This Friday, December 20, marks the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the Apollo program, the day we effectively abandoned the universe beyond low Earth orbit.  To commemorate the event properly, let’s move the American joke holiday forward a couple months and declare it Groundhog Day.  As in the Bill Murray movie of the same name, our space efforts have been stuck in a loop, endlessly repeating the same events over and over until maybe, finally, we learn something and free ourselves to move on.  Thirty years should be enough repetition of tax-financed circling in LEO:  let’s draw some conclusions and get on with building a spacefaring civilization.

In the movie, Murray played a cynical drone of a TV weatherman, someone who’d chosen to ignore his own talents in order to cultivate a superficial appeal, to his audiences and to the people in his personal life.  The repetition of one Groundhog Day forced him to develop skills and values enabling him to be of service to his community, to develop a popularity built on real utility and deep connection.  NASA and the global space community, after a generation of Groundhog Days, are just beginning to learn the lessons that enabled Murray to break the cycle and move on.  Some of those lessons are beginning to generate real change, the kind of change necessary to put an end to thirty years of more-of-the-same in space and launch us into an era of progress and transformation.

What We’re Doing Doesn’t Work:  If our goal is to build a permanent, sustainable human presence in space, we have to begin by acknowledging failure.  We’re not there; we don’t have the “2001: A Space Odyssey” future.  The observation is obvious, but much of the space community has failed to draw the logical conclusion:  the methods we’ve been using to achieve our goals have failed.  We’ve stuck ourselves with repetitive behaviors, and so we keep reliving Groundhog day.  Dependence on governments and the aerospace giants who service them has failed.  A space-enthusiast effort focused on government-agency boosterism has failed.  Entrepreneurial efforts ungrounded in incrementalism and ruthless financial realism have failed.  “Space is cool” educational programs have failed.  Success will require not just new approaches but an end to wasting efforts on the old ones.  You can’t dig your way out of a hole.

We’re Only Fooling Ourselves:  All of us in the space community have been like Murray’s smarmy weatherman, pulling ever-more outrageous stunts, making increasingly grandiose claims, to grab the attention of fickle audiences.  Nobody bought Murray’s act, and nobody’s buying ours.  The primary work product of NASA and Big Aerospace is “viewgraph engineering:”  ferociously expensive studies that generate beautiful artwork of cool spaceships – and nothing else.  Nobody other than newcomers believes any of the stuff will ever be built.  The cynicism behind such efforts, verging on corruption where public funds are involved, is corrosive to the credibility of the entire space enterprise.  The same holds true with much of the outreach focused on schoolchildren:  that captive audience has a fine nose for adult speciousness, and they’re not buying outer-space gee-whiz:  they can see the level of interest and attention paid to space by their parents and the media, and can see for themselves that the humans-in-space effort in particular is ghastly dull.  To be sure, our messages to our children are more a product of wishful thinking than the intentional design of space Potemkin villages perpetrated on taxpayers, but the disconnect between reality and the empty flash of presentations is equally discrediting.

Bureaucracies Aren’t Bold:  Another lesson that should be obvious, this one has escaped government space supporters and critics alike.  Governmental efforts can’t afford to fail, but they can afford not to succeed.  “We’re still working on it” prevents blame and ensures a continued supply of funding to manage what must be an oh-so intractable problem.  “We thought we had it, but it blew up” leads to messy investigations.  This simple rule of human behavior has several consequences for space.  One is that very old technology will stay in service long past its intended life:  better the devil you know.  Another is that simultaneously, research and development will focus on the most distant, blue-sky, projects, ones that can safely be studied for generations without incurring the wrath of legislators expecting results.  Ignored if possible and stamped out if necessary are the incremental advances and completely new products that are the staple of commercial efforts.  Some of this is driven by the procurement process, which ensures that product development must meet current, not envisioned, needs, and must incur great documentation expense up front.  Some of it is the inevitable product of the bureaucratic mindset, which in all times and cultures values stability and self-preservation over innovation and progress.  Bureaucracies excel at repetition, at established and routine procedures – at being stuck in Groundhog Day.

We Need to be Useful:  Arguably, Apollo generated real utility for the American culture of its time.  Soviet space efforts had severely threatened America’s self-perception as a technologically advanced, can-do society.  That image had to be redeemed, and through a grand gesture.  Otherwise, the “space program” has provided little to meet the real needs of the community, be that America or the world.  There have been quiet triumphs:  the general ability of remote sensing data has made a real contribution to safety and prosperity.  Certainly communications satellites have been an immense boon.  But much space effort, including, often, this column, lack grounding in the needs of the community – as it perceives them, rather than as we wish it did.  Ours is not an expansive, bold, frontier-oriented civilization.  Projects designed to meet those needs will fail, for lack of demand.  Scientific data is of only passing interest beyond a community of specialists:  NASA’s focus on scientific questions marginalizes its own efforts and leaves it open to charges of hypocrisy for projects with other, unconfessed, motivations, such as the ISS and the choice of Mars missions over those to Pluto or Europa.  What would be useful?  Efforts increasing interconnectedness and communications:  commercial suborbital vehicles fit that bill.  A counter to fears of terrorism, more than to its actuality – which is why ballistic missile defense remains a priority.  So long as SUV sales continue to increase, our society remains unwilling to confront the consequences of its demands for energy and raw materials, and unwilling to perceive any need for change. Once it does, expansion of our material resource base may become useful quite soon, enabling solar power satellites and asteroid mining.

We Need Skills:  We really do have things to learn before we can live and work in space and expand outward through the solar system.  By focusing on endless human microgravity studies – and ignoring Russian data in the field – NASA has squandered opportunities to grow and learn during its long Groundhog Day.  Thirty years in LEO could have been put to use prototyping spacesuits, conducting crew composition studies, running simulated Mars missions, and developing a myriad other essential skills.  Return to the Moon supporters have been among the most clear and consistent in recognizing and trying to address the need for many of these skills.  We’ll still have to learn them someday, and until we do, it’ll remain Groundhog Day, and we’ll keep endlessly repeating what we already know.

We Need to Start Small and Persevere:  On the final repetition of his Groundhog Day, Murray’s character had become a competent emergency medic, a good dancer, and a terrific piano player.  His transformations weren’t magical, but were the product of lots of time to practice, during his infinitely looping day.  The discipline to abandon his grandiose bluster in favor of daily incremental progress was one of the keys to his release.  It is ours as well.  A new generation of rocket entrepreneurs is starting small, building, testing and flying hardware in steady development.  Some of them will succeed, unlike the purveyors of giant orbital vehicle designs and “spend twenty billion dollars and they’ll come” business plans.  Some of the current crop of grad students will persevere in their disciplines, moving on eventually from volunteering on analog missions to running the real thing.  Some of the enthusiasts who keep working through this time when space is far from the public consciousness will hone immense talents to be applied when a new era opens.  The grandiose dreamers won’t be there, the burnouts won’t be there.  The folks who kept showing up for piano lessons will.

To our credit, we’re beginning to learn some of the lessons of Groundhog Day.  Some of the space advocacy groups are turning from a futile focus on government towards private action – either directly, as with the Mars Society’s habs, or indirectly, through the Space Frontier Foundation’s focus on training and encouragement for space entrepreneurs.  Those entrepreneurs are shedding the vices of their military-industrial competitors and taking a steady progression of small steps with real hardware.  A very few advocates are beginning to address the question of how the space movement can be a productive, integrated, valued member of the global community.  The Spacefaring Web, that network of scientists, entrepreneurs and advocates, is becoming real, and honest, and useful.  Thirty years isn’t too much time for that:  progress tends to be made by the old guard dying off.  We still have Groundhog Days ahead of us, but if we keep their lessons in mind, and if we persevere, one Groundhog Day not too long from now will be our last, and once again we’ll move on, beyond Earth orbit and out for good into the universe.

NASA’s recent budget request is uninspiring, reactive and constraining – and just what the doctor ordered.  Agency Administrator Sean O’Keefe has apparently realized that our grandiose dreams of near-term space triumphs are simply shattered, leaving us – government, industry and advocacy alike – with the unglamorous work of living within our means, delivering on our promises, and slowly building a new space infrastructure, one that, this time, can last.

There’s an old saying that the best is the enemy of the good enough.  NASA, following in the family tradition of its older brother, the Pentagon, has spent twenty years proving the maxim.  President Reagan’s little $8 billion Space Station Freedom managed to misplace $5 billion last year, in its 18^th year of bureaucratic life.  Despite the “faster, better, cheaper” mantra, the engineering bells-and-whistles mindset, coupled with government budgeting procedures, has caused most projects to bloat.  The gap between expectations and results then gets filled with “viewgraph engineering,” more grandiose promises, coupled with requests for yet another one-time-only emergency handout.

NASA and its dependent contractors are not alone in overpromising and under-delivering.  Space advocacy’s track record is, if anything, worse (“L5 in ’95,” for example).  Volunteer enthusiasm couples with pent-up demand fed by NASA’s failure to deliver on its promises to create the same dynamic.  Ambitious projects are declared, discussed in a frenzy of chat-board activity – then, like so many amateur rockets, either fizzle or explode.

Entrepreneurial space companies, often drawn from the ranks of either advocates or frustrated veterans of NASA disappointments, have followed the same pattern:  the initial draft of the business plan (if they’re that realistic) calls for conquering the Solar System, producing two dozen products and making billionaires of their first round investors, all in five years.

To their credit, though, the entrepreneurs have been the first to learn the lesson of “foundations first.”  The die-off of many of the launch vehicle startups triggered an increase in professionalism and a decrease in grandiosity among their successors.  Many current space startups have much more business savvy and vastly more humble – and achievable – goals than their predecessors did.  The lessons they learned in the unforgiving school of the marketplace are finally beginning to spread to their governmental and advocacy peers.

