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Huffington Post
Posted: 03/02/2012
A United Vision for Space
Original Article
It's been a couple of weeks since the NASA budget came out and fingers are still pointing as to who screwed up where, whose program ate what budget and why, and why is mine being singled out while yours is being kept alive? Meanwhile, in partial answer to that question, congressional staffers and their bosses are madly walking the halls, working to get this or that "must have for our national future in space" local jobs program funded or refunded, and the lobbyists are out in full force, fanning out to make sure their bosses make good money off our dreams.
Those convinced the administration of President Barack Obama is killing the space program as they knew it gather around opposition candidates in hopes they will get back into power, as NASA centers and directors keep their old Constellation, Ares and Orion brochures out and on display, awaiting the good ol' days when the idea of circumnavigating the Moon a la Apollo 8 some 50 years after it was done the first time was sufficient to keep the job force growing and cash flowing.
Meanwhile, the president still hasn't laid out a compelling vision or rationale for the changes he made, corrected his mistake of dissing the Moon, set a compelling organizing goal around which the troops from all sides can rally or put a strong general in place to lead the charge. I'm sorry, but a possible visitation of an asteroid sometime in the future for this or that available reason just isn't good enough.
And wrapping either approach in the illusion that it might on some safely distant day lead to what will inevitably be another set of abandoned flags and footprints on Mars is disingenuous, pathetically uninspiring and not a worthy challenge to a great nation such as ours.
America is at a moment of national self-doubt and transition, facing a possible shift in world leadership and a technological and economic race of global proportions, in some cases led by those who do not share our belief in freedom and liberty. Wimpy won't do.
Sound familiar? It was the same in 1962. Faced with the rise of the Soviet Union as a world power, a military, scientific and industrial base in need of a positive focus, a generation of children being bombarded by images of fear through the new tech of TV, a president who recognized a bold initiative, a clear mission within challenging parameters, reachable yet hard, with clear milestones and an unambiguous and symbolically powerful goal, stepped up and dared us to step outwards beyond what was safe and do the unimaginable.
We are there again. The threats and problems we face today are the same. And although the tools, the team and the technologies today are different, they not only can achieve the same level of symbolic victory but can surpass it, as we rightly ought to be able to do some 50 years later.
We need someone to step up again, point to the reality of what the people of this nation can do and aim us, challenge us, to do something beyond our reach, do it right and do it faster than we think we can. To do something that acknowledges and builds on our national strengths, captures the spirit of the age and draws together the widest possible constituency of Americans to take on a challenge that is hard yet symbolic, tough yet achievable, and will inspire new generations to emulate a new wave of heroes.
The team we have this time is broader than the last.
We have a space agency desperately in need of purpose, whose employees and capabilities have been wasted for decades on make-work projects and dead-end PowerPoint pioneering placebos designed to do nothing more than keep the billing high. An agency that if challenged and given clear orders and the right job as the leading edge of a new wave of human exploration beyond low Earth orbit could and would rise to the heights of its capabilities.
We have an industrial base -- one that if made to take orders rather than being allowed in the vacuum of leadership to create them, if enabled by the elimination of cost-plus contracting to produce and achieve rather than waste and receive, could make something worth the cost rather than making work that costs us our dreams. An industry that, if overseen by customers and managers more interested in opening an airlock to space than passing through a rotating door to a comfortable job lobbying for more, could produce something worth paying for.
And we have a new generation, raised on the ability to move quickly, communicate instantly, develop, try and discard that which does not work while in the same moment creating that which does. A generation raised on the technologies of the first conquest of space and yet clean of the taint of its subsequent failure to hold the ground it had achieved. A generation that is ready, willing and able to step up and step out, already building its own rocketships, staffed by eager new minds who almost believe it a given they will be living in space in their lifetimes.
It is time to bring these cultures together. By reigniting the exploration role of our government Lewises and Clarks within and enabled by the infrastructure and economic drive of commercial space and the people themselves, this nation can rise to heights unimaginable. Together we can achieve something of proportions that will not just be the stuff of someday stories, but the reality of a new realm of human civilization.
In this moment of what may appear to be lost direction, we must make the decision that any direction we go is based on a shared goal, a shared set of values, and a shared vision of the desired outcome. When it comes to human spaceflight, that shared goal must be settlement.
It is time to declare that the goal of the United States in space is the settlement of the solar system, from low Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars.
It is time for all of us, in all of the sectors, segments and societies that make up this grand movement, to agree on this one core and simple goal -- the purpose of human space exploration is human space development and settlement. Not just exploration but including exploration, not just technology development but including development, not just jobs but including and creating innumerable jobs, not just national prestige but advancing the ideals of this great nation and making it clear to all that the high ground belongs to the free -- because we will be living there.
My words are strong and my rhetoric perhaps over the top for some. But the reality is that this can be done. This is the moment for it to be done. And clear and simple plans already exist to show how it must be done.
