I’m a little loathe to follow up on this morning’s Space Review article, because there is so much both good and disputable there, and one wants to praise the wheat while addressing the (all-too-much) chaff. I doubt if I’ll finish tonight, but I finally worked up a little before-bed gumption to at least start to go through it.

Let me preface by saying that the most annoying thing, overall, is the vague accusations throughout. There are no specific cites, examples, or people, who could then defend themselves. All of the “Space Cadets” (of which I assume that I’m one) are tarred with the same brush, and all of the “experts” and “space elite” march as one. It’s the same problem that I have with Mark Whittington’s imaginary “Internet Rocketeer’s Club,” whose membership is a secret to all but him. As an example, let’s go to the very second graf:

…as Jeffrey Bell put it in his Space Daily article, “The Totalitarian Temptation in Space”, “space travel is mostly the creation of Hitler, Stalin, and Khrushchev,” and in his view, the fact has led more than a few “Space Cadets” (I apologize to any offended by the term, though I have had a hard time finding an adequate alternative) to develop “a subtle anti-democracy, pro-totalitarian bias.” The most celebrated period in the history of the US space program, the 1960s, is also the era when confident New Deal-Great Society liberalism was at its apogee, and apparently here to stay.

Let us ignore the absurdity of citing Jeffrey Bell on anything (partly because it’s an ad hominem argument, but also because I don’t want to get into yet another issue with the piece). I’m not offended by the term “Space Cadets,” but I am offended as hell about being thrown in with a group that has developed such a “subtle tendency and bias.” Simply put, who is he talking about, and WTF does he mean? If he would tell us, I might agree, or not, but as it is, all I can do is scratch my head at the potential slander. And what is the relationship between this and the New-Deal/Great-Society liberalism? I might agree that they’re all of the same thread of fascism (which they are), but the author later pronounces Jonah Goldberg’s thesis “dubious” (though there’s no evidence presented that he is familiar with anything other than the cover of the book).

Of course, one should not rule out the role of specific personalities, organizations and projects, like Robert Zubrin and his Mars Society, Paul Allen and SpaceShipOne, Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic, or Elon Musk and his SpaceX venture. The prestige, charisma, and sheer financial resources they collectively bring to the table have certainly galvanized libertarian space activism, despite the daunting odds—and to date, the absence of the results long dreamed about, like a sharp drop in the cost of space access. (One need only consider the haste with which this group cites the case of the Falcon 9 rocket in any debate about the costs of space flight–as has happened to me personally on several occasions. I wish SpaceX success in its efforts, but I think that these observers are definitely jumping the gun when they talk about a rocket that has yet to fly as having already delivered the goods.)

It’s nice that he at least tips his hat to the latter day visionaries (though one of them is not like the other — Zubrin is no free-marketer or entrepreneur with his own skin in the game). And I agree that one shouldn’t point to Falcon 9 as an exemplar of a successful vehicle before it has flown. But the point that most sensible “Space Cadets” would make is that it is a lot closer to flight than NASA’s Ares 1, and that it has been developed for a couple orders of magnitude less money than is projected for that program. Falcon 9 is certainly a reasonable comparison to that project.

At this point, he gets into his thesis of the history of technology and how it is interwoven with political thought since the Enlightenment. I have to say that it is overambitious for the length of the piece. It is of course, precisely because of his unwillingness or inability to incorporate technological advances into his analysis that Malthus was so off in his predictions (and nothing, sadly, has changed in the last couple centuries, because neo-Malthusianism persists, all the way up to the current presidential science advisor).

But not everyone was ignoring technology at the time. The first modern science fiction novel, a retelling of the Promethean myth, was written by Mary Shelley at the time, after all. In his confusion about “right” and “left” and the origins of the modern inheritors of those terms (justly or otherwise), he misses the fundamental difference between the children of Locke, and those of Rousseau. The former was not at all averse to reason (as he later describes the conservative tradition when he attempts to shoehorn the post-modernists into it). And the latter professed allegiance to it but was in fact a key player in the Romantic movement. Mary Shelley had a foot in both camps (as do many writers of speculative fiction, for good reason). Political left and right can have their counterparts in the two parts of the brain (except they are generally reversed, in my experience).

[The hour grows late. To be continued, but probably not before tomorrow evening, because I have to get up early and drive to Boca from Orlando for a dentist appointment in the morning. The nice thing about blogging is that one can publish a work in progress, and refine it based on initial comments.]

[Tuesday afternoon update, while cooking corned beef for the occasion.]

OK, back to it. In this next section, he describes why so-called liberals may be less than enchanted with space technology:

The stunt mentality of the Cold War era space program (which may still be with us today) leaves many liberal critics seeing space as a waste of money that would be better used on Earth. Such pronouncements were common enough from figures like Kurt Vonnegut in the 1960s, and the attitude has likely been sharpened by the slowing of economic growth and tightening of public finances since that time (an issue I have discussed in my previous articles, “The Limits to Growth and the Turn to the Heavens” and “Long Waves and Space Development”). The tendency to see space spending as a form of corporate welfare, and to associate space activity with the military space ambitions of governments, only alienate it further. (Indeed, it is worth noting that the area of space policy that attracts the most overtly liberal attention is arms control and defense.)