The space community had no monopoly on excess, to be sure.  We’ve all been down that road.  Overpromising was what the latter 1990s were about.  While space has had its own dynamic, driven by NASA’s pervasive lack of realism, the entire Western economy was, if not, as the Texans say, “all hat and no cattle,” at least running with a hat/cattle ratio that no sober banker (had there been any) would have approved.  That party’s over.  NASA must rebuild credibility with the public, with Congress and with its international partners, deliver on promises already made, and live within its budgetary means.  Advocacy must do the same.

The NASA budget request is a courageous attempt to meet those critical requirements of credibility, frugality and infrastructure repair.  The Space Launch Initiative was shaping up to generate a replacement for the Shuttle as disastrously out of step with fiscal and mission requirements as the original has been.  There is no good solution to the problems caused by unsafe, spectacularly expensive and antiquated transportation to a largely worthless destination.  Sacking the SLI program while extending the life of the existing orbiters and developing a relatively cheap lifeboat capable of supporting a full crew complement on the International Space Station, is a good faith, “good enough” fix.

Hopefully, this approach, grounded in a blessed lack of vision, will spread through NASA’s upper management.  The agency’s “NExT” initiative, despite some very positive elements, smacks too much of a re-creation of the process that diverted the bulk of its attention and resources into the Station and Shuttle, to precious little relative return.  More microgravity mega-engineering does not seem a reasonable response either to NASA’s own priority of exploring life’s origins, or to the public and commercial demand for affordable access to space.

Criticism of this sort of bureaucratic “beau geste” has been coming from interesting quarters.  The Economist, the British news weekly, has long been fanatically hostile to human spaceflight.  Yet its November 14 editorial marks a change in tone.  While still scathing (“It is true that science can be done in the space station.  But science can also be done dressed in a clown suit atop a large Ferris wheel”), the editors go on to express sentiments that could have come from this column:

[F]or decades there has been a huge pent-up demand for flights into space.  Although the private sector is finally making some progress towards this, NASA should have been there years ago.  What is still needed is research and development on economical and safe space transport for the public at large.  Space, like the Wild West, can be truly opened up by the private sector.  NASA’s central goal in human space flight should be to make that possible.

A broad consensus seems to be coalescing around this radical view.  The Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry delivered its final report to the Administration this week.  No visionary programs are called for:  rather, the focus is on rebuilding infrastructure, improving basic research and removing trade barriers – the impediments to spacefaring identified in the previous issue of this column.

The Commission calls for a realignment of Federal efforts around these unglamorous but essential issues.  The advocacy community as well should follow suit, to aid in this effort and to redeem itself from the overpromising/under-delivering space curse.

This past week marked the twentieth anniversary of a fringe organization whose beginnings were much less promising than those of the space groups’, but whose influence, unlike that of our community, has become immense.  The Federalist Society began as a campus-based movement of conservative, statist law students in an era when the top law schools were largely liberal and biased against the exercise of imperial power.  It was a fringe organization regarded with deep suspicion by mainstream students and faculty (as I recall from firsthand experience, having attended law school with co-founders of the organization in its second year of existence).  Yet its anniversary was noted prominently in the New York Times – as the commemorative celebration was attended by a Supreme Court Justice and the Attorney General.  No cabinet-level official has ever attended a space-advocacy party, to the best of my knowledge.

What did the Federalist Society do right that the various space societies have not?  Three things of utterly critical significance:  it focused on training and promoting cadre, and on engaging in genuine, respectful debate with its opponents.  Also, it did not squander its energy on personality-driven factional infighting or schismatic doctrinal squabbles.  The space advocacy organizations should learn that lesson and radically revision themselves around those two positive projects.

The Federalist Society made the front pages because it spent twenty years recruiting bright students who were receptive to its message, training and indoctrinating them, and networking them with alumni and supporters in positions of influence.  In less than a generation their strategy has given them policy dominance over the Federal agency of concern to them, the Justice Department.

Imagine if a space organization could have placed its members throughout the NASA hierarchy, claiming the Administrator and the Secretary of Defense as allies – we might actually have a Federal space effort accomplishing something other than intellectual and financial bankruptcy restructuring.

The other critical technique involves recruiting one’s adversaries as marketing representatives.  By providing a forum for liberal and libertarian opponents to hone their arguments through debate, the Federalist Society forced those opponents to accord it respect and legitimacy.  By putting their people on panels alongside respected mainstream opinion leaders, they declared themselves peers and serious players.  When their opponents would go out marketing themselves, they would likely refer to having assailed their Federalist Society adversaries – again, marking the once-fringe organization as a legitimate peer of the prominent mainstream figure.

Space advocacy groups have consistently chosen to preach to the choir rather than to engage their critics.  This choice ghettoizes us, prevents us from becoming truly proficient or convincing in delivering our message, denies us the opportunity to win over moderates who have only heard the opposition’s case, and denies us the leverage of putting our adversaries to work marketing us.  There has been talk of engaging the environmental and religious communities, of opening a dialog with the technologically-skeptical “Party of Nah,” but little concrete action.  Our failure costs us influence.

NASA now has an opportunity to rebuild its financial, reputational and physical infrastructure.  Only when this process is complete will it be able to move on to grander things.  By abandoning the impulse to build deep-space Egyptian pyramids in favor of more mundane and infinitely more useful Roman roads, the agency may actually accomplish its true goal of opening the space frontier.  If the space advocacy groups similarly choose to abandon millennial fervor and narcissistic self-destruction in favor of recruiting, training and influence-building, they can provide the leadership of government and industry necessary for opening that frontier.

Critical to both efforts is accepting that, for now, building a spacefaring civilization does not involve grand theorizing, viewgraph engineering or marching gaily off to triumph.  For now, revolutionary patience lies in inspiring the kids, paying the bills and building the roads.  If we do those things right, the triumphs will surely come.

With the ending of the Industrial Age, the future disappeared.  Once a familiar land with agreed-on boundaries, aftershocks from the fall of communism and industrialism shattered its landscape like the mythic cataclysm that felled Atlantis.  The future now is what Shakespeare and the Klingons called it, an undiscovered country.  Rival powers are now busy mapping the spacefaring provinces of that country, hoping to claim them all in their own name.  A power struggle for space is on.

The first issue of this column addressed 2001′s popular IBM commercial, the one in which Avery Brooks demanded, “Where are the flying cars?  They promised us flying cars!”  Everyone knew what he meant:  through the 1960s we were broadly sure of what the future would look like.  In its atlas, there were pages for “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “The Jetsons.”  Sunday supplements and government plans alike provided ethnographies and almanacs of that not-so-distant realm.

Then that known future vanished.  Cultural change outstripped even engineering advances, first in the West and later worldwide.  Old social certainties evaporated as the new culture went global.  Cheap, instantaneous communications dealt mortal blows to the old, slow, isolated world of Thomas Friedman’s “olive tree.”  Customization, recognized in the early 1970s as the key to “future shock,” made consensus and shared experience obsolete.  The heavy-engineering certainties of von Braun were overwhelmed by the accelerating pace of technological and social change.

We are caught in the turbulence of what Disney Fellow Danny Hillis calls a “phase transition” between two stable eras, the industrial past and a blank and unclaimed future.  The struggle for that future has begun, for the right to own it, name it, reshape it to the whims of the victor.  Three great powers vie for dominance:  the state, the individual and the market.  Terrorism is a front in that struggle, as is state erosion of civil rights, anti-globalization protest, and the fight to maintain the public domain.  As in the Industrial Age, one small province of that future is space.

Recent dispatches from behind the lines of each of the powers may help us map the fronts, indicating where reinforcements might be sent to back our chosen side, maybe even to predict a winner, though it’s doubtful that the struggle will ever truly end.

The state, having been virtually written off by Network Age pundits (myself including), has come roaring back since 9/11.  It gained an edge over the market as the global economy sank.  Its critical victories, though are being scored against the individual.

The war on terrorism is essentially a war against the individual, against what Thomas Friedman calls the “super-empowered angry young man” willing to die for the old certainties.  Yet along with measures directly linked to attacking terrorism, the American response has included any number aimed at controlling the strategic center of power in the Network Age, free flows of information.

One battle, begun well before the current crisis, has seen fresh action.  Back in 1998, export licensing for American space technology was transferred from the relatively market-friendly US Commerce Department to the national-security focused State Department.  The move was prompted by concern among the organs of state security that an insurance company’s investigation of the failure of a Chinese rocket to launch an American satellite had revealed strategically sensitive information.

Strategic weapons data?  No:  the key issue was know-how of Western engineering analysis.  What’s more, the Congressional report on the matter (http://www.gpo.gov/congress/house/hr105851-html/ch8bod.html) went on at length to clarify that discussion of public-domain basic engineering information with foreigners could readily be classified as a “munitions export” requiring a license.  Or a million dollar fine and a federal jail term, in the alternative.

The laws weren’t focused on China or other strategic adversaries:  routine communications between an American company and its UK affiliate could be subjected to licensing requirements.  They also applied to scientific space efforts, technically preventing a university research team from sharing scientific data with its own resident-alien graduate students.  Previous Commerce Department regulations had broadly exempted the transfer of goods and data for scientific purposes.

The American satellite industry was crippled by the regulatory change:  US imports of spacecraft and components surged from 19 percent the year before the change to 46 percent in 2001.  American companies lost numerous deals when purchasers were unwilling to tolerate licensing delays or the outright prohibition of information exchange.

Yet it was the scientific community that pushed back aggressively against the assault on its fundamental principles.  A university consortium was able to gain amendments to the arms-transfer regulations that restored a narrow carve-out for research.  Now citizens of NATO countries and key allies can receive project data, and certain public domain information is no longer treated as the equivalent of machine guns.

The universities tried again, hoping to get the exempt-country list broadened to include all nations other than those identified by the State Department as sponsors of terrorism, and to restore the “public domain” definition originally enacted by the Reagan Administration.

Two weeks ago the empire struck back:  John H. Marburger, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, responded to university concerns, dismissing them in two paragraphs (http://www.aau.edu/research/Marburger10.17.02.pdf).  Despite the rejection-letter formula, two concepts stood out.  Regarding foreign faculty and students, Marburger wrote that the “balance [between] the needs of universities and national security concerns” was fixed just where the government wanted it.  The decision to criminalize routine project discussions within the university was a conscious choice by the organs of state security.

