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The Spacefaring Web 2.16:
The Empire Turns Back
John Carter McKnight September 25, 2002 Reprinted by permission of the author. |
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This column is dedicated to the memory of Robert L. Forward, who proved that space science, technology and advocacy could be united, and who was, truly, a gentleman and a scholar. Along with daily reports of moves towards a Middle Eastern war, the news
from NASA has been unusually grim. Capping the International Space
Station's crew
at three, serious
problems in the robotic Mars program - these blows to our near-term
hopes in space are collateral damage inflicted by political pressures
to turn inward, to abandon the values of exploration, of the free exchange
of goods and ideas, even of reason itself. Those Network Age values
may fall to the widening "War on Terror", even beyond the extent
to which space commerce and exploration are casualties of governmental
business-as-usual. To begin with, the Chinese lacked range, focus, and above all, curiosity. They went to show themselves, not to see and learn, to bestow their presence, not to stay, to receive obeisance and tribute, not to buy... These voyages reeked of extravagance... The vulnerability of the program "here today, gone tomorrow" was reinforced by its official character. In Europe, the opportunity of private initiative that characterized even such royal projects as the search for a sea route to the Indies was a source of participatory funding and an assurance of rationality. Nothing like this in China, where the Confucian state abhorred mercantile success.A lunar scientist or space entrepreneur might say much the same of our own aborted Space Age. Chinese efforts - all governmental, funded from tax receipts - were caught up in budget battles for a generation after the ascendance of a new emperor. In 1477, the noose tightened. The secret police confiscated all the expeditionary logs, and a government minister denounced the records of the voyages as "deceitful exaggerations." Five hundred and twenty-five years later, Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin punched out one of the 25 percent of Americans who believe the Moon landings to be a hoax. By 1500, construction of an oceangoing ship was punishable by death. To paraphrase Sinclair Lewis's novel of fascism in America, "it can't happen here." Right? Declining NASA budgets, programmatic chaos and cost overruns are nothing new, of course. NASA funding parallels the extent to which the agency is seen as a useful tool of American statecraft: high in the Cold War when space travel was a proxy for technological prowess, low in the days of détente, up a bit when the NASA budget became a vehicle for foreign aid to Russia, down again in these days of military space and unilateralism. Yet what calls forth the Chinese-fleet analogy is more than the regular news of neglect and consequent disarray. Rather, the larger factors that lead to China's inward turn seem to be in play, in America and everywhere within its imperial reach - that is, everywhere, except, perhaps, ironically, in a China flirting warily with both repression and an embrace of Cheng Ho's legacy. Network values - the values of the Spacefaring Web - are antithetical to those of the imperial, national-security, state. Curiosity is a threat to those who purport to have all the answers - in a classified report somewhere, of course. The scientific enterprise is founded on the free exchange of ideas, just as the commercial is on the free exchange of goods and services. New national-security measures ban some exchanges outright, while a monitoring regime, coupled with secret intelligence courts, have, in constitutional law parlance, a "chilling effect" even on arguably legal exchanges. Endless universal warfare - China's perpetual conflict with Eastern barbarians or ours with terrorists - leaves little money or patience for the peaceful pursuits of exploration and commerce. The previous issue of this column addressed the three great sources of power in the post- Cold War world: the nation, the market and the individual. Tasked with retaliation against the perpetrators of the 9/11 horror, the Bush administration has chosen instead to redress that balance of power. In every arena, from the malign neglect of space exploration through tariff policy to environmental and military action, the ever-present, unspoken goal is turning back the clock - back from the Network Age to the American Century. Superficially, a return to the old days would seem to present opportunities for the space community. After all, space was a hallmark of American power, and rocket scientists stood at the right hand of the imperial Presidency for over a generation. Certainly the new prominence of the Department of Defense in space technology has drawn happy salivation from the lunar science community. Yet Cheng Ho's fate provides a cautionary tale: what the mandarins giveth, the mandarins taketh away. Ask anyone who actually was looking to do science on the ISS, or those of us who put any stock in NASA's once-grand robotic Mars plans. DOD may well find itself scaling back its advanced projects to cover deployment expenses, if Congress's historical unwillingness to face and fund the true costs of war continues. While the weight of evidence points to our Cheng Hos being stuck in port, history does not mechanically repeat itself. Two years ago, it seemed that the power of the individual in cyberspace and the power of the market in virtually every realm had rendered the state a bit player. A Network Age was under way, in which alliances were critical, impediments to the flow of "bits and atoms" fell at every turn, and innovation was proceeding at an astonishing pace. Now the clock is poised to turn back. Both modernity-hating terrorists and interdepency-fearing governments have made conscious choices to fight that future. Others can choose to defend it. For the space community, the defense strategy is twofold. One front is the propaganda war, the contest of values between the dynamic enterprises of space science and commerce on the one hand and the static one of state power on the other. Scientists and entrepreneurs both need free exchange: regulations that unduly burden workers, products and ideas on the basis of citizenship must be targeted. While there are genuine safety issues to be addressed, the current American technology-transfer regime is a burden without commensurate benefit. Beyond immediate policy issues, though, the wider conflict of values remains to be fought. We can take the case to the people that they benefit more from inquiry, innovation and exploration than from isolation, self-satisfied certainty and war. That case was made for us in popular culture last week: the season premiere of Enterprise dealt with the Cheng Ho decision: the Vulcan mandarins shaping Earth policy called Enterprise home - exploration was disturbing the balance of power, the messy business of trial and error conflicting with the political view that failure is not an option. In the spirit of classic Star Trek optimism, the explorers made the case persuasively for their values and their mission. They called out the mandarins on their attempt to suppress unpleasant truths and defended curiosity and growth as necessary to life. Here and now, we might not win, but their playbook offers us a chance. The other front is the one of a tangible alternative. Today, governments control human access to space and all access past geosynchronous orbit. Many bold efforts are underway to change that monopoly with hardware, from X Prize vehicles to privately-organized robotic exploration and technology-demonstration missions. They need support now, so that their industry can achieve a credible size and influence before the mandarins smash the drydocks. The two strategies are not opposed, not alternatives, not prosecuted in isolation. The argument from values is strengthened by existence proofs - flight hardware - and through the heroic stories of the new space pioneers, which put a human face on our arguments grounded in our values of freedom and prosperity. Similarly, the argument from hardware needs investors and customers, who are motivated not by technical feasibility but by a calculus of value - of a belief, rational or emotional, in the desirability of the enterprise. United, space scientists, engineers and advocates can make the Enterprise's case. Network values embodied in vehicles of space exploration and commerce offer a better future than the governmental values of power unrestrained by logic, evidence and law. To mix science-fiction metaphors, the empire might want to turn back, but it will face our spacefaring rebel alliance. The Spacefaring Web is a bi-weekly column © 2002 by John Carter McKnight, An advocate for the Space Frontier Foundation. Views expressed here are strictly the author's and do not necessarily represent Foundation policy [or that of HobbySpace]. To subscribe or unsubscribe, contact the author at kaseido@earthlink.net |
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