The Final Frontier

Staring down the barrel of a $1.5 Trillion budget deficit, and another $14-odd Trillion in the hole, it is no small wonder to me that NASA's new heavy lift vehicle, Constellation, was scrapped in the proposed 2011 budget. I say fine, and I say it as someone who has a fervent, undying wish to one day catch a ride on something headed into Earth orbit, or maybe the moon, and I say this without regret or fear that this dream is in any way diminished by such a budgetary decision.

The long-standing argument in support of NASA's manned space flight program is that great nations have always invested in exploration. Back in the 50s, that investment was a sort of competition between nations and political systems. No one was really sure why it mattered so much, but it did. When Sputnik went up, the fear that the Soviets could drop a nuke from orbit motivated us to launch Explorer, Mercury, Gemini, and ultimately Apollo on a journey to the moon.

But the technology that launched Sputnik into space was already a step or two ahead of what's needed to send an ICBM halfway around the globe at hypersonic speeds, and what the hell were we supposed to do on the moon anyway? The connections between the space race and the arms race were circumstantial, not direct. It was about pride.

What about the great nations before us who invested in exploration? The literature behind the explorers overshadowed the ledgers that sent them on their way in the first place. Anything worth reading from that era is about the glory and travails of those who dared to set out across unknown oceans, but the real, boring truth we learn in school is that it was about the acquisition of resources: spices, gold, slaves to name a few. To be sure, unimaginable riches lie in the exploration of space, but those riches are as yet, unimaginable, and the acquisition of wealth is no longer the province of kings. The needed investment to get a mining operation going on an extraterrestrial body of any kind is many orders of magnitude greater than what's needed to send 100 men with nothing to lose on a ship headed west.

What does this line of thinking mean for our own nation's aspirations to explore the stars? Well, first of all:

1. It's not strategically useful in any conception of modern warfare.
2. No one's found any profit in sending people to space at $50 million a head.
3. It's no longer the state's job to make a profit anyway.

There is a role of the state for space exploration, it's just not war or profit. Like a lot of other things, it's a mix of public goods like scientific knowledge, and public investments in industry. The essential technology of building a rocket and sending people and things into orbit is well-established. The Soviets (now Russians) have used the Soyuz platform for over 4 decades, sending people and things to space with a superior safety record and an inferior price to anything NASA's done since about 1962. NASA is unlikely to do better.

The private sector, venture capitalists, and the current cohort of ungodly rich adventurers are chomping at the bit for a NASA contract that would give them the legitimacy to leverage other private capital into space tourism, space hotels, space electricity, maybe even some space manufacturing.

NASA has taken human exploration as far as it needed to go. Without the massive public investment in the generations since the second world war, it is unlikely that anyone would have made those colossal early investments on their own. NASA will continue to have a role in underwriting basic space science the same way that the National Institutes of Health underwrites basic medical science. We don't go to federal hospitals for surgery, and we don't take federal pills for headaches. We rely on the federal government to ensure hospital and pharmaceutical safety, and to pay for the research that no one who needs to make money is willing to pay for.

As I get older, I wonder whether space will be a destination before I'm a geezer. If I'm ever going to make it up there myself, it's not going to be on a NASA Constellation rocket full of dehydrated ice cream and lab animals. It'll be on Virgin Galactic with other passengers who have shared my childhood dream, sitting back with barely checked excitement, working on a squeezebottle martini on their way to the Lunar Hilton.

At the beginning of what I hope is a long history of human exploration of the Final Frontier, I am optimistic for the first time in years that I may have a place of my own up there, if only as a tourist.