The second point stated that the current public domain definition was “consistent with the longstanding practice regarding implementation” of the State Department regulations.  True enough, but the implication was that the Munitions List – yes, that’s really the name of the regulation covering space technology – is the appropriate regulatory instrument, rather than the Commerce Department’s Export Administration Regulations.  State security has captured the high ground of space research, not in the name of terrorism prevention, but in the name simply of control.

Yet the individual spirit is alive and well in space efforts.  This past weekend, I set aside work on an article on American policy impediments to private spaceflight to attend a party hosted by local science fiction writers Emily and Ernest Hogan.  They promptly steered me into conversation with a friend of theirs, Chris Welborn.  If John Marburger is the mouthpiece for the organs of state security, Chris could be the spokesmodel for the classic American virtues of independence, imagination and know-how.

Bored and frustrated, Chris left his engineering job with Big Aerospace to work for the Pima Air and Space Museum (http://www.pimaair.org), restoring classic aircraft, a true labor of love.  In his spare time, he and a small team are building a rocket engine of his design.  He’s financing the project from the proceeds of sales of his own model rockets to museum gift shops, where they’re flying off the shelves and into the hands of kids who get to actually use the fundamentals of space technology.  His core principle:  “invent the technology you can afford.”  It’s a small-scale effort, but brilliantly subversive in its synergies, a perfect example of the “revolutionary patience” that can get us back into space, to stay.

There are a lot of people out there like Chris, from the amateur rocketeers launching their own creations on weekends, up to such large-scale private efforts as Armadillo Aerospace (http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home) and official X Prize contestants like XCOR (http://www.xcor.com).  Dismissing them for falling short of Saturn V’s and spacewalks would be a grave mistake.  They’ve mastered a fundamental truth:  we aren’t going to get a spacefaring civilization by waiting around for the government to hand it to us.  We’ll only get it through our own efforts… and those involve “inventing the technology we can afford.”  It’s the only way to get the price to fly below $20 million a seat.

The markets are beginning to catch on, and may be gearing up for their own assault on space.  At current launch prices, demand is pretty much flat.  Satellite launch is a no-growth industry, offering nothing to attract competitive investment dollars.  But the entrepreneurial space companies, having finally found their “killer app” in space tourism, have the credible potential to reduce costs drastically while bootstrapping demand, a step at a time.

A new Futron Corp. study, commissioned by NASA and described in a recent Space.com article by Leonard David (http://www.space.com/news/futron_tourism_021101.html), indicates that space tourism has overcome the “giggle factor” and is ready to storm the heavens. There is a commercial battle plan to take the solar system.  It leads from zero-G parabolic airplane rides to suborbital hops, then orbital flights, then new tourist destinations on orbit, and beyond.

Battles, big and small, are being waged for the for the future, for those lands encompassing the high frontier.  These battles aren’t being fought by draftees, but rather by volunteers willing to pay for their dreams of space.  The price is the old market rate – their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor.  But the high ground to be won is the universe, and the freedom to go out into the black, to map that infinite undiscovered country.

This past week the World Space Congress re-enacted that hoary old conference staple, the Moon/Mars debate.  Nothing better epitomizes the space movement’s factional discord, the subjugation of reason to passions of theocratic dimensions, the impulse to preserve doctrinal purity at the cost of internecine warfare, better than the “Celebrity Deathmatch” between The Mars Society’s Robert Zubrin and the Lunar and Planetary Institute’s Paul Spudis.  Beyond damaging the space community’s unity and credibility, it also models the challenges of eventual space governance.

The Zubrin/Spudis debate, over the choice of “Humanity’s Next Destination in Space,” is a textbook example of the failure of segments of the space community to recognize that the Industrial Era’s Space Age is deader than Treasury surpluses.  The debate forces a zero-sum context from the assumptions that our spacefaring future will be determined by central planning fiat, that a bureaucracy or legislature will choose among master plans and command – successfully! – a single-point public-works project for the Solar System.  Any time after the demonstrated failure of the Space Shuttle as a “transportation system,” and really after the beginning of NASA budget cutbacks in 1966, basing programs on those assumptions smacks of a faith-based initiative more than rational planning.  The invocation of a Kennedyesque savior for Space Age dreams verges on a technocratic theology, a cargo cult of heavy-lift launch vehicles.

In the world beyond government planning, no investment decisions are zero-sum.  We didn’t have to choose between airplanes or better steamships.  We got both.  Dollars for the development of television weren’t sucked out of the radio industry.  Command decisions are inevitably zero-sum: one’s gain is another’s loss, the order to do B means the countermanding of the order to do A.  Market decisions are by nature win/win:  if I trade my knife for your goat, each of us gives up something of lesser value (to us) for something of greater value.  Only when coercion enters into the market is this not the case:  monopoly pricing, take-it-or-leave it “contracts” like software licenses or company-town employment.

Given the failure of government planning, in the general economy as well as with respect to space, investment decisions are being made more freely.  One of the few bright spots in space is the steady development of a market and an infrastructure for space tourism, as people freely choose to pursue a path that the central planners at NASA bitterly fought.

Here’s the reality of current efforts towards both the Moon and Mars.  In a climate where space really doesn’t figure in the culture at large, those with a passion for each destination are organizing, doing science, even “bending tin” on real hardware.  Companies, university consortia, amateurs and professionals alike, are investing cash and sweat equity in incremental progress towards their own chosen goals by the means they have determined best.  The technocratic theology of the Moon/Mars debate slights their real accomplishments.

It also creates unnecessary disunity.  Rank-and-file members of diverse space organizations cooperate regularly and tend to see each other as members of a common space community.  The “debate” demands that they choose sides, not against opponents of space activity, but in opposition to each other.  Once this premise of factional enmity is accepted, it can only deepen.  The best example comes from that classic text of religious and political analysis, “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” – the anti-Roman movement in Palestine suffers from split after split, until an entire arena is filled with political parties of one person who regard everyone else in the movement as worse enemies than the Romans.  Finally the “People’s Front of Judea” stonily glares at the “Judean People’s Front” – obviously they could only be enemies!

Mars advocacy in particular has fissioned down to “Judean” levels  In 1998, The Mars Society’s inaugural conference marked the pulling together of a real community from divergent groups of scientists, engineers, activists, students and laypeople.  Powerful internal conflicts arose quickly (and I was no small contributor to the problem), fracturing that unity.  Those with stature across factions failed to re-forge a community.  Personal enmities and policy disagreements metastasized in subsequent years, such that the amount of effort actually applied towards common goals is but a fraction of what it was.  Those most averse to conflict have left the field to those happily comfortable with internecine strife.

One can readily imagine a similar scenario playing out in a space settlement.  Indeed, the likelihood of a descent into factional conflict is the supreme challenge for any system of governance, from the constitutions of the United States and the former republic of Yugoslavia, to normative rules of behavior for the space community, to space governance systems.  Those of us grappling with these issues in the present and future with respect to space have done a pretty poor job.  Most attempts to create structures for space governance are blind to both the creative role of discord (as discussed in the previous issue of this column) and the power of destructive irrationality.  But tolerance of the descent from passionate disagreement into polarizing conflict is no answer.  Determining and enforcing the boundaries between creative and destructive conflict is the central challenge of politics and the proper focus for the political sciences in the space community, now and with respect to the future.

Rules of conduct can be enforced only by consensus or by fiat.  Consensus works if most everyone believes that they will benefit more from cooperation than from conflict.  Fiat works if someone’s got the demonstrated willingness and power to bust miscreants’ heads.  Space has and likely will have neither.

An atmosphere of internal conflict, of which the Moon/Mars debate is a symptom, is one in which conflict is rewarded and cooperation punished.  The players have chosen to eject the referee, seeing personal advantage in unnecessary roughness.  In such an environment one has to be willing to undergo trial by combat for their views – that’s exactly how such customs arose.  Power accrues only to the leaders of factions, particularly to those who’re most successful in beating down their neighbors.  At the same time, the constant fissioning ensures that no one will have the power or authority to command obedience beyond their small cadre of loyalists.

None of this is unique: the analysis is pretty much that of Thomas Hobbes when he was looking at the global political system in the 18^th Century.  The “war of all against all” that he described can be pushed towards either of the solutions, consensus or fiat.

Smart factions will absorb their weaker neighbors, growing in size and power.  The Europe of Hobbes’s time had already transitioned from a myriad principalities into a handful of nations.  Then, with a small number of relatively equivalent players, their mutual interest lay in maintaining the status quo, beating down any power making a play for the supreme domination of empire, and crushing dissident elements.  Out of such rough parity came international law, as a tool for maintaining that rough balance.  Its failure came when one of the players, Germany, chose to abandon parity for the gamble of empire or destruction.  The Second World War taught even the victors that the cost of abandoning consensus power for fiat power was prohibitive, and a re-created consensus enforced behavioral norms for half a century thereafter.

Consensus and fiat both work as the basis for enforcement.  Fiat power is risky and expensive to establish and maintain, but can be effective, as empires throughout history have shown.  Whichever basis of power is chosen, it can only be maintained in the face of opposition by swift, decisive action.  Behavior that undermines the integrity of the larger community must be identified, declared unacceptable, and, if the power to do so is available, stopped.

In the present case, the Space Frontier Foundation (of which I am a member) has submitted an op-ed to Space News condemning the Moon/Mars debate – in more moderate language than that of this column.  Coming from an organization which historically had relished internecine strife, the call for consensus action against destructive factionalizing marks a positive sign for a troubled community.

For space settlement, any political schema must recognize the dynamic of faction.  Technocratic approaches ignore it, assuming rationality and a desire for consensus solutions.  Systems like that designed by the United Societies in Space assume a willingness to conjure an entity capable of imposing fiat in a frontier environment likely to be marked by the greatest extremes of political passion and militant seeking of autonomy.  My own schema, the “Martian Meta-Utopia,” (see issue 1.8, Red Tarzana, in the archives) based on the works of anarcho-capitalist philosopher Robert Nozick, has assumed a willingness to embrace consensus in an environment likely to create pressures to shoot the referees.

