (see Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon).  Musk is a real-life entrepreneur who dreams big.  He’s surrounded himself with a bunch of young, innovative people who share his dream.

A Sixty Minutes segment featured Musk a while back.  Unlike the anti-corporate attitude the Times often pushes (the support of Hachette seems so out of character until we remember that the Times thinks it’s a big-time publisher too), Sixty Minutes presented an unbiased appraisal of space privatization.  I would only add that I wouldn’t trust Boeing too much—they don’t have a great track record with recent products.  Moreover, Space-X is focused on, well, space.  Boeing is greedy, therefore more interested in making tons of money.

I’d much rather private enterprise spend the money on space exploration.  Otherwise, the ninety-nine percent are going to pay for it.  It’ll be expensive.  The one-percenters will have all the money soon—let them pay.  If they benefit, what else is new?  Big Pharma puts money into developing drugs.  Once they go generic, they can benefit everyone.  Eventually, space exploration and exploitation will be generic.  It’s inevitable.  If not the U.S., then the Chinese or someone else (China’s just one big mega-corporation already).  I remember when a portable phone was a rich person’s toy.  Now everyone can have a toy phone to play with, because big corporations can make money selling them!  Space is the final frontier—until we make first contact and find out there are other beings out there who offer more frontiers.  (That’s in the second novel of the “Chaos Chronicle Trilogy,” Sing a Samba Galactica.)

Space exploration will always be expensive.  Space travel will also be expensive—until it’s not.  Technologies have a way of creeping up on you, becoming ubiquitous before you can utter the magic incantation “Steve Jobs” and look for the silver stake.  They don’t come from socialist communes or Israeli kibbutzim.  They originate in budding corporations where entrepreneurs, technicians, and scientists share big and small dreams.  That’s human nature, practical people coming together to dream and invent.

[I hope you’re as forgiving about my surreptitious marketing as you are about my mixed metaphors.  I do sell books, you know….]

And so it goes….

5 Responses to “The new space program…”

  1. Scott Dyson Says:

    Walt Disney famously said, “If you can dream it, you can do it,” and that attitude pervaded the company he created until (and for a while after) he died too early. The world needs more people like Disney. Before he died, he was focused on floating the trial balloon of E.P.C.O.T., which of course is nothing like what they ended up doing down there. Whether it would have worked or have been a huge disaster, everyone would have benefited from the information gained in the experiment.

    Sometimes I wonder when Walt would have turned his eyes to space. If he had seen the moon landing, what might he have done with it? When the government needed support for the space program back in those days, they turned to Disney to make promotional films, and he set some of his best imagineers to the task.

    Maybe Elon Musk is this sort. Maybe Jobs, or Bezos, or Branson, is this type, but do they have the voice that Disney had in his heyday?

    In any case, I agree with your arguments, and I hope that humanity sees the light…

  2. Scott Dyson Says:

    Here’s my attempt at replacing my comment, I think I used a lot of words to not say much. 🙂 But I think what I had said was something about needing someone like Walt Disney in our world. Say what you might about the Disney Corporation, but Walt, who had his faults, was definitely a futurist and someone who was willing to put his company’s money where his thoughts were. E.P.C.O.T. was supposed to be something far different than the theme park it is today; it was supposed to be an experiment in urban planning and urban living. Whether or not it was successful, knowledge would have been gained and maybe things would have come out of it that would have helped society in general.

    Walt was also very interested in the space program; I believe Disney was recruited to make a Man-In-Space series of films to drum up popular support for the program. I wonder what might have happened if he had lived to see us land on the Moon, and where he would have gone with it. Maybe his attentions would have been turned away from his E.P.C.O.T. experiment and toward space. Maybe we’d have a Disney theme park on the Moon by now!

    The reason I thought about this was because of your mention of Elon Musk, who might be a visionary on that level, along with others. Richard Branson? Maybe Bezos? Jobs? Gates? Tesla? The thing they don’t have (except maybe for Bezos) is the megaphone that Disney had in his day. The Disney Corporation today has none of that sort of vision.

    BTW, who heads up the Sierra Nevada Corporation, the third company that was eliminated from consideration in this little race?

  3. Steven M. Moore Says:

    Hi Scott,
    Congrats to you that this time your comment went through. I’m beginning to think each new WP version becomes more flaky.
    Interestingly enough, Walt was born just “down the road” from where my Dad was, in Kansas. They were both artists. My Dad took the responsible road and provided for his family. Walt took the dreamer’s road and went to California. Of course, Walt was lucky as well as making some of his own luck–not all dreamers enjoy the same success, though.
    In the original Disneyland, long before Disney World, there was a “space ride”–it’s still the closest I’ll ever come to traveling in space!
    Sierra Nevada Corp? Never heard of them. I was actually surprised that old Boeing was in the running. Their track record hasn’t been good lately, while Space-X makes regular deliveries to ISS.
    As an ex-scientist, I’ll have to insist that there are more visionaries slogging it out in the world’s universities and research labs than we’ll ever hear about from our media that shines the limelight only on a select few (who sometimes only get it because they seek it, by the way). Every scientist I’ve known is a visionary. Few want the limelight.
    r/Steve

  4. Scott Dyson Says:

    The only reason I know about Sierra Nevada corporation is because of the BBC news article that my son wrote his current events paper on, covering this very subject. It also said that the SN Corp will continue in their quest to develop their own system, albeit without NASA/Government money.

    I’ve read a handful of biographies on Walt, and it seems that he had an uncanny knack for “knowing” what would work for the masses. In the company, he was always right, whether he was “right” or not. But the thing was, he WAS usually right. He was told that he couldn’t do an animated feature film, but he did it and did it right, and it made big bucks for the company. He was told by other studio execs that this TV thing was just a passing thing, but he saw what it could be and jumped in with both feet. He was again told, at a gathering of amusement park people in Chicago, that he should stick to movies and TV because his ideas for a theme park would never work. Didn’t phase him.

    I’m sure that there are TONS of visionaries and futurists in the scientific community, but they usually need the backing of someone with money and charisma and a voice to get their ideas made. Walt was not the best animator (probably just average at best) but he knew what he wanted, and found people who WERE the best people to do what he envisioned…

  5. Steven M. Moore Says:

    Scott,
    Often scientists don’t care about the business end. Their vision roams farther afield. The entrepreneur perhaps sees the application and decides it’s marketable. We wouldn’t have modern technology without the vision of the scientists who invented the transistor and the laser, for example, or even atomic energy (and bombs) without that funny-haired guy dreaming his days away in a Swiss patent office. Skill sets are highly personal. And different strokes for different folks….
    I’m not going to debate who provides more benefit for society either. It’s probably a chicken-and-egg debate anyway. The average human being should realize that we need all sorts of people doing all sorts of things in order to realize progress…and control it. You do, I do, but it’s not clear that everyone does.
    r/Steve