It is wishful thinking, and probably pointless, to expect a visionary politician to come along and embark our nation on a vigorous humans-to-Mars program. That was the theme of a post, and Fox News column that I wrote a couple of weeks ago.

As I said then, it’s unlikely that we’ll repeat Apollo, both because the political planetary alignment that caused it is very unlikely to repeat, and because even Kennedy wasn’t really particularly visionary when it comes to space. But I also said then that if we can’t expect a politician to lead us to the high frontier, I would describe just what conditions do have to be in place for it to happen.

We are presently constrained to this planet not because no one wants to go to Mars–the Mars Society puts the lie to that notion. It’s because the people who want to go can’t afford to, and the people who can afford to have no (or at least insufficient) desire to spend their money in that way. While this will probably strike people as obvious, it’s useful to state it nonetheless, because it then provides guidance as to solutions.

There are two solutions.

The traditional one, usually espoused by lobbyists and advocates of space exploration, is to try to persuade those with the money (generally the government) that they should indeed spend it on this. This has been a notably failed strategy, both because such persuasion is difficult, and because even when there is an occasional success in appropriating public resources, the political process invariably perverts the activity away from the original goal, and toward ancillary partisan interests (e.g., job creation in key areas, bureucratic empire building, coopting of the program by the State Department for promotion of international cooperation or foreign aid, etc.).

The other alternative is to reduce the cost of the effort, so that those who already want to do it can afford it. I used to have a signature on my Usenet postings to the effect that “NASA’s job is not to land a man on Mars–it’s to make it affordable for the National Geographic Society to land a man on Mars.”

With his Mars Direct proposal, Bob Zubrin was attempting to tackle the problem from both directions–he came up with a cheaper way to get to Mars, in the hope that he could then convince someone in the government that it had therefore become affordable. However, his approach didn’t tackle the real cost problem, which is the cost of getting from earth into space in the first place.

Robert Heinlein once famously wrote, “when you get into orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere.” Conversely, going to Mars is presently expensive because going anywhere in space is presently expensive. While Mars enthusiasts recognize this, most of them just assume that it’s a law of nature, throw up their hands, and say in essence, “to heck with it–we’ll just have to convince the government to go anyway.”

However, high launch costs are not a consequence of any laws of physics–as I’ve written previously, they’re a consequence of the fact that we do so pitiably little in space–there are no economies of scale.

So rather than lobbying the government to send a few people off to Mars post haste, Mars enthusiasts would be well advised to take their eyes off the prize momentarily, and instead help build a public consensus for much larger space markets, and commercial ones.

The most promising of these is public space travel and entertainment. If we can develop a robust space tourism industry, it will drive costs down, both because they have to be low for it to be a viable business, and because the potentially huge amount of activity (orders of magnitude above anything that NASA is doing, or ever plans to do) will drop the costs of access for everyone, including those who look down their noses at such “pedestrian” uses of space.

If we can use this market to drive down those costs to the point at which the cost of the energy itself becomes significant (which is as low as it can ever go), then the National Geographic Society, or even the Mars Society, would be able to mount their own expeditions, and no longer be dependent on fickle and difficult politicians. In addition, they will be able to do it with a clear conscience, because it will paid for by people who want to pay for it, not those who are forced to. And best of all, they’ll be able to ensure that it’s under their control, and not hijacked for crass political purposes, as happens almost invariably to government programs (particularly space programs).

So if you want to go to Mars, cheer on the Mark Shuttleworths, and the Lance Basses and Lori Garvers. Support XCOR, Pioneer Rocketplane, Armadillo Aerospace, and Space Adventures and Incredible Adventures and MirCorp, and the X-Prize, and all the other for-profit and non-profit organizations too numerous to mention here, who are working hard to get all of us into space who want to go, and not just a select few.