So, what is to be done?  Encourage unification efforts, to make the transition from ever-smaller principalities or factions up to nations and parties.  Encourage cooperation, both to create alliances that may in time unify, and to police basic norms of conduct.  Strike hard and fast against those seeking to bring more conflict and more fission to the system.  Never assume that people on a frontier or within a non-mainstream movement are placid and reasonable.  Remember that civilized behavior is the product of norms; and norms are the product of the will and ability to enforce them, both of which must be earned by acting consistently and effectively, not called into being by plans and documents.  These things are true within our community of space advocates, and they will be true out in the black as well.

Technocratic infatuation with the state-directed master plan helped smother the first Space Age.  Today, the nascent second Space Age faces challenges not just from NASA’s continued addiction to central planning and control, but from groups of well-meaning reformers within the space community.  Like their governmental counterparts, they want space development, but without uncertainty, disorder and upheaval.  Without bold gambling and creative chaos there is no frontier, and the greatest value of expanding into space is lost.

Technocracy was the primary ideology of the Industrial Age.  In East and West alike, it was widely believed that economic and social activity was so complex as to require a master plan for coordination.  Everything, from steel production to medical care, required a governmental system of rules and regulations in order to be licensed to occur.  Space, as an outgrowth of the military and of heavy industry, the two most managed activities, was deeply imbued with the technocratic ethos.

In its day, the Plan was effective enough, transforming a Soviet Union of peasants briefly into a superpower and enabling the United States – briefly – to put men on the Moon.  What it achieved in single-pointed efforts it lost in failures of coordination and sustainability.  It proved increasingly ineffective as advances in communications technology rendered the “manager” a redundant intermediary.

NASA failed to evolve when its political and cultural environment changed after Apollo 11.  Its ongoing adherence to grandiose mega-engineering plans, cost-plus contracting and reckless accounting has smacked of the voodoo ritual, an attempt to reanimate the corpse of technocracy’s glory days.

Using the very methods that industries and governments worldwide were beginning to abandon, NASA failed to produce a viable product with the Space Shuttle, which has never come anywhere near delivering the outcomes touted for it.  Fresh from that failure, the agency re-enacted the same rituals and got the same results – with much greater delay and expense – for the International Space Station.  Next week at the World Space Congress, NASA will release its “NexT” master plan for government-only space construction efforts.  Any bets on the outcome of that?

Along with the all-encompassing, over-promising central plan, NASA has repeatedly tried to limit access to space.  It attempted to force a satellite launch monopoly with the Shuttle, but the Challenger disaster allowed Arianespace to stage a market coup and drove the US Air Force to fund a new generation of expendable launch vehicles to ensure its own access.  NASA later strongarmed the Russians into abandoning Mir as the price for access to the ISS (which has proved illusory), and was hostile to the point of hysteria over the first paying space travelers.

This urge to control is, unfortunately, the technocratic reflex.  For the planner, the greatest fear is chaos, the greatest need, control.  The critical economic role, the planner feels, is performed not by the producer, nor by the consumer, but by their intermediary and master, the planner.  It is simply unimaginable that beneficial outcomes could occur otherwise:  the hand of undirected market forces is not just invisible, it is inconceivable.  Where the entrepreneur sees a vibrant marketplace, the planner sees a terrifying chaos.  The land beyond the plan is a place clearly marked “here there be dragons.”

Others call that place the frontier.  It may be the metaphorical frontier of a new market yet un-dominated by sclerotic companies whose days of real innovation are generations past.  Or it could be the geographic frontier, the land beyond the reach of the lawman, the taxman and the bureaucrat.

People of many political persuasions speak glowingly of the value of a frontier.  When they do, often they are envisioning an idealized American West, one of taciturn cowboys and sturdy pioneer farmers.  The more real West, of vigilante justice, self-governing mining camps, legalized prostitution and brutal strike-breaking – that West is a different matter.  Conservatives, with a romantic attachment to the past, denounce those images as the focus of cynics and dissidents.

The technocrat, however, believes that we can have our frontier cake and eat it too – that we can get “reasonable” – watch out for that word – economic expansion without boomtowns, without robber barons, without bloodshed over working conditions and property rights – if we just start with the right plan.

Yet both economic growth and those sturdy pioneers are the fruits of chaos – or, to use a synonym, freedom.  The frontier is attractive because it offers the chance to make a metaphorical (and sometimes literal) killing.  Those who value safety and certainty live in their parents’ hometown and keep their money in banks.  Real growth is the product of risk, of gambling life and capital on the prospect of “unreasonable,” “unfair,” “piratical” gain, versus complete loss.  If the full safety net – or noose – of lawmen, taxmen and bureaucrats is present, there is no risk, and no concomitant return.

The frontier offers more than spectacular economic growth.  Only there is any real social or political innovation, rather than incremental tinkering, possible.  Democracy did not evolve gradually out of Europe’s absolute monarchies, nor was it provided for in the colonizing nations’ master plans.  It was tried and tested on the frontier.  What worked and endured was imported back to the Old World.  What failed was discarded, sometimes violently.  Similarly, technological frontiers – birth control and cheap telecommunications, for example – forced changes to law and custom that were driven by experiment and experience rather than design.

A spacefaring civilization will not be the fruit of NASA Five-Year Plans, nor of incremental progress by Big Aerospace.  It will be the product of an open frontier or it will come not at all.

The American frontier was not settled by the government, with cowboys and farmers trotting behind an army of county clerks and safety inspectors.  Restless explorers, military scouts, resource speculators, malcontents who couldn’t abide the strictures of ossifying Eastern cities – they were first to the West.  Hobbyists, hackers and pornographers pioneered the Internet long before AOL made it family-friendly.

That means that our future in space will not be built by people that the planner, the guaranteed-return investor and the moral traditionalist will easily approve of.  It will be built by dropouts, crooks, pirates, gamblers and misfits, same as any other frontier.  And it will be built only in the absence of laws, regulations and government plans made here on Earth.  Their presence, so reassuring to the cost-plus contractor and prissy schoolmarm, is anathema to innovators in business, politics and culture.

It is widely argued, and correctly so, that uncertainty in property rights and an absence of means of settling disputes undermine economic development.  This argument is put forward by many of the space advocates who back one plan or another for shipping lawmen, taxmen and bureaucrats out into the black.  The argument is true, but misinterpreted.  In settled societies, property rights and a fair, speedy and final means of adjudicating disputes are critical to continued growth.  In settled societies.  Establishing such systems prior to the natural end of the frontier period short-circuits the whole process.

Technocratic approaches – permits, licenses, land grants and the like – pick winners and losers by fiat.  Contracts and privileges are awarded rather than earned.  They go not to the invisible, incomprehensible entrepreneur, but to the established risk-averse government contractor, the one reassuringly incapable of upsetting the status quo.  Competition is for favor in the ministry or legislature, rather than for mindshare or market share.

Technocracy is simply modern colonialism, the exploitation of the new for the benefit of the old established elites.  Frontiers build infrastructure for the benefit of the locals who take the risks.  The Spanish gold rush impoverished Central America to enable lavish expenditures by courtiers; the California gold rush built San Francisco into a world-class city and turned the inspiration of one merchant drawn to the frontier, Levi Straus, into the most popular consumer item in the world.  It also gave rise to seediness, decadence and violence, the price of freedom.  No free lunch, as Heinlein said.

Which is why the well-meaning codes written by some space advocates are as much of a threat to the opening of a space frontier as are NASA’s efforts at bureaucratic strangulation.  The space advocacy community has its share of technocrats, of course.  Many are veterans of NASA or of government contractors, deeply imprinted with the ideology of managerial control.  Some just fear the chaos of social and economic dynamism, feeling the same trepidation at the prospect of a space frontier that protestors feel for globalization or genetically modified foodstuffs.  Some just wish things could be a little neater, a little more genteel.  Some are genuinely looking to establish favorable conditions for investment and political viability but overreach in their concessions.

With respect to all these space planning initiatives, we should ask:  does this plan encourage real economic growth and cultural change, or is it an attempt to extend the status quo a few miles farther past the atmosphere?  We have plenty of status quo here on Earth – it hardly seems necessary to go to great expense to vacuum-pack it.

Space governance?  Cops and regulators first, then “reasonable” prospectors.  No frontier.  Land grants?  The already-wealthy will force up prices in a speculative market, driving out the entrepreneur and ensuring the continued dominance of current financial or political powers.  Codes of ethics?  New industries are built by ruthless, megalomaniac robber barons.  The meek will inherit the Earth, once the pirates get us into space.  Grand plans?  Single-point efforts lacking a broad-based infrastructure – pyramids rather than cities.  NASA is building enough of those, thank you.

Technological frontiers come once a generation at best, and are limited in their scope.  Social frontiers, places beyond the reach of lawmen, taxmen and bureaucrats, unmapped territories filled with dragons for the timid, can be found these days only in story.

Rather than asteroidal ore or Lunar ice, those spaces, and the hope they offer for vibrant growth and beneficial, if messy, change, are the most precious space resource.  Their development is the standard by which space planning should be judged.

This column is dedicated to the memory of Robert L. Forward, who proved that space science, technology and advocacy could be united, and who was, truly, a gentleman and a scholar.

Along with daily reports of moves towards a Middle Eastern war, the news from NASA has been unusually grim.  Capping the International Space Station’s crew at three (http://www.spacedaily.com/news/iss-02h1.html), serious problems in the robotic Mars program (http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-general-02d1.html)– these blows to our near-term hopes in space are collateral damage inflicted by political pressures to turn inward, to abandon the values of exploration, of the free exchange of goods and ideas, even of reason itself.  Those Network Age values may fall to the widening “War on Terror,” even beyond the extent to which space commerce and exploration are casualties of governmental business-as-usual.