So let's do it.
Luna 2020. Phobos 2025. Mars 2030.
Settlement all the way and forever.
This time we don't go to play.
This time we go all the way.
This time -- we go to stay.
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Huffington Post
Posted: 01/31/2012
Big Ideas in Small Times
Original Article
I will get back to my series on the "Why?" of space later this week. In the meantime, knowing that by the end of the week the issue will be used up and gone for a bit, I must comment on the Newt Gingrich space speech in Florida and the public reaction to it.
Putting aside who it was speaking, what was presented in the speech as to our future in space is actually good stuff. We need to open the frontier between the Earth and Moon to large scale human activities, we need to establish human outposts and communities off the Earth and begin the job of doing so right away -- and do so largely based on letting the people take over most of the jobs.
We need Big Ideas, as we are in a time of small people, and as Kennedy showed with Apollo, doing something grand in space is the Biggest. At a time of huge national doubt and fear of losing our leadership as a nation to others, it focused us, gave us something positive and inspired a generation.
As a kid growing up during that era my parents' TV was flooded with anti-Vietnam riots, race battles and a cacophony of Cold War stories competing with depressing diatribes about the end of the world as we knew it. And yet, there, in the midst of the nightly news (in those days, the source of almost all news) would be a shining story about the next step being taken on our way to the moon. A launch of new vehicle, a spacewalk, a new human spaceflight record... it didn't matter, I would zoom into the living room with big eyes and go to bed that night inspired. And I wasn't alone. Sprinkled throughout the generation that grew up in the 1960s and 1970s were others who were driven to study hard, and reach for impossible dreams -- because if we can put a Man on the Moon....
By the end of the century these space geeks and nerds had finished school and founded companies like Microsoft, Apple, PayPal, Google and others.... And now many of them are building rocketships of their own as they continue the quest. Be it Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Elon Musk of PayPal, John Carmack, creator of Quake and Doom, or Paul Allen of Microsoft, they are standing on the shoulders of the giants of Apollo and reaching for the stars. Along with Branson and the owner of Budget Suites and a myriad of others who are bending metal and putting their own bucks into the quest to be the new Buck Rogers, they believe in Big Ideas and are doing something about it -- in space.
And so, finally, as others bemoan the death of American leadership, a candidate has the hubris to invoke a grand dream and the media and others pile on. Yes, much of their criticism is because of the man himself, but there is also an element of "how dare you" in their words, an air of insult that at such a time of national mediocrity anyone should suggest we do something grand, and worse, that we would let private, yes he said it -- "commercial" firms join NASA in leading the way.
BTW, Obama got there first, and has begun to end the going in circles pork-based NASA programs that have wasted billions of dollars and years of time since we went to the moon the first time. He blew the roll out of his program, allowing the old school (who now have all joined the Romney team) to characterize his actions as the end of US space when it was really meant to be the beginning of a new space age. He said some dumb things about the moon. He appointed a ghost as his administrator. He has let Congress gut his plans to hand off transport to space to commercial firms and he laid out a fairly timid path forward, but he did get the core elements right -- and Gingrich includes many of the same ones.
Obama did take action first though, and interestingly, Newt Gingrich and Robert Walker actually came out in support of his initiative -- for about thirty seconds -- before realizing Republicans are not supposed to support anything Obama does, and that most of those defending the socialist approach to space we have followed since Apollo were indeed Republicans... (Oops!) And of course now the reverse is true, as the liberal side ridicules the concept simply because it came out of the mouth of an avowed rightist.
But the politics of this isn't the important thing. The sad thing, the pathetic thing, about the whole episode, is that over 40 years after we put the first American on the moon the idea that in 10 more we might have a moonbase is considered radical and far out.
This is the real story. This is the point that demonstrates how bad a state we are in as a nation, how badly we have lost our way, and how important it is that we understand and support whoever pushes us UP and out to the frontier -- at least on this one issue.
Forty three years ago we landed on a new world, and we blew it. We had it, and we dropped it.
I would just ask you for one moment to imagine what today would be like if we had built on that landing by creating a permanent and growing community there and moved on to Mars. What would it be like to be an American schoolkid today (or a kid anywhere on Earth for that matter) if you could look up at the lights of cities on the moon and see reports on your cell phone of our expanding presence on Mars?
What might the campaign season be like if the trending topics in today's news were how the mining of platinum from asteroids was affecting the price of cell chips, or the cost of power being beamed from solar plants in space competing with carbon fuels, the unionization of orbital workers or the end of Parkinson's disease due to new micro gravity research breakthroughs?
We need our reach to exceed our grasp. We need a generation that says "If we can put a city on the moon why can't we..." as it calls us forth to do better in all things. Big ideas? Hell, we don't have enough of them. And to ridicule those you are simply too timid or short-sighted to embrace, at a time when you need them so badly is ludicrous.
