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….

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2014 at 4:00 am and is filed under Government Waste & Inefficiency, Science, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.