Building Alpha Town
The International Space Station as a Precursor to
the First City in Space

Testimony Before
The House Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee
Washington D.C., April 9, 1997

Rick N. Tumlinson
President – Space Frontier Foundation


It is early in the 19th century. Lewis and Clark have just returned from exploring the West. Excited by their findings, President Jefferson declares the region to be a Federal Reserve. A new Waggonautics and Wildernautics Agency is created to mange the frontier. Scientists are consulted as to what to do with this new land, and government engineers called in to develop a new Conestoga Wagon and Log Cabin capable of dealing with the extreme conditions encountered by the explorers.

Some thirty years after the original expedition a small but relatively high tech cabin is reaching completion some hundred miles west of the Mississippi. Serviced by a completely self sufficient giant Conestoga Shuttle, the cabin faces delay after delay as government priorities shift, and there is doubt as to if it will ever be ready for its first four Wildernauts. As endless debates between engineers and scientists continue as to its usefulness, with some proposing the development of unmanned wagon trains to lower the risks to humans...an entire generation of potential pioneers are denied the chance to move out into the new world...


Written Testimony
(A much abridged version of this testimony, appearing under the title: "NASA: Landlord or Lewis and Clark", appeared in the Wall Street Journal)


The International Space Station has been delayed again, sliding from an initial planned deployment late this fall to sometime next year. This is not much of a surprise to NASA watchers, as it has already been pushed back some dozen times since the original 1992 completion date announced by President Reagan in 1984. Along with each delay the cost has also increased, mushrooming from the original tab of $8 billion dollars to the almost $40 to $100 billion dollars it is running today. There have also been so many shifts in its alleged purpose as to make the projects' current goals almost indefinable. In fact, when pressed, NASA managers now say the goal of building the station is to learn how to build a space station.

So what do we do? Cancel it? No. We could have done so a few years ago, and in fact I was one of those leading that fight, but now we are too far down the road to give up. Most of the major elements are already built or close to completion. Tens of thousands of Americans and workers around the world have sweated for over a decade to make this thing fly, and the damage to our new and old space industries would be devastating. Finally, to walk away would send a terrible signal to our children and the people of the world about America's ability to lead them across President Clinton's "bridge to the 21st century." So, since there is no lemon law that applies to giant government projects, I suggest it's time to start making some lemonade.

The first thing to do is to recall the space agency's' mission in our society. If you asked that question of the taxpayers who fund it, they would probably answer that NASA's job is exploration. NASA is today's version of Lewis and Clark, its job is to blaze new trails, to be pathfinders, to explore, to push back the human horizon...

But NASA can't afford to do these things, as its budget is increasingly being sucked into the station and space shuttle programs. Put another way, our proud explorers have been saddled with the job of managing a building in space and driving the delivery trucks to keep it supplied. Thus, exciting news about possible past and present life conditions on Mars and Jupiter's moon Europa can't be thoroughly checked out, and there is little or no money to develop new leading edge space technologies. Meanwhile, its bureaucracy has set up shop just a hundred miles overhead, claimed low Earth orbit as its own, and any development and exploitation of the territories it has explored so well in the near Earth domain is stifled. It is as if Jefferson, after hearing the results of Lewis and Clarks' expedition, had decided to turn the west into a federal reserve, banning all settlement and development.

So why do we have a crack team of explorers acting as landlords? After all, when stripped of the space mystique, the station is merely a combination port, hotel and research lab in orbit.

It will have almost the same categories of costs and overhead as any other such facility on earth. Under government management and protected from free market forces one can be sure those costs will be sky high (or higher in this particular case). These costs mean a continuation of the self fulfilling prophecy of space being too expensive for all but deep pocketed government players. Not only will money America could be spending on exciting exploration projects such as the search for life be going to pay utility bills, but the high costs will freeze out any who might wish to experiment with new products or carry on scientific research. In the end, the space station, far from being the next logical step towards the true opening of the space frontier would be the bar across the door to our future. You see, there's a funny little rule about settling new frontiers – Nobody stays until somebody pays. And in our society, it is industry, products and services that write the paychecks.

To make matters worse, the bureaucracy that runs the facility has no time nor inclination to support commercial ventures. If an entrepreneur were to walk into NASA with a billion dollars and try to rent a rack on the wall of the station to house a potentially groundbreaking experiment, they couldn't do it. There is no system to allow for such activities. There is no way to put together a fundable business plan based on the station. No one can you how much a kilowatt of power costs, how much an astronaut's time is worth, or even how to get your materials and products there and back. Most likely, even as they were trying to figure out these basic business questions, the agency would be bartering away the needed space to a foreign partner in government to government deals.

This is what must be changed. Running the station is the wrong job for our space agency. Let's face it, such mundane tasks as being a landlord or truck driver are not what an organization like NASA is designed to do. NASA is an exploration and advanced research organization, not a construction, trucking and building management firm. Those are jobs that our private sector does, and does very well, in every other environment on Earth, from downtown Manhattan to the extreme conditions of the North Sea.

The way to flip this entire equation on its head is simple. As soon as the station is completed, it's management should be handed over to the private sector. Folks who understand things like the bottom line, contracts, and making money. The space station partners should form an international authority like those used to operate sea or airports. This body will lay out the guidelines for commerce between the station and Earth and within the station between tenants. It will lay out the rules by which the commercial firms will play, enforcing laws on everything from copyright, to patents, to intellectual property rights and arbitrate disputes among users. It will then contract out to a firm or consortium the job of being the station's property managers.