Sanity is a relative thing, and saying we will at last do what we should have done long ago and do it based on empowering the people to do what they do best and by doing so calling out the best in us is actually one of the few sane things to have been said in this campaign. Crazy may not be the one who says the sun is the center of the solar system, the Earth is round and someday people might fly. It may be those who laugh at such words whose minds are lost.
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Huffington Post
Posted: 1/17/2012
"Why Space" Part II - We Need an Edge
Original Article
This month I began a series of postings entitled: "Why space?" as part of an explanation as to why so many of us, from geeks to dot com billionaires and others, are so passionate about what is about to happen in space, just as others decry the end of the space age, the collapse of our ecosystem and the fall of our civilization.
This week I shall continue the flow.
I was asked by a friend last week why I am focused on the spiritual level when we need real and down to Earth "money in my pocket" reasons to get people excited. He is right, we do. However, people are also powerfully motivated by reasons that have nothing to do with money, or there would be no churches, no Olympics, no art nor science. Ideally they all work together -- especially in the face of new frontiers.
So be patient. I will be working my way down to science, economics and businesses like those seen being formed in what we call the NewSpace industry and even a few national policy proposals as I move ahead.
So... "Why space?"
When asked this question some might answer with the traditional "Because it's there." Fine for a mountain, insufficient for a frontier. There are as many reasons to open the space frontier as there will be humans to go there, and if history is our guide, although at first it will be only a few, the numbers will grow enormously.
But the real reason, the one necessary and sufficient reason we are called to the space frontier, is buried deep within us. It is a feeling, a knowing in our hearts when we look starward on a clear night. The same feeling that some of our earliest ancestors had as they looked across a new valley, or stood upon the shores of unsailed oceans. First fear, then curiosity, and then, for some, a calling. A calling which pulls us to go, to see, to do, to be there. It has created us and we have always responded to it.
Homo Sapiens is a frontier creature. It is what we do, it defines what we are. This has been true from our very beginnings. It is the core reason our progenitors wandered forth from the first primordial valleys in search of more room, better hunting or more fertile soil. Often they traveled to escape the dominance of this or that tribal bully, or faced with over-crowding, to find a place of their own. Each time this migration occurred far more stayed and endured than sought the new, but it was the new-seekers who changed the world, and in many ways created new worlds of their own.
While most remained as huddled masses, accepting of the powers that be, constrained by the limits of their time, stuck in the routines of mere survival, there has always been a small group who want more -- those who are dissatisfied, who don't fit in, who cannot accept the constraints of the status quo, who dream, or who simply want to "know" what is out there. To these, the edge of the known did not represent danger, but opportunity. And each time they have stepped towards the edges of their world, they have been ridiculed, ostracized even restrained at times by those whose "world order" was threatened. Yet somehow they always seem to break free, to break out -- again, it is the human way -- for we shall not be bound -- be it by the restraints of smaller minds nor, in this case, gravity itself.
Each time these pioneers expanded into new realms they discovered the old ways wouldn't work. Whenever a new domain was inhabited by humans old survival patterns were left behind, and new patterns created. Although often repressed or restrained by their societies, history has shown repeatedly that these changes in behavior, technology and culture were necessary for the society as a whole to remain vital, and without them cultures become stagnant, closed and deadened, often turning on themselves. Without an edge the center comes apart.
As we have seen in our own history, the injection of new ideas from other worlds transformed life for all, and with the establishment of new frontier communities far from the reach of the old world, new social systems also formed, more in tune with the fact that it was the individual who had to make the decisions and do the work of pioneering. New ways of perceiving the human condition and the universe we live in were born.
In space we will continue to redefine ourselves, as hundreds, then thousands, then millions of us take our places at the edge of the human realm. The value of what it means to be human will increase, as the lives of individuals, settlements and towns remain under constant threat of death by the harsh forces we find there. Life's worth will be the soul of such societies and the measure of a person will be what they can carve out of the frontier for themselves and their families, what they can do to expand the human domain, and how they thus serve our civilization.
Just as many are saying it is time to lower expectations, a whole new class of expectation can be created. A child on Earth, previously forced to look to sports figures, flamboyant criminals and entertainers for their self image will find new heroes to emulate. The idea of living in the question rather than settling for the answers of yesterday will become the new normal. Our society's youth will grow up knowing that tomorrow can be better, that there are alternatives for the future, that there are living, breathing humans of all colors and creeds out there in the sky building new worlds. Imagine knowing it is all there waiting, as opposed to being behind you, and all you can do is fight to slow the fall of the civilization that gave you life.
I believe we will go to space because we have to in order to continue our growth as human beings. There is little choice involved. In fact there's only one to be made. Open the frontier as our spirit and soul tells us, excel, climb, grow, live large and transform hope into a new and glorious reality as we reach for the brilliance of the stars... or perish, sinking in the sands of the sustainable, fading out in the oblivion of the adequate.
