Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

I’ve been in the doldrums lately. At times drowning in despair at the hopelessness of America under progressive rule that is anything but as we seem to be sliding backward rather than moving forward into the Golden Age that was supposed to be the Space Age. Sliding backward into something that looks hauntingly familiar to anyone who watched the first men walking on the moon in the late 1960s.

I was living in Manassas Virginia then in my early grade school years when I watched Neil Armstrong step down from the ladder of the lunar landing module to plant the flag and utter those immortal words about one small step for Man & one giant leap for all Mankind. It was on a black and white TV set with the rabbit ear antennae that I also watched a host of Saturday morning cartoons with science fiction themes by Hannah Barbera and the original Lost In Space and Star Trek were prime time series. This fueled some very lofty expectations later boosted in my teenage years by the debut of Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica and the 1970s reboot of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. There were also the writings of Gerard K. O’Neill and Ben Bova in which I discovered the application of space technology as a practical solution for the most pressing problems of the time.

We must solve our problems on Earth first was the mantra of the day and I was often pressured to feel guilty until I had a real wake up moment circa 1984 when Jerry Pournelle stated in one of his “A Step Farther Out” editorials that “You either choose socialism or you choose Freedom”. That was also the time Reagan said something about refuting the Limits of Growth that had been the name of a popular ecological doomsday potboiler published by a group called the Club of Rome.

Things were looking pretty good for space until a few years later when the Challenger Disaster stalled everything and then the dream kept getting downgraded. The space shuttles started flying again and International Space Station got built but progress was slow and there was no compelling reason to go for lofty goals such as a lunar base or Mars mission though some bold proposals were advanced through the end of the century going into this one.

In the mid 1990s I read an article in the newsletter of the First Millennial Foundation: “The Significance of the Martian Frontier” by Robert Zubrin. It articulated a riveting vision of human settlements on Mars as a reinvigorating force for future human history in the way of enhancing innovation and prosperity and freedom. Especially the part where Zubrin makes a contrast with the frontier of the old American west saying things like a frontier creates a labor shortage and “A factory worker in New England had to be treated better because he had an option in the West”. That really resonated with me at the time because the economy of the Rust Belt was still coming back from the collapse of the steel industry in the 1980s and jobs were hard to come by. We definitely needed a frontier then. Indeed we’ve needed one ever since the last one closed in the late 19th Century and we need one now even more than ever. I never liked that slogan “Alaska: America’s Last Frontier”.

Zubrin’s “Significance of the Martian Frontier” became the theme for a book: The Case For Mars which I’m sure many of the readership who are likely to be interested in science and science fiction have read. It proposes a “Mars Direct” approach to establishing a base on the surface of the Red Planet that can be expanded into a thriving city and eventually a new civilization that will in time terraform and create a second Earth.

He’s also since written The Case For Space which entails a broader vision that includes concurrent efforts to put settlements on the moon and asteroids and ultimately develop the technology for interstellar travel and the establishment of human societies in neighboring star systems.

I sent this out earlier in the week to a number of contacts after viewing because it was so exciting. Zubrin hits it out of the park as he discusses his vision for jumpstarting the expansion of humanity into the solar system and beyond. Here is another video about the versatile launch system under development by Space X:

Its called “Starship” and it’s part of Elon Musk’s vision for putting humans on Mars within the decade.

This is a game changer if it is allowed to happen. In addition to reaching Mars, “Starship” can also be adapted to support lunar colonization and asteroid mining. It’s also far less costly than the government space program run by NASA. According to Zubrin; the reason the Artemis Program to put Americans back on the moon after a 50 year hiatus was canceled by the Obama Administration is that the heavy launch system required to replace the one that supported the Apollo Missions cost in the neighborhood of $30 billion. Elon Musk can do it for about a billion. In the first video linked above; Zubrin goes on to explain the nature of the government space program which is has evolved into a vendor driven system as opposed to the original purpose driven one it was during the Space Race. Instead of spending money to do stuff—like putting astronauts on the moon—NASA does stuff to spend money and missions are designed to be unnecessarily complex and expensive to serve the interests of the vendors: the aerospace contractors who built the space shuttle and modular components for the space station. This is the fundamental reason why government in general is so wasteful and ineffective on so many fronts. It’s why we’ve stalled for 50 years after putting boots on the moon and why we are pulling out of Afghanistan after 20 years of wasting American sweat, treasure and lives. Go figure we would persist so long at such a destructive enterprise as war but throw in the towel so easily with manned space exploration.

Albeit NASA did succeed with unmanned exploration of the solar system and the science of detecting thousands of exoplanets in other stellar systems. Mostly because these missions involve proven technology that is commercially practical for launching satellites. Supporting humans in space is still very difficult and expensive and the vendor driven approach racks the price up even higher. And there is no incentive to improve. This is the reason launch costs have stagnated for so many years.

There is hope that Elon Musk’s Starship may be the paradigm shift we’ve been hoping for. Being able to put humans on Mars also means asteroid mining and lunar missions become feasible enough to support construction of a space based infrastructure by sourcing the construction mass from low gravity bodies. This lowers launch costs even more than building better rockets to lift stuff from the deep gravity well of Earth and doing that will drive the development of the other because once you have places where people can go and live out there you will have demand for more and better launch systems that will drive down costs and make space travel accessible and affordable to average people like commercial air travel.

Now that’s what I call a paradigm shift!