As Rand has already blogged, I’m the new interim Washington Director of the SubOrbital Institute, since Pat Bahn is too busy actually running a company to take care of the nitty-gritty of running the Institute. This goes for many of the other Institute members, which is very good news. Unfortunately I’m paid exactly the same as I am for blogging here, but that’s not zero except in dollars. Let me clarify that statement a little: I realized a few years ago that I was thinking about the problem of space access all wrong. The problem is complex and has many conceivable solutions, but only a small set of practically implementable solutions. Which solutions are practical is not obvious except in retrospect, and since we don’t already have low cost space access, retrospection is not an option.

Given that the shape of the technological and economic landscape ahead of us is not well understood, it’s impossible to plan in detail for the long term. That means plans have to be made in the short term, with the only long term considerations being to maximize the number of available options when the short term plan succeeds. Once you realize this, it changes everything. Thinking in the fuzzy long term about space elevators or scramjets becomes untenable, and you’re forced to break everything down to the most fundamental questions.

When I first started getting serious about space access it was with a focus on mining asteroids for platinum group metals (oddly enough, I had an email exchange with Jeff Greason about this subject way back before XCOR or even Rotary). I started actually writing business plans and designing techniques to handle what I thought would be the long pole in the tent, namely prospecting. Since high value PGM rich asteroids are expected to occur with a frequency of less than one in a thousand, the prospecting phase has to be really cheap on a per-candidate basis, even if ground based spectroscopy is used to winnow the candidate pool by 90%. I figured out how to do it (sort of) if the cost of space access came down by about a factor of ten. Of course, given factors of ten to toss around at will we can also do commercially viable nuclear fusion and flying cars. Or fusion powered flying cars, for that matter.

Setting aside PGM mining for the time being, I went back to first principles. What is within reach that I really want to do? I want to go into space. Even mining asteroids isn’t enough without actually being there. It’d be cool to mine asteroids, but it’d be so much cooler to actually go into space and experience spaceflight in person. That’s my current focus. Not saving the world, not imagining wondrous possible futures – just me looking out of the window from 100+ kilometers above the earth.

I believe that this is the right approach to space activism. There are simply too many demands in life to keep a focus on working towards something that will never provide concrete personal benefit. Even people doing supposedly purely altruistic things like helping famine victims are constantly rewarded with positive feedback from the people they are helping. It’s simply not sustainable on a personal level to work hard over the long term for no personal reward other than an idea. Sure there are individuals capable of that kind of effort, but they are exceedingly rare. Much more common are the folks who work for a while and then burn out or just lose interest.

Given the realities of near term technologies (and the irrationality of planning based on nonexistent technologies), and given the realities of human nature, the best approach to space activism is to focus on personal hands-on participation. Nobody is going to build a space elevator in their garden shed. You might, however, save up enough money to afford a ride on a suborbital vehicle. You might invest in a suborbital company with a realistic expectation of profit. In time, you might even be able to build your own suborbital vehicle. You could certainly help push for sensible regulation of the suborbital industry, with the certain knowledge that it has a positive impact right now as opposed to some unknown time in the future (if ever).

The upshot is that the reward both for blogging and for working with the SubOrbital Institute is gradual progress towards a very concrete goal – putting me personally in space. I suggest that this goal is a good one for all space activists and enthusiasts to adopt. Focus on the near term practicalities because those are the only ones you can realistically have confidence in. Everything else is speculation. The net effect of a bunch of people seriously working to get themselves into space is that costs come down, markets are established, and new opportunities move from being speculative to being attainable.