My Fox column is up. It's the post from last Wednesday on NASA's forty-fifth birthday.

It would have been last week's column (as it turned out, there wasn't a last week's column) if I weren't an idiot. I forgot to attach it in my email to them before I got on a flight to Chicago and headed off to the northern Michigan wilderness.

Not sure if this was a Fox editing error, or in the version submitted, but I saw this little typo:

"After an almost 33-year hiatus, the shuttle started flying again in late 1988..."

I know it may be too late to do anything about it, but I thought it need be mentioned.

Yes, thank my editor for that one. I submitted it just as it appears in the blog (i.e., correctly).

Rand,

I have one thing to say about this otherwise consise and accurate history you've written: Short of euthanasia, what might NASA do to polish it's tarnished relevancy?

It is all well and good to again point out where the agency has stumbled, it is an altogether different thing to point out a solution.

NASA and the federal government comitting hari-kari on itself regarding space matters isn't the optimal solution, IMHO.

"Nasa Watch" (a 9 October entry) thinks this rates a "Yawn" because people like you "never, ever offer a cogent solution to the problems they cite."

I guess for some people NASA is the only game in town, and should always be that way. Ignore the decades of failures, they're gonna get it right this time.

Raoul,

I don't think that's quite the tone NASAWatch would usually adopt. I think the dig was that pointing out problems is fine, but propose solutions, too.

Rand has done such pointing before, I just think NASAWatch thought that the solutions could have been noted (beyond deep-sixing the agency) along with those VERY VALID criticisms.

> people like you "never, ever offer a cogent
> solution to the problems they cite."

Solutions? You want cogent solutions?
How about this cute Libertarian posting from sci.space.policy?:-) ("Where do we go from here, Sept.13)

[...]

The book will also contain detailed instructions and suggestions for establishing your own local chapter of what I'm presently calling (again, for lack of anything better) the "Space Scouts" and everything necessary to affiliate it with a national organization of the same name. Unlike a great many other organizations I've been involved with, I want this one always to grow from the ground up, not from the top down.

The _Space Scout Manual_'s third mission will be to establish a political constituency for abolishing NASA and getting government out of the way of space exploration. If the book, and the organization it creates, are useful and interesting enough, then within a few years, there should be hundreds of thousands of young Space Scouts and maybe, a few years after that, millions. Politicians and bureaucrats will eventually be up against an enormous group of voters who are educated, tough, who won't take "No" (or even "Give us another 30 years") for an answer.

I want this book to get into conventional distribution channels and to show up on paperback racks everywhere. I want this book in airports and grocery stores where the words SPACE SCOUT MANUAL will leap out at all those who had almost -- but not quite -- given up the dream.

Please note that the manual will not be about the current hardware of government space exploration (which is constantly changing anyway) but about personal physical, mental, and moral preparation. It will draw on history, and on both factual and fictional sources. Also, it will give its readers the beginnings of a decent science education (another thing public schools were never up to), and encourage in them a proper skepticism with regard to public education and the democratic process.

Another reason not to get bogged down in such details is that there's no telling what methods of spaceflight will evolve if this idea works.

The book's moral outlook will be rooted in the Bill of Rights and the libertarian Zero Aggression Principle, but it will not preach. It will assume from the outset that individuals own their own lives and the products of their lives, and that no one has a right to initiate force against another human -- no, make that _sapient_ -- being for any reason.

The book will advocate "Reconstitutive Unanimous Consent" as the preferred means of making group decisions and settling disputes. It will also advise politicians and bureaucrats that, from the moment that the first off-planet settlement is created, on Mars, on the Moon, in the Asteroid Belt, or wherever, it should reasonably be expected to become politically independent of Earth whenever its people want it to be.

Don't let any of the above mislead you, however. This will not be a book about libertarian or constitutionalist philosphy. It will be a book about getting into space and staying there. It will be guided as much by the scientific method as it will be by the Zero Aggression Principle. Its largest section, by far, will be a detailed survey and commentary (despite that editor's view that I'm not qualified to write it) on everything that's known, at the moment, about the Solar System, including its constituent star, its planets, moons, planetoids, and comets.

It will also talk -- again in detail -- about all of the many reasons we might want to see these things close up, and even go to live on, in, or among them. Those reasons will range from what might be called the "spiritual" -- because it's the destiny of humankind and a good first step to the stars -- to the exceedingly practical: our species won't survive another rock like the one that put an end the Cretacious; we're 15 million years overdue, so we have to go out and stop it, the topic of a lecture I delivered to the Eris Society in 2000.

Your thirty years are up, NASA.

They've been up a couple of times over.

There will be no more waiting politely. Even if it has to be done like the moldy old joke -- the hotel clerk admits that a room is available, but you'll have to make your own bed; upstairs you find you've been supplied with a hammer, saw, and lumber -- it _will_ be done.

So this is what I've given up electoral politics for -- at least this decade, when the goodguys are powerless. But I think I've traded up. I'm ready to make my own bed. And to plant the seedlings for the lumber.

How about you?

Now I understand why Fox News viewers end up being the most ill-informed of all cable news viewers.

Hang you head in shame. Oh, wait the paycheck!