Long ago, China had its version of our Space Age, one whose ending may presage our own fate.  For a generation, from 1405 to 1431, the imperial government launched at least seven major naval expeditions into the Indian Ocean.  Unlike puny contemporary European efforts, these were fleets worthy of a von Braun Mars mission:  Admiral Cheng Ho’s  (Zheng He’s) first command included 317 vessels, the largest five times the length of Columbus’s Santa Maria.

Cheng Ho’s brief was much like von Braun’s, as well.  In The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, David S. Landes offers reasons why China’s “Space Age” came to naught (pp. 96-97):

To begin with, the Chinese lacked range, focus, and above all, curiosity.  They went to show themselves, not to see and learn, to bestow their presence, not to stay, to receive obeisance and tribute, not to buy….  These voyages reeked of extravagance…. The vulnerability of the program – here today, gone tomorrow – was reinforced by its official character.  In Europe, the opportunity of private initiative that characterized even such royal projects as the search for a sea route to the Indies was a source of participatory funding and an assurance of rationality.  Nothing like this in China, where the Confucian state abhorred mercantile success.

A lunar scientist or space entrepreneur might say much the same of our own aborted Space Age.

Chinese efforts – all governmental, funded from tax receipts – were caught up in budget battles for a generation after the ascendance of a new emperor.  In 1477, the noose tightened.  The secret police confiscated all the expeditionary logs, and a government minister denounced the records of the voyages as “deceitful exaggerations.”  Five hundred and twenty-five years later, Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin punched out one of the 25 percent of Americans who believe the Moon landings to be a hoax.

By 1500, construction of an oceangoing ship was punishable by death.  To paraphrase Sinclair Lewis’s novel of fascism in America, “it can’t happen here.”  Right?

Declining NASA budgets, programmatic chaos and cost overruns are nothing new, of course.  NASA funding parallels the extent to which the agency is seen as a useful tool of American statecraft:  high in the Cold War when space travel was a proxy for technological prowess, low in the days of détente, up a bit when the NASA budget became a vehicle for foreign aid to Russia, down again in these days of military space and unilateralism.

Yet what calls forth the Chinese-fleet analogy is more than the regular news of neglect and consequent disarray.  Rather, the larger factors that lead to China’s inward turn seem to be in play, in America and everywhere within its imperial reach – that is, everywhere, except, perhaps, ironically, in a China flirting warily with both repression and an embrace of Cheng Ho’s legacy.

Network values – the values of the Spacefaring Web – are antithetical to those of the imperial, national-security, state.  Curiosity is a threat to those who purport to have all the answers – in a classified report somewhere, of course.  The scientific enterprise is founded on the free exchange of ideas, just as the commercial is on the free exchange of goods and services.  New national-security measures ban some exchanges outright, while a monitoring regime, coupled with secret intelligence courts, have, in constitutional law parlance, a “chilling effect” even on arguably legal exchanges.  Endless universal warfare – China’s perpetual conflict with Eastern barbarians or ours with terrorists – leaves little money or patience for the peaceful pursuits of exploration and commerce.

The previous issue of this column addressed the three great sources of power in the post- Cold War world: the nation, the market and the individual.  Tasked with retaliation against the perpetrators of the 9/11 horror, the Bush administration has chosen instead to redress that balance of power.  In every arena, from the malign neglect of space exploration through tariff policy to environmental and military action, the ever-present, unspoken goal is turning back the clock – back from the Network Age to the American Century.

Superficially, a return to the old days would seem to present opportunities for the space community. After all, space was a hallmark of American power, and rocket scientists stood at the right hand of the imperial Presidency for over a generation.  Certainly the new prominence of the Department of Defense in space technology has drawn happy salivation from the lunar science community (http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/moon_next_020923-1.html).  Yet Cheng Ho’s fate provides a cautionary tale:  what the mandarins giveth, the mandarins taketh away.  Ask anyone who actually was looking to do science on the ISS, or those of us who put any stock in NASA’s once-grand robotic Mars plans.  DOD may well find itself scaling back its advanced projects to cover deployment expenses, if Congress’s historical unwillingness to face and fund the true costs of war continues.

While the weight of evidence points to our Cheng Hos being stuck in port, history does not mechanically repeat itself.  Two years ago, it seemed that the power of the individual in cyberspace and the power of the market in virtually every realm had rendered the state a bit player.  A Network Age was under way, in which alliances were critical, impediments to the flow of “bits and atoms” fell at every turn, and innovation was proceeding at an astonishing pace.  Now the clock is poised to turn back.  Both modernity-hating terrorists and interdepency-fearing governments have made conscious choices to fight that future.  Others can choose to defend it.

For the space community, the defense strategy is twofold.  One front is the propaganda war, the contest of values between the dynamic enterprises of space science and commerce on the one hand and the static one of state power on the other.  Scientists and entrepreneurs both need free exchange:  regulations that unduly burden workers, products and ideas on the basis of citizenship must be targeted.  While there are genuine safety issues to be addressed, the current American technology-transfer regime is a burden without commensurate benefit.

Beyond immediate policy issues, though, the wider conflict of values remains to be fought.  We can take the case to the people that they benefit more from inquiry, innovation and exploration than from isolation, self-satisfied certainty and war.

That case was made for us in popular culture last week:  the season premiere of Enterprise dealt with the Cheng Ho decision:  the Vulcan mandarins shaping Earth policy called Enterprise home – exploration was disturbing the balance of power, the messy business of trial and error conflicting with the political view that failure is not an option.  In the spirit of classic Star Trek optimism, the explorers made the case persuasively for their values and their mission.  They called out the mandarins on their attempt to suppress unpleasant truths and defended curiosity and growth as necessary to life.  Here and now, we might not win, but their playbook offers us a chance.

The other front is the one of a tangible alternative.  Today, governments control human access to space and all access past geosynchronous orbit.  Many bold efforts are underway to change that monopoly with hardware, from X Prize vehicles to privately-organized robotic exploration and technology-demonstration missions.  They need support now, so that their industry can achieve a credible size and influence before the mandarins smash the drydocks.

The two strategies are not opposed, not alternatives, not prosecuted in isolation.  The argument from values is strengthened by existence proofs – flight hardware – and through the heroic stories of the new space pioneers, which put a human face on our arguments grounded in our values of freedom and prosperity.  Similarly, the argument from hardware needs investors and customers, who are motivated not by technical feasibility but by a calculus of value – of a belief, rational or emotional, in the desirability of the enterprise.

United, space scientists, engineers and advocates can make the Enterprise’s case.  Network values embodied in vehicles of space exploration and commerce offer a better future than the governmental values of power unrestrained by logic, evidence and law.  To mix science-fiction metaphors, the empire might want to turn back, but it will face our spacefaring rebel alliance.

In the year since September 11, 2001, we have begun to acknowledge, finally, that the world has changed.  Back in the Cold War, both sides believed that reason and technology were prime values and the key to victory.  Space – science and engineering alike – held assured pride of place.  Now, rather than the promised New World Order, we find ourselves in a New World Flux, where the players, the rules and the stakes are vastly different.  One thing is sure:  the role of space is not what it was.

If we look clearly and creatively at the centers of power in this Network Age, we may find surprising opportunities and unexpected allies.  If not, space will be pushed to the margins of funding and attention for generations to come.

Back in the late Industrial Age, the world was divided between two great camps with some philosophical positions in common.  The dominant ideologies of East and West both held that applied reason was the key to progress, and that progress was good.  Nature should be tamed by industry, poverty and illiteracy by government programs, economic fluctuations by central influence or edict.  These similarities allowed for meaningful competition short of war between the systems:  in number and size of engineering projects, quality and ubiquity of technical education, and, of course, in space exploration.

Rationalism held sway throughout the world:  fascism, eschewing reason and progress in the name of a mystical nationalism, had been soundly defeated.  Throughout the Third World nations adopted the rationalist values of the First and Second Worlds, often moving in a generation from animism and tribalism to technocratic management.  With the fall of Communism, the way seemed clear for Western democratic rationalism’s utter triumph.  One scholar, Francis Fukuyama, saw the “end of history.”

History, running in the background as the world changed through the 1990s, caught up with us on September 11.  The conflicting powers of this new world do not share values of rationalism and progress.  Indeed, to much of the world, progress is feared and rationalism suspect as the source of so many 20^th Century horrors.

This new era, this Network Age, has its two great sides as well.  Yet unlike in the old Cold War world, the lines are unclear, the walls down.  American citizens suspected of aiding terrorism can be held as enemy aliens.  Luddites and technophiles, hardcore greens and real estate developers, can be found in the same towns, same schools, in America and around the world.  Even within each of us, the walls have come down:  we may work in high-tech industries, hold fundamentalist religious views, and support Greenpeace – all at the same time.  As Pogo said long ago, we have met the enemy and he is us.

Writing from Silicon Valley, Dinesh D’Souza, in The Virtue of Prosperity, named these sides the “Party of Yeah” and the “Party of Nah.”  While his sociological analysis is spot-on, his glibness does a disservice.  Looking at Starbucks-smashers and terrorists, it is easy to see what this one great faction opposes, and less what it is for.  The “Nah” seems an appropriate label for the authors of violence and jeremiads at the extreme margin.  But beyond a simple “Nah” to social and technological dynamism, these dissenters do have a coherent world view and agenda, one with a long philosophical tradition and many articulate advocates.  They speak for primacy of place over concept, of biology over information flows, of atoms over bits, and cannot be casually dismissed.

After decades of observation in the Middle East, a more nuanced analysis comes from New York Times columnist and author Thomas L. Friedman.  He finds icons for the factions in “the Lexus” and “the olive tree.”  One side, the Lexus, embraces and adapts to cultural and technological change.  The old rationalist philosophy, that one person or bureau could devise and implement the ideal economic or technical solution to any problem, is stone dead for them:  the invisible hand, not the hand of the planner, reigns.  Mobile, fluid, synthetic, “creative destruction” is their byword.

The other, the world of the olive tree, values locality, continuity, predictability.  The dead hand of tradition rules.  Values are black and white, games are zero-sum:  my land or yours, my church or your secular humanism.  The Lexus threatens most in its ecumenical claims:  partisans of the olive tree, believing in “mine and thine,” see no space left apart, beyond the reach of McDonalds and MTV.  Peaceful coexistence is not an option:  the old ways cannot maintain their integrity with pop culture and Western values mixed in.