The business-skeptic left is also little affected by the “market romanticism” (see “Market romanticism and the outlook for private space development”, The Space Review, September 2, 2008) which I have argued has much to do with the current climate of the debate about space development. (If anything, the thought of $200,000-a-seat space tourism is for them a pointed reminder of the world’s inequality, and an instance of repugnant self-indulgence on the part of today’s aristocrats.)

The same goes for the idea of space as a “final frontier,” liberals taking a more ambivalent view of romantic images of the winning of the West. (Those who are economically minded may be prone to see it as the work of government-subsidized railroads and other corporations, rather than hardy, self-reliant pioneers.) Indeed, a certain amount of writing has already been devoted to the ecology and ethics of space expansion. This is not only the case with regard to the effects of human impacts on celestial bodies, but also a question of what such thinking implies for behavior back home on Earth. Given a doubtfulness about the prospects for finding real solutions to our problems in this way, a vision of space development can (and to some, does) appear as an irresponsible fantasy—or worse. And while I suspect this attitude could change, at this point the burden of proof would really seem to be on the advocates of space development to show that space can generate really workable solutions to the problems with which they are concerned.

I agree with the first two grafs, and there are other examples (Mailer’s work, for example). Of course, there are also exceptions (e.g., Oriana Fallaci). As to the third, I would disagree quite a bit. First, the settling of the west was not an exclusive or. It happened both due to government activity and doughty private individuals seeking both freedom and prosperity.

And the “subsidies” provided to the railroads weren’t exactly that, at least not in the usual sense of taxpayers providing funds to support a private business. The government’s contribution was worthless (at least at the time) real estate, to which the railroads added value along the right of way (something worth thinking about in the context of the Outer Space Treaty and current inability to grant extraterrestrial property rights). It also ignores (as do almost all such analyses) the Great Northern, which was entirely private. It should also be noted that much of the American West was explored privately (by the mountain men, seeking good trapping grounds for beaver pelts). In fact, the mouth of the Columbia was discovered by a seal-hunting ship.

As for whether or not the burden of proof should be on those who claim that space holds a solution to earthly problems, who would argue? This is another straw man (not to say that there is no one who takes the view that the government should just take our word for it, but again we shouldn’t all be tarred with that brush). Of course, one of the reasons that so-called liberals are less than enamored with the opening of the west as a model is that they view it through their standard prism of rape of the environment and the noble red man. For people with this mind set, it’s hard to get past their instinctive distaste for the whole thing, even when reliably informed that there is neither an ecology or native peoples to exploit and pillage in space. Even when informed that the goal is to create an ecology, and expand humanity to places where it currently does not exist. And that doesn’t even start to get into the extreme eeks who believe that rocks (both terrestrial and extra) have rights.

So, for a modern leftist, there’s a lot not to like about space, and it’s not at all surprising that most of them don’t. What is surprising, in fact, is that some do. I have my own theory about this, which I’ll get to momentarily, that I think cuts through a lot of Elhafnawy’s underbrush.

Now we come to one of the most absurd notions in the essay — that postmodernists are conservative:

Postmodernists are commonly thought of as being leftists, and indeed, the very word seems to conjure up images of campus radicals. This view is rarely questioned, by the left or the right, by postmodernists or their detractors, but it is a profound misperception.

No, it’s exactly right. There is a damned good reason that “the very word seems to conjure up images of campus radicals.” It’s because postmodernism is a hot-house plant — it cannot survive outside the nurturing leftist environment of English and Anthropology Departments. It’s one of those things so absurd that (as Orwell famously put it) only an intellectual could believe it. I would defy the author of the essay to find a postmodernist running a business. Or at a shooting range. Or in church.

And the notion that someone not of the left can survive not only unscathed, but be celebrated in the campus environment is belied by the scarcity on campus of people who are (or at least will profess to be) conservative. Postmodernists, on the other hand, fit the place like a glove, culturally and intellectually.

From there he goes on to demonstrate his profound lack of understanding of the conservative tradition, instead presenting a caricature of conservatives that he finds convenient to his thesis:

Unlike the left, and very much in line with the conservative tradition, postmodernists are very suspicious of the claims made for reason, rationality, and the idea of progress, and by extension, anything founded on them.

If he thinks that John Locke or Edmund Burke were “suspicious of claims made for reason, rationality, and the idea of progress,” he cannot be in any way acquainted with their works. Or rather, if they are so suspicious, it is a healthy skepticism about the claims, rather than reason, rationality or progress in themselves. Conservatives that I know are all for reason and rationality (at least when it comes to economics). What they oppose is false claims made in its name (e.g., we can spend our way out of debt). Postmodernists, on the other hand, don’t even believe in reason as a means to attain knowledge. Really, I find this notion that postmodernists are conservative (as most people understand that word) to be the most misguided part of the whole essay. Not to mention its lack of relevance to the overall thesis.

Now, finally, we come to the cartoon depiction of the “space cadets” on line versus the “elite” “experts” who “actually are involved with space policy.”

[To be continued]