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.

There’s a new book on entrepreneurial space coming out this month. I was previously unaware of this. I’ll look forward to getting a copy.

Most Americans equate space exploration with NASA, but the general public is largely unaware that hundreds of passionate individuals and private organizations are working to allow ordinary people the opportunity to tour near space and to create permanent human settlements on Mars and other celestial bodies. Through a series of fascinating interviews, this book introduces the scientists, astronauts, engineers, and entrepreneurs behind the private space movement and offers a clear-eyed assessment of their prospects for success. The legal, ethical, and political challenges facing the exploitation of space resources are also explored, and issues such as environmental responsibility, safety, law enforcement, property rights, patents, and government policy are discussed.

John Weidner has a nice follow up to my recent rantings about the “rocks have rights” crowd.

For those who are wondering about Blogspot, no, it hasn’t really been down a thousand+ percent of the time in the past twenty four hours (I’m not quite sure what that would mean if it were true). I’m sure that it has something to do with a flaw in my algorithm that deals with the month change. If you view the actual log, you can see that it’s actually been doing pretty well for the past few days.

It’s not a problem–it’s an opportunity to debug!

[Update at 8:11 AM PDT]

Well, obviously it’s fixed now, though it must have been jarring to people who saw it earlier, when it was up to over thirteen hundred percent down time. The problem was that it was something that was hard to test without actually jiggering with the system clock, so I just had to wait until the end of the month to see how it worked. It obviously didn’t, but now it does. It was a stupid coding error. I’ll say no more.

The piece about space tourism on ATC that Instantman mentioned earlier is available on the web.

It was a pleasant surprise. They had some good quotes from Jeff Greason, the President of XCOR. They also mentioned the Space Access meeting in Phoenix this past weekend, a report on which I’ve still to write up. The only down note came from (I’m shocked, shocked) a NASA employee.

Roughly paraphrasing: “Space is just so hard, and so expensive, and so dangerous. Maybe someday, everyday people will be able to go, but that day’s a long way off, and in the meantime, we’ll take care of things for you, by sending a few of our elite astronauts up there for no obvious purpose, at a cost of billions of dollars per year, which you can enjoy vicariously, kinda like going down to the video store and renting sex flicks. After all, if just anyone could go, and it didn’t cost all that much, how would we justify our continuing existence?”

I didn’t see the original story, but according to these letters to the editor of Dawn, a woman was recently stoned to death in Pakistan for the crime of being raped. The two rapists walked, natch…

Do you think it’s possible that the UN could take a break from investigating imaginary war crimes in Israel to look into gender oppression and apartheid in the Islamic world?

No, me either…

Just in case there was any doubt in your mind about what a corrupt scumbag Gray Davis is, check out this story in the SacBee. It’s got everything–campaign donations, money-losing state contracts, political token appointments, Larry Ellison, and of course, good ol’ Grayout himself.

If this is covered adequately, even Le Pen should be able to beat Davis this fall. Unfortunately, Davis has put the fox in charge of the investigatory henhouse.

From SpaceRef:

NASA and aerospace industry representatives will announce results of the Space Launch Initiative’s first milestone review, which narrowed the field of potential technologies and architecture designs for our nation’s next reusable launch vehicle. NASA’s Space Launch Initiative is designing the next-generation space transportation system by first developing the technologies needed to ensure a safer, more reliable system that can be operated at a much lower cost.

If I could spare any, I’d be pulling my hair. I hope that this is just inertia, and it’s something that O’Keefe will fix when he’s got the ISS budget situation under control.

There should not be a “nation’s next reusable launch vehicle.” That was (in Hayek’s words) the fatal conceit of both the Shuttle and of the ill-fated X-33 program. NASA has to get out of the vehicle development business, and simply put incentives into place for private industry to develop new vehicles. If NASA is in charge, it will be doomed to failure, and if there is a single vehicle, it will be another Shuttle-like disaster from a cost standpoint, because it will once again be one-size-fits all, excelling at nothing.

We don’t need a new launch vehicle. We need a new launch industry. And the Space Launch Initiative, in anything resembling its current incarnation, should be strangled in the cradle.

Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), chairman of the House Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee, has introduced a bill offering prizes for amateur asteroid sightings. It’s done in honor of astronaut Pete Conrad (who was also a space entrepreneur, having founded Universal Space Lines, though the article doesn’t mention it).

I was confused about the prize, however:

The first category is an award for the amateur astronomer who discovers the largest asteroid crossing in near-Earth orbit…

How will they know when someone has won? There’s no way to tell that a larger one isn’t out there somewhere still awaiting discovery. There would have to be some kind of time limit on it (say, an annual award for the largest object found in a calendar year) for this to make any sense.

What I really like about this is that it sets a precedent for government-sponsored prizes, which could have a much larger impact on improving access to space than any number of NASA’s technology programs, if properly deployed.