What the sides share is not values, but the technological underpinnings of the Network Age: the flows of money and information of an already-globalized world.  Anti-globalization protest is itself a global network, linked by email and cheap airfares.  Fundamentalist terrorism is financed by global financial transactions, maintained and directed by cell phone and satellite television.

Beyond the two conflicting value systems, Friedman identifies three centers of power:  the individual, the market and the state.  In the Cold War era, only states were power players.  After 9/11, the balance between individual, market and state is in dynamic flux.  Markets were ascendant for the half-decade before the date when an individual declared war on the most powerful state and market alike.  In the aftermath, markets have declined in global recession, and the newly emboldened anti-terrorist state is seeking dramatic power shifts in its own favor.

In the Cold War, as we saw, the space community had a core contribution to make to the centers of power on both sides:  space served the state.  Now, in the New World Flux, we have to ask ourselves what we have to offer, and to whom.

For the most part, we have yet to do so.  Precious few space advocates, even space entrepreneurs, understand and embrace the revolution of the Network Age.  Our continued dominance by Industrial Age policy mavens still using Cold War era viewgraphs, along with the sclerotic central planning ministry of NASA, contributes to declining budgets and increasing apathy alike.

After 9/11 the old Cold Warriors tried to reheat their rhetoric, hawking the same old goods in the same old way, with calls to use our rockets and factories to triumph over the adversary (no coincidence that we heard this ballyhoo from advocates of Apollo II Mars programs).

There were no takers.  It’s not that kind of a world, and the war on terrorism is not that kind of war.  The American Secretary of Defense knows it, and is desperately trying to drag the Cold War military kicking and screaming into the Network Age.  He’s buying Lexuses while we’re still selling tanks.

To the state, aside from black projects and long-established remote sensing and communications technologies, we have little to offer.  To the markets, even less right now, as the fate of generations of hopeful space entrepreneurs has shown.  To the individual, the apparent failure of Lance Bass’s flight efforts has closed the space tourism door to all but billionaires with cash in hand.  These things may change, but today prospects for a new Space Age in this decade seem slim indeed.

But might we have something to offer the Party of Nah?  Not the al-Quaedas and Talibans of the world, whom we must eliminate for the sake of our own survival.  Many, though, would live by rules different from those of the global dynamism of the Lexus.  Might space fulfill a need of theirs?

Low Earth Orbit, for reasons previously explored in these columns, can only be the property of the Party of Yeah.  LEO is for building new Lexuses.  Mars, on the other hand, might just serve the olive tree.

A scenario was suggested by the Mars Society’s Gary Fisher:  Mars might become a backup to Earth’s cultural hard drive.  Not an alternative, not a place of exile, a last redoubt for the hopeless, but an opportunity for hope.

Space as voluntary or involuntary exile for a technological elite is an old trope in both science fiction and space advocacy.  Inasmuch as the analogy one often hears from space advocates is of a lifeboat leaving a sinking ship, those identified as being left behind tend to find this argument offensive.  Backup or preservation is a much less provocative image.  Currently, as the Party of Yeah seems to be firmly dominant, the “cultural backup” argument would likely not resonate so strongly with them.  Detailed examination of how this idea’s appeal might grow is a matter for another time.

Surprisingly, “cultural backup” might have an appeal to the other side, to the disciples of the olive tree.  Mars as cultural backup would not be an abandoning of the olive tree of one’s birth, but a seeding of it in new soil, safely six months away from its endangered native land.  Like Dharmsala, an outpost of threatened Tibetan culture at a safe remove from its Chinese adversaries, or a Nature Conservancy preserve of rare Amazon wildlife, Mars might serve as a haven for cultures, even species – literally, olive trees – whose members feel threatened by the spread of the Lexus.

Mars and the olive tree are deeply interconnected:  the “Red” ethic of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy is intentionally deeply rooted in the olive tree’s philosophical lineage.  Mars could well offer a counter to the destructive, only Nah-saying extremes of this side’s adherents, channeling energies towards construction rather than empty opposition, and, ironically, bootstrapping Lexus industry and commerce into space.  Certainly preservation of a way of life would be a better cause than murder and destruction to funnel Saudi fortunes into.

Shifting political forces might render such developments impossible.  While many young space advocates harbor strong olive tree sympathies, the old Cold War technocrats still dominate in space policy and public communication.  Certainly they will oppose common cause with an ideology so alien to them.  The anti-terrorist state may come to utterly dominate the balance of power.  If so, the revolutionary potential of space will likely be stifled, as it has been for a generation, to preserve the status quo.  The Party of Nah may embrace violence more broadly, building walls where none yet exist, rendering cooperation or the search for common ground impossible.

Yet the hope remains that space can become the answer to questions someone is asking, be they old allies or longtime opponents.  Space can sell Lexuses.  It can also preserve olive trees.  Only by offering solutions to the current needs of some group holding or seeking power can a new Space Age begin

“Would ET Vote?  The Likelihood of Extraterrestrial Democracy,” a recent article by Doug Vakoch, (http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_vote_020815.html) sets out the proposition that “if we detect a signal from advanced extraterrestrials, there’s a good chance that the basic principles of democracy play a role in their society.”

While the article specifically addresses alien civilizations, its larger question is the one discussed regularly in this column: how might an enduring, technologically advanced spacefaring (or at least space-communicating) society be structured?  Vakoch’s article has some strong and provocative answers, particularly in discussing psychologist Albert A. Harrison’s excellent book After Contact: The Human Response to Extraterrestrial Life.  The two authors’ valuable observations, though, are obscured by vagueness in several critical definitions, leading the article to an unsubstantiated conclusion.  Don’t expect little green men to be punching hanging chads.

“Democracy” is a slippery concept, one whose denotations (specific meaning) and connotations (positive or negative value) have changed greatly since the term’s early use in Greece 2500 years ago.  Aristotle defined the term as “mob rule,” one of the perversions of government, and scholarly usage followed him through the 18^th Century.  The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Politics wrestles with the concept for about three pages (pp. 129-132) before bottom-lining the term as “majority rule,” the same denotation as Aristotle, but with complex connotations varying with one’s philosophical views  It notes a tendency to use “democracy” to mean “what I approve of,” – uncomfortably close to its usage by Vakoch and Harrison.  Specific elements of the bundle of concepts associated with democracy – like toleration and rights –it holds to be “preconditions for democracy but not…constitutive of democracy itself.”

Vakoch uses “democracy” to refer exclusively to the 19^th and 20^th Century technologies of representation.  Summarizing Harrison, he writes that “ETs might feel very much at home with the notion of going to the ballot box.  Or at least they would be familiar with the process of having input into the control of their lives, even if it doesn’t take the form of presidential elections.”  But representation, rather than being the synononomous with democracy, arose as a solution to a specific problem in political technology.

In ancient Athens, democracy was direct:  all citizens were expected to participate in communal decisionmaking in person, in assemblies of up to 6,000 people.  That was a workable system for a polity about the size of an average state university campus.  Advocates of democracy in the 18^th Century had to address the question: can a system of personal politics be adapted to a vast nation whose citizens might be separated by days or even weeks of travel?  By way of answer, they developed a hybrid: campaigning for the office of political decisionmaker would take place locally, face to face in the Athenian style, but that decisionmaking itself would be limited to the legislature meeting in the capital.

Representative democracy, then, was a solution to a problem of communications, rather than ethics or morality.  Contemporary political theorists have called for using modern communications technologies to enable a new direct democracy on a national or planetary scale, claiming that telephony and the internet have rendered the mechanisms of representation outmoded and unduly limiting.  The ballot initiative and plebiscite – direct-democracy overrides within the representative system – grow in use every year.  Instant polling is a critical tool for legislators; the same technology could readily eliminate the middleman.  Representative democracy is widely criticized for systemic flaws – corruption, control by special interests, and so on.  After the last American presidential election, supporters of both candidates widely discussed the technological flaws of the current system. Assuming that our ETs pursue efficiency, rather than holding on to outmoded systems for sentimental reasons, we can pretty much discount the prospect of their simultaneously trying to communicate across interstellar distances by ultramodern means while structuring their internal affairs around horse-and-buggy technology.

In naming other supposed attributes of democracy, Vakoch’s article lists an “emphasis on bargaining, negotiation, and peaceful solutions to internal problems.”  I could only think of two political systems or situations where these factors did not hold: the moment of revolutionary turmoil and Thomas Hobbes’s conception of life before the rise of the State – a “state of nature” characterized by “the war of all against all.”  Every political system not actually in the midst of self-destruction is marked by those characteristics.  Political scientists since the 1970s looked behind the “totalitarian” rhetoric of Communist states and their adversaries to the real, pluralistic, if constrained, processes of decisionmaking.  Even the most primitive analyses of, say, contemporary Iraq, must take into account the counterbalancing forces of clan, region, Republican Guards, army and so on.  Saddam Hussein is not literally an autocrat, nor has any monarch, General Secretary or warlord ever had his people quietly united behind him, eschewing their own interests and turf wars for the greater good.

In my reading, the article conflates “democracy” and “politics.”  The Oxford definition of the latter term  (pp.388-389) begins:

As a general concept, the practice of the art or science of directing and administrating states or other political units.  However, the definition of politics is highly, perhaps essentially, contested….

. . . .

[The traditional definition]offers no constraint on its definition since there has never been a consensus on which activities count as government.  [The modern mainstream view is that politics] occurs where people disagree about the distribution of reasons (sic, I believe that should be “resources”) and have at least some procedures for the resolution of such disagreements.

Politics, then, as opposed to simple command, or warfare, is an agreed-upon method for the non-violent settlement of disputes about resources.  This seems to be the gist of what Vakoch is discussing.