The new commercial landlords will be responsible for everything from signing leases of lab space, fixing and collecting rents, hiring and firing permanent employees (for example, highly paid astronauts are not needed to operate laundry machines and cook stoves) and generally managing station operations. All with an eye to pushing costs down and the anathema to government employees, actually making a profit. The governments who funded and built the facility will of course be the first ones in, acting as anchor tenants, creating an early cash flow, and establishing its credibility as a stable platform for business interests.

To encourage timid business interests to participate in space, tax incentives must be created, just as any town here on earth puts special zoning and tax packages together to get new business to locate in their city limits. In a sense the space station partners will be acting like the city council in any town hungry for economic growth, new jobs and prosperity. This is a completely different mindset from today's "space is ours and you can watch on TV" attitude. In effect they will be hanging a sign on the docking hatch stating this new place in the sky is open for business.

Rather than a financial albatross that weighs down our aspirations in space, the station will become an economic engine that lifts new industries from the Earth out onto the frontier.

In this new commercial environment, firms that have been burned by the space agencies bureaucracy in the past, or those who have heard the horror stories of years long waits to fly, bumped flights or drifting cost estimates will at last have a stable environment in which to work. A contract will be a contract, a deal a deal, and if someone wants to work on a new potential wonder drug or process in secret, they will be protected by the same laws and contracts we enforce everyday on Earth. Old ideas like developing ultra high speed electronic components for computers, to formulating new medicines and treatments will be pulled out of the dead file and dusted off. New and untried or undeveloped ideas, like creating light weight high strength materials such as foam steel, or making new products like self lubricating ball bearings alloyed from titanium and lead can at last be tried. And wild cards we can't even imagine will be pulled from the deck of entrepreneurial ingenuity, as always happens when the game is not stacked, the rules are clear and the game open to all comers.

Using the station as an economic center as well as a research lab benefits everyone. Scientists, also critical of the station's high costs and ill defined support capabilities will also benefit from the stability of a well run building in which to work. They will also be able to do much more research with less money, as they will in effect be partially subsidized by the commercial firm's rent payments.

It will obviously be in the interests of all concerned to bring down the costs of getting tenants, customers supplies and products to and from orbit, as it is with any new commercial development here on terra firm. Thus, national rockets like the government run and operated space shuttles must become a thing of the past, and be replaced by privately run rocket fleets. Considered by many to be the key ingredient to successfully opening space to human settlement, cheap access to the frontier will come as a natural result of free market forces as launch companies compete to carry various payloads to and from this new commercial nexus in space. Additional payload space can then be sold to companies wishing to set up their own facilities, even to paying passengers, such as academics, commercial scientists or even tourists.

Many potential tenants of space stations, such as astronomers or those engaged in delicate crystal growth experiments need extremely stable platforms with which to work, for them the comings and goings of a bustling space facility will be unacceptable. Biologists working on easily contaminated experiments or creating vaccines for easily spread diseases may wish for isolated facilities of their own. Again, in this new economic based model for space station growth, market forces will determine and drive new alternatives.

To serve these divergent needs, other facilities will spring up nearby. For example, Russia's old Mir station, which under current plans might end up as orbital junk will be prime "adjacent" real estate. And the giant 17 story tall space shuttle external tanks that are now dumped into the Indian Ocean can be converted into new "buildings." Once seen as a potential threat to the station's funding by paranoid NASA managers, commercial firms wishing to convert these government surplus assets into new real estate will be encouraged to do so by tax and investment incentives in the orbital space enterprise zone, as precedents set on the station begin to spread beyond its airlocks.

As transportation costs drop and "space" in space becomes available, the first orbital hotels will be constructed. It may sound like pie in the sky right now, but tourism is one of the largest industries on Earth, and there are entire nations on this planet whose economies are based on the tourist dollar. NASA funded research has shown that when the cost of getting into space drops from today's' $5,000 a pound to about a $100 per pound (the long term goal of the commercial follow on to the NASA/Lockheed Martin X-33 rocket program) there are people who will pay for the ride, the same ones who now sometimes pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for global "adventure" tours.

As each new market sector is created in and around the station, economic forces go to work, and costs begin to come down. Soon will come the long awaited chance for average citizens like you and I and our children to go there ourselves. Before long, we will see the birth of the first true town in space. "Alpha Town" – "First Town" will be born.

Imagine, just as we enter the 21st century, the intrepid human and robotic Lewis and Clarks of NASA will be freed from going in endless circles around the Earth, and once again push out "to go where no one has gone before." Meanwhile, the shopkeepers and business people and entrepreneurs and settlers who invariably follow such explorations will move out into near Earth space and begin to build there a new human domain.

If one looks to history, each time careful exploration has been followed by the might of the free enterprise machine, miracles have happened, usually far exceeding and outpacing even the wildest dreams of those initiating the quest. Thus, I believe, if this model is adopted, it is quite possible that in your lifetime humanity will begin the irreversible settlement of space. And no more than a few decades hence stretched out above us in the night, for all on Earth to see, a string of tiny pearls of light, representing humanity's first community in the sky, will remind a pessimistic world that the greatest age in human history has just begun.


end testimony