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August 25, 2005

Thinking Clearly About Space Part II: Everybody Wants Space

A lot of energy goes into lamenting that, and arguing over what went wrong after Apollo. Try Occam's razor instead: perhaps we enthusiasts are part of a majority in thinking new achievements in space are admirable, but a minority in the priority we put on achieving them with tax money. Try facing facts: the pace from Sputnik through Apollo was an exception, not the norm. It was enabled by military missile technology that had already done the hardest part of the engineering. It was funded in a unique Cold War period when everything the US and USSR did was part of a global contest. And Apollo itself was aimed at a specific "flags and footprints" victory within that contest. It was never meant to be a foundation for sustained expansion into space, no matter how much we wish otherwise.

So let's stop wondering who took away Humanity's birthright after Apollo 17. Let's assume that political leaders, who have the strongest possible motivation to assess what the public wants and will pay for, were doing just that in the 1960s, and have been doing just that ever since. To put it bluntly, public support for publicly funded space activity is a mile wide and an inch deep.

That doesn't mean space enthusiasts should stop organizing, proselytizing, and lobbying. It means that we should focus our advocacy on immediate and near-term steps, with realism—not frustrated cynicism—about funding, space policy, and what goes into the sausage. It means that we should stop raking over the past for scapegoats and "roads not taken." (Good night, DC-X... good night, National Aerospace Plane...) And it means that while there may be a planet-killer asteroid out there, until it shows up we're wasting our time trying to sell a lunar or Martian or L5 insurance policy to a species that didn't see the need for a tsunami-warning network in the Indian Ocean until December 27, 2004. As for CO2—no, not going there.

SPACE.com -- Thinking Clearly About Space Part II: Everybody Wants Space

Posted by thdyck on August 25, 2005

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