Are politics necessary in an advanced society?  Politics arises from the scarcity of resources.  It’s easy enough to envision a society without material scarcity: just couple access to the raw materials in space with cheap construction methods and accurate duplication of goods such as paintings and handicrafts.  Nanotech or Star Trek-style replicators get you there.

So what might remain scarce in such a culture?  Political power.  Fame.  Dominance.  Harrison’s discussion of these factors is smart and nuanced:  he regards dominance as a “cultural universal,” observing (pp. 151-152) that

“[a]lthough one might expect that societies with large power differentials and sharp status distinctions would be more riddled with disputes where the pecking order is unclear, the reverse is the case.  There may be initial fussing and fighting as a hierarchy is established, but once it is in place everyone understands who can lick whom, and the dominant members of the group are only infrequently called upon to assert their authority.  When they are challenged, they may resolve the difficulty with threatening gestures and displays; they have little need to rely on actual force.  In less hierarchical species, there are pressures to ‘have a go at it’ to resolve even small issues.”

By this analysis, dominance is a constant and decisionmaking by majority rule (the core of our definition of “democracy,” or in Harry Turtledove’s memorable phrase, “snout-counting”) is non-universal and inherently unstable.  Yet Harrison goes on to cite the real evidence of the greater stability of democracies, including a favorable reference to Francis Fukuyama’s thesis that modern liberal democracy is such an ideal system that its eternal triumph is inevitable.

I believe that the apparent conflict stems from that problem that the Oxford dictionary cited in the definition of “politics:” it’s never clear from person to person or usage to usage just what is or is not included.  Harrison’s discussion of democracy follows his excellent analysis of the superiority of networks over hierarchies for decisionmaking.  In arguing that alien civilizations will draw the same conclusions, Harrison parallels the central thesis of this column, that network values and technologies are essential to the development of a spacefaring civilization.

It’s the next step where the lines blur:  implicitly equating “decisionmaking” with “politics.”  Harrison notes that liberal democracies are the most network-like of modern political systems, hence the most enduring and successful.  Liberal democracy, like its component, representative democracy, is a jury-rigged bundle of values and methods, some directly contradictory, developed to address specific political issues and technological constraints.  This is one of the flaws in Fukuyama’s argument:  change the resource base or the technological boundaries and you necessarily change the political solutions (another flaw, underestimating the role of passion in politics, will be the subject of a later column, as will be a more thorough discussion of the conflicts and synergies of liberal democracy, or democratic capitalism).  In my ET hypothetical, the only scarcity is dominance, and majority rule is obviously not an answer.

Yet network logic and the universality of dominance can be reconciled.  As the political sphere shrinks with reduced scarcities, it fragments into micropolitics.  Industrial hierarchy – the Cold War model in East and West – was a logical response to the mass-mobilization needs of heavy industry and global warfare in an age where information was scarce, and thus heavily politicized.  As enterprises (from Special Forces teams to biotech firms) come to require fewer resources, and the cost of information decreases, the network replaces the hierarchy.  Within the network, however, the drive for dominance goes on.  The playing field has just shrunk form the monolithic State to one’s own set of nodes.

This may mark a return to a more traditional, even inborn, meaning of dominance – in a limited arena, for a limited time, rather than the totalizing sense that began as kingship evolved from the wartime-only chieftain into the full-time, divine-right monarch and reached its absurd peak with Hitler, Stalin and their ilk.  Now, we all have roles where the opportunity for dominance is presented, and others in which it is beyond hope.  In the world of political science, Fukuyama may be a top dog:  puny assistant professors roll over and show him belly.  In a biker bar the outcome might be different.  By the same token, the editorial staff of Foreign Affairs magazine probably includes few Hell’s Angels.  The struggle for dominance continues, but it’s no longer linked to national/political hierarchies of control.

“Would ET vote?”  Almost certainly not, and I think our days of doing so are numbered.  Will ET have decentralized, networked decisionmaking?  Most likely yes – along with really cutthroat office politics.  Some things, after all, are universal.

For nearly a century Mars has been the blue screen onto which we project, in scientific speculation as well as literature, two powerful concepts:  the West and the Other.  Looking at the sequence of imagined Marses (see the previous edition of this column, “Barsoom’s Legacy”), we the evolution of American hopes and fears.  In turn, these projections continue to shape the meaning of Mars for us.  Any attempt to advocate Mars exploration and settlement must be grounded in an understanding of the nuances of those memes of West and Other in our culture today.  Central to Americans as motherhood and apple pie, they define the boundaries of the possible.

We find these memes expressed in both the Mars novel and the Western.  The two have a common heritage in the pulp magazines of the early decades of the last century.  Indeed, one of the great pulp writers, Edgar Rice Burroughs, published in both genres.  His first novel, A Princess of Mars, literally began in the Wild West of Arizona before shifting to Mars.  This linkage still continues, down to the latest entries in each genre.  Few might think to combine Paul McAuley’s biotech Mars novel The Meaning of Life with Dreamworks’ animated Western, Spirit, Stallion of the Cimmaron. Yet together the two works absolutely nail the zeitgeist, highlighting current views of the meaning of the West and the Other, with clear implications for Mars exploration.

Spirit perfectly illustrates both the evolution of the sentiments expressed in the Western and the likely popular attitude towards any life on Mars.  The story of a young stallion’s encounters with the American army and its Native American enemies, a generation ago the movie’s hero would have been the dashing colonel trying to break Spirit to the saddle and productive use.  A decade ago its hero would have been the American Indian boy, so gentle with his own horse, Rain.  But in our own time it is the indigenous lifeform that’s the hero:  Spirit escapes from technological man, is set free by “green man,” and builds his own wilderness paradise away from humanity entirely.  The humans see the wisdom of this, leaving Spirit and his kind to themselves in the forbidding redrock canyons of the frontier.  Substitute Martian microorganisms for Spirit, unreconstructed old-guard engineers for the colonel and “Greens4Mars” for the young Indian boy, and you have the future history of the next decade.  The “wild and free” ending is undeniably the one that sells now, a fact best taken into account by mission planners.

In The Meaning of Life, a Chinese expedition has found Martian microbes – and kept the discovery as the proprietary basis for new biotechnology.  An industrial accident threatens the survival of ocean life as the hybrid spreads unchecked.  A NASA expedition is mounted to recover specimens in hopes of developing a countering agent.  Meanwhile, across the American Desert a technophilic counterculture is growing in opposition to the machinations of the biotech giants and their wholly-owned governments.  Armed with the leaked Martian discoveries, they begin to mount a challenge to the global monoculture in the name of freedom.

The real element of fantastical speculation (aside from the notion of a NASA human Mars mission) is in McAuley’s creation of an opposition to globalization from within what Dinesh D’Souza (in The Virtue of Prosperity) calls the “Party of Yeah” – educated, technophilic, humanistic tolerant optimists, rather than the medievalists of the far right and left.  In Robert Zubrin’s Mars novel, First Landing, the opposition to Mars efforts is fueled by the same pervasive fear of the Other, but comes from a more expected source, the “Party of Nah.”  “Nah” is the Seattle movement, that united front of the backward-looking on the right and left, literally Luddites, the smashers of machines.  Driven by fears of alien contamination, these activists call for stranding the crew on Mars.  McAuley posits elements within his crew working with a technophile underground for freedom and biological preservation.  His heroes support exploration along Antarctic lines, but stand against commercial use and political manipulation.  This view currently has a solid core of support within the space community, with Kim Stanley Robinson as perhaps its most articulate and widely-heard champion.  Is it the position closest to where a popular consensus would lie if the issue were widely considered today?  Might the current wilderness-preservation ethic serve as a common bond between Yeah and Nah as the basis for a broad opposition to Mars settlement or exploitation?

The setting of both Spirit and The Meaning of Life indicates the power of the Western conservation memes in shaping a consensus about development.  It is fitting that the land that naturalist Gregory McNamee calls the “Holy Sonoran Empire,” the land from which Burroughs’ hero began his sojourn to Mars, would be the birthplace of freedom for the Stallion of the Cimmaron as well as for McAuley’s forward-looking humanity.  The Great American Desert has always held an inexorable attraction for the dissident from mainstream American culture.  The Mormons stood here against Spirit’s adversary, the US Army, avidly terraforming while deeply appreciating the red land.  The environmental movement won a landmark victory here in the early 1960s when it prevented the damming of the Grand Canyon.  Another band of radical activists formed here:  the Mars Underground was born in Boulder, Colorado, and a generation later its founders can still be found there and in other arid places West.  Perhaps McAuley’s vision is not so far-fetched.  Vivid dreamers, redrock scientists, atom splitters, land defenders, still-viable indigenous communities, all scattered across the red desert – they might be seeds of some hopeful new future.  This is the shape of the “frontier” at the beginning of the 21^st Century.

And yet there is that other great meme beside the Frontier:  the Other.  Spirit and his band in proud isolation, bioterror, fear of “Frankenfoods,” the mythic pull of that sense of hubris that comes from tampering with raw life, all powerful images that resonate strongly in current popular culture.  The prospect of microbial life on Mars is a nexus of our fears of the alien, of our own Faustian powers, of that revisionist Western history that sees cultural and literal genocide where our grandparents saw the white man’s manifest destiny.  A happy ending to the story of discovery of life on Mars may well be the brave microbes winning their freedom from the ruinous presence of man.

Would that in fact be a happy ending?  Some would strongly disagree:  Spirit’s horse-breaking colonel is alive and well at the fringes of the spacefaring discussion.  “Nuke the red bugs” is a sentiment one hears from Southern California’s old Star Warriors.  Spirit’s story is a measure of how little influence they would have over popular culture should the issue arise.  Everyone boos the colonel till he wises up at the end.

Our ethical views shaping our answer to the question of the rights of any indigenous Martian life may be informed by other data available when the question becomes ripe.  By the time we look for life on Mars in a serious, comprehensive way we may have preliminary data from the search for terrestrial planets.  If Earthlike worlds are common as grains of sand, we may well choose to leave Mars alone and wait on planetary settlement until we can reach more congenial, or more sterile, worlds.  If they are rare and Mars represents a near-unique opportunity, keeping an entire planet off-limits as a microbial preserve may seem a lesser good than some form of human intervention.