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Huffington Post
Posted: 1/6/2012
Why Space?
Original Article
Given this is the inauguration of a new science section, I thought I might step away from the moment by moment politics of the space field and do a bit of priming and explanation for what people see happening in the human space arena, yet many misunderstand -- as was recently evidenced by various pundits reactions to Newt Gingrich's attitudes towards our space program -- attitudes actually shared by the leaders of the Obama space team. I will deal with the ironic politics of this another time, but for now here's some of the basic thinking he and many of those of both parties who are doing the actual bending of metal, building of rockets and buying of rides share.
As a spokesperson for the Frontier movement, I am often asked: "Why space?" A time back I decided to write the answer in a series of short essays to be filed onto the net as a means of perhaps explaining the somewhat unexplainable -- "Why?" You see, to those of us who see the expansion of humanity and life into space as the next obvious action for our species, answering this one question actually involves answering the biggest question of all: "Why are we here?"
I will follow this filing with more in the coming weeks discussing the why and how of this new frontier, as it is after all 2012, and some among us are preparing for the end of days -- and I don't just mean the election of someone else's candidate. Also, as the year unfolds we will see the first flights of a generation of New Space rocketships, built and flown by those who already know the answer. Be it Bezos or Bigelow, Branson or Musk, these new rocketeers are taking the first steps on the path to the stars. It is important to understand these are not just rich boys and their toys, but the harbingers of a revolution, raising up the best of our capabilities to reach for our destiny even as those with no vision decry our culture's collapse.
Just as with their predecessors and fellow travelers in NASA and the world's other space agencies, to them the obvious "Why?" has become "How?" and they have set about building this critical pathway to the future. But in our passion and impatience to get on with the job, those of us in this movement often forget others may not "get it" yet... so it is important now and then to stop and explain, and for ourselves, to review.
In a sense there is one answer to both questions involving the "Why?" of space and existence. It involves God, the universe and life itself. In another sense there are many answers, for the frontier is essentially endless, and offers each one of us a chance to find out there what we seek -- in here -- if we but look up with open eyes and reach up with open hands.
Space is a laboratory, an experiment in all forms of all things, an infinity of possibilities, properties and places that cry out for investigation and exploration. Space is a canvas, as large and blank as any ever created, for it is indeed creation itself and it calls to us to paint upon it with our own dreams and imaginations anything we wish, anything we want, and anything we can imagine.
Space is our past, the place from where we come, the place out of which some particles joined other particles and molecules joined with other molecules and at some point reproduced themselves and thus began an incredible and nearly impossible set of coincidences and near misses and direct hits with other objects in space through all of which the spark of life survived and eventually beyond all odds produced this creature we call a human being, who can type these words and send them through space to you.
Space is our present, for whether or not you aware of it we are speeding through space right now at around 70,000 miles an hour, on a tiny ball of rock that just happens to be in the right place and made up of the right mix of chemicals and energy to allow us to be here and not fly off, and which, at any moment could, through this or that cosmic whim or change in the mix of forces around us -- be gone -- or we could be gone from it, and it would continue along without us. We use space in myriad forms and yet are also hostage to the technologies that we have created to fly through it, in the form of rockets whose payloads can transmit the images of peace or be the cause of war and destruction.
And space is the future -- if we choose to rise up the next level from our humble roots as creatures designed for killing rabbits with rocks and learn that we can not only end our conquest of the life of this planet but flip the war between our civilization and the rest of the biosphere on its head. By opening space, for the first time in our history, rather than inexorably extracting the blood of life from this oh so precious sphere in our quest for wealth, we will turn outwards and upwards, creating new wealth from places already dead, advancing into places where there is no life and bringing its seeds with us.
To some of us who have the frontier calling, there is no question "Why space?" It makes no sense. We look out and know that out there are more galaxies than there are all the grains of sand on all the beaches and in all the deserts of the world and in each of those a million times a million suns, around which swirl millions of worlds, each different, each a question mark itself and each a possibility for new life, new knowledge and new places to be -- and we wonder, how could anyone, anyone, ask such a question?
The hubris in this might seem to reside in those who look at the stars and dream such incredible dreams, of flights to worlds unknown, of new civilizations and a humanity finally rising above its ragged roots. I suggest it is more in those who look at the stars and do not. Those who think we have done it all, those who do not understand, who do not grasp nor comprehend the incredible adventure ahead of us, and how we, We who are only a blink of an eye beyond the discovery of fire can even wonder "Why space?" or even "Why are we here?"
To those of us who know, it is obvious, We are here... to go there.
Go out tonight and look at the stars. And allow yourself to dream. Perhaps you too will then begin to understand the "Why" of it all...
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