The moral calculus involved will be complex and subtle.  More nuance, more ethical debate now might shape the parameters of later discussion.  There are other positions than the colonel’s, an entire spectrum of ethical views ranging from conservative “wise stewardship” through a range of green positions short of bacterial triumphalism.  The more each position is expressed, transmitted into the popular culture, and allowed to shape that culture, the better off we will be.  One of those positions will form the basis for popular opinion when the time comes to address Mars seriously across society.  There will be a consensus as to what we should do about Mars:  to ignore it, or explore lightly, settle, terraform, or something else entirely.

Today that consensus would likely call for leaving the wilderness alone.  A new decade, though, may replace Spirit with a new frontier hero, a new cultural response to the memes of Frontier and Other generated by the perception of Mars.  That response will reflect who we are as a people at that time.  White-paper policy will not determine it, zeitgeist will  Our answers may come from a young generation standing on Arizona mountains and Utah slickrock, spreading their arms and dreaming of Mars.  Or from the summer hit Western of 2015.

This column along with its predecessor formed the basis for my presentation on the “Mars: Past, Present and Future” panel at ComicCon, the World Comic Book Convention, on Sunday, August 10.  Hosted with great professionalism by the San Diego Mars Society (http://chapters.marssociety.org/SanDiego), the panel (myself, space entrepreneur Jim Benson, science fiction authors Larry Niven and Kevin J. Anderson, and Dr. Michael Caplinger of Malin Space Science Systems) packed a standing-room only crowd into the only science-based presentation at the four-day event.  Mars is alive and well in the popular imagination.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, best known as the creator of Tarzan, wrote ten novels set on a fictional Mars known to its inhabitants as Barsoom.  Published between 1912 and 1948, these popular stories provided seminal inspiration for generations of youngsters who would grow into scientists and science fiction writers, including the likes of Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke and Carl Sagan.  Writing in 1971, Bradbury (Mars and the Mind of Man, p.17) went so far as to say that “I also admit the terrible fact that Edgar Rice Burroughs was in some ways my father…. thousands of wild-eyed boys have fallen in love with [him] and had their lives changed forever.  He has probably changed more destinies than any other writer in American history.”  Yet within a few years of Bradbury’s writing, Barsoom had virtually disappeared from bookstore shelves and the popular imagination.  Burroughs’ decline holds important lessons for the marketing of Mars, as entertainment, educational subject, governmental program or private initiative.

Burroughs was one of the great marketing geniuses of American popular culture.  His was one of the first creator-owned multimedia empires;  his corporation, Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc., (still extant:  http://www.tarzan.org) has licensed Tarzan movies and merchandise (and recently licensed the Mars novels to Paramount) for some four generations of fans.  His first sale, A Princess of Mars, in 1912, revealed his brilliance in synthesizing pop-culture memes.  Percival Lowell was at the height of his outreach efforts and popularity:  Martian canals and intelligent life were memes as universal then as Roswell and Area 51 were in The X-Files’ heyday.  The ultra-hot pop culture genre was the Western; with “certain consistent, even programmatic elements:  a hero who represented a synthesis of civilization and wildness; an affirmative finding with respect to progress; an emphasis on action; and a setting of epical import – usually vast, wild, open spaces.” (“The Literary West,” Thomas J. Lyon, in The Oxford History of the American West, p. 712)  Burroughs had served in the Indian-fighting U.S. Army in the same landscape that was informing Lowell’s visions.  Drawing on all these elements, he created a Western adventure set on a dying Mars.  The Martian/Western was a huge hit, and an immensely sticky meme:  to this day, much of the factual and fanciful speculation over the nature of Mars – and a human future there – struggles in the tar of the “Mars as Arizona” meme.

Why did Barsoom appeal for so long, only to fade in the mid-1970s?  To some degree, science erased Lowell-based imagery:  through the age of telescopic astronomy, the Lowell/Burroughs vision remained, if not entirely plausible, at least not disproven.  Mariner and Viking were the death knoll for tales of canal-building Martians.  But the cultural reasons for the stories’ decline are more significant.

Prior to the Mariner and Viking era, American popular culture had been largely unitary, both the cause and result of fairly crude, monolithic systems of meme-distribution.  In Burroughs’ day, Henry Ford could give us cars in any color we wanted, so long as it was black.  By 1970 Alvin Toffler looked at the birth of customization and niche marketing and saw a social revolution of fragmentation: Future Shock.  The trend began with the rise of rock music and youth-oriented marketing in the later 1950s.  The 1960s and early 1970s shattered American cultural uniformity in every respect, from politics to music to fashion.

One critical breakdown of consensus was over the meaning of Westward expansion mirrored and upheld by Burroughs.  In the 1970s Native American writers and organizations began reaching a broad public with their side of the “conquest of the West” story; cowboys-and-Indians began to die off as a childhood game.  Environmentalism and the direct experience of Western wilderness through the rise of backpacking challenged the construction-and-exploitation ethos that had urbanized the West.  A generation of children born in the Western states knew nothing but city life; they lacked the experience of moving from the old East to someplace new and alien that enabled their parents to identify with the Western-frontier memes.  The Western genre itself effectively died:  in 1957 seven of the top ten television shows were Westerns; by 1977 the count was zero, and John Wayne was dead.  Along with him died the living legend of the Wild West, the frontier.   Shortly, though, Ralph Lauren (and arguably Ronald Reagan) would bring it back as nostalgia, a very different thing.

The death of the uncomplicated, pre-revisionist Western memes is as much of a sure thing as can be found in cultural studies – as any number of Hollywood executives who’ve speculated financially on a revival have learned.  Yet space advocates in particular are given, sometimes fanatically so, to using them.  This is readily explicable:  the Western-frontier myth was at the height of its popularity from about 1957 to 1965 – the impressionable pre-adolescent years of the baby boomers (someone once remarked that the “golden age of science fiction” is twelve); the birth of the American space program, steeped in Westward-ho imagery; and, of course, President Kennedy’s “New Frontier.”  Given how few people ever entertain a new idea after age 25, it’s little surprise that some continue to sell a product – space as Manifest Destiny – that isn’t exactly flying off the shelves.

This is not to say that the Mars (or space) as West meme is dead; far from it.  Rather, there are a plethora of such memes, constantly evolving and speciating to match the diversity of meanings the West holds for various groups.  While some do still hold the old triumphalist views of Western expansion, many view the Western legacy through lenses of cultural and environmental revisionism.  Historical preservation and environmental protection, limits to growth, the boomtown, gambling, entertainment and tourism – each of these is the foundation of its own Western image.

Post-Viking (and post-Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a contemporaneous revisionist bestseller), we lost the Mars of Apache warriors and Bureau of Reclamation waterworks but gained a sense of the planet that paralleled our social and environmental concerns (and prejudices) here on Earth.  The modernized Mars/West analogy has informed numerous contemporary Mars novels, from the Navajo astronaut of Ben Bova’s Mars though Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Reds” to the Sonoran techno-dissenters of Paul McAuley’s The Meaning of Life.  Astronomer/artist William K. Hartmann uses Mojave landscapes as backgrounds for his Mars exploration paintings and paints the Sonoran desert with skies out of Chesley Bonestell’s Mars.  The Mars Society’s desert hab combines science with meme-nailing showmanship in a manner worthy of a Lowell.  In the next column, I’ll look at some current Western imagery alongside new Mars fiction, to highlight how far the cultural center of gravity has shifted from the “shoot it, pave it and dam it” frontier.

What we have lost is not the meme but the mono-meme.  The hope of creating a grand, unifying vision of a Martian New Frontier, complete with neo-Kennedy presidential commitment, can only shatter on the reality of American cultural balkanization and fractal marketing.  It’s notable that even James Cameron, at least as great an entertainment-marketing titan as Burroughs, has yet to bring any of his Mars projects to fruition.  While some cultural memes do become nearly universal, at least in capturing a sense of the times – The X-Files and Seinfeld in the 1990s, The Bonfire of the Vanities and Miami Vice in the 1980s, there is no clear post-9/11 zeitgeist and no one uncontroversial meme for Mars.

Rather than marking the impossibility of mobilizing cultural forces for Mars exploration, the death of the unreconstructed frontier myth is instead a great opportunity for diversity of expression, in storytelling and in time on Mars.  Burroughs’ Wild West Mars was supplanted in the postwar generation by Mars as Southern California:  stultifying suburbia and Cold War industrialism.  Bradbury, Philip K. Dick and others gave us Martian dystopias to match the real dystopia of the times.  In reaction against social ills, the American monoculture of the 1950s was undone by dissent, allowing new forms of self-expression, new opportunities to seek out the like-minded of every persuasion, right and left, traditional and revolutionary.  Likewise, the lack of a single universal meme supporting Mars exploration prevents the replication of that monoculture on Mars.  The diversity of constituencies, rationales, goals and imaginings of Mars exploration should ensure similar diversity if and when we get to Mars.  There will be no “Red Tarzana” – Mars will not be a government-sanitized image of suburban Houston, the way Low Earth Orbit was for forty years before Dennis Tito and ,hopefully, Lance Bass.

For this, most all of us ought to be grateful.  Especially the next generation’s children, who may reach that “golden age of science fiction” looking out from station, hab or rover onto the red world, dreaming of exploration and swashbuckling adventure, of genuinely being able to boldly go where no one has gone before.  They’ll want tales of derring-do:  Barsoom may just live again.

This column, along with the subsequent issue, Spirit of Mars, formed the basis for my presentation on the “Mars: Past, Present and Future” panel at ComicCon, the World Comic Book Convention, on Sunday, August 10.  Hosted with great professionalism by the San Diego Mars Society (http://chapters.marssociety.org/SanDiego), the panel (myself, space entrepreneur Jim Benson, science fiction authors Larry Niven and Kevin J. Anderson, and Dr. Michael Caplinger of Malin Space Science Systems) packed a standing-room only crowd into the only science-based presentation at the four-day event.  Mars is alive and well in the popular imagination.