As one humorist notes, if space enthusiasts are correct that we should send humans into space wholesale simply because "mankind has a primal urge to explore", then why do they feel it necessary to keep working so frantically to try to pump up that urge? "What mankind really has a primal urge to do is sit in front of the TV set and eat."

This fact was brought home three decades ago, when Nixon's cancellation of the last three Apollo missions brought not a whisper of complaint from the public. And when NASA proposed, in 1969, a manned Mars program as the next step beyond Apollo, it was greeted with universal guffaws.

NASA could not even come anywhere near persuading Congress to back its fallback alternative: a large space station and a fleet of space shuttles to service it.

So, to try to retain as much of its bloated Moon Race-era funding as possible, it was forced back onto its last expedient: sell the shuttle by itself as a cheaper replacement for expendable rockets -- a line which actually required it to contradict what it had said about the shuttle's costs earlier, and to start lying through its teeth by factors of ten-to-one and more about the shuttle's low cost and high flight rate.

The moral, as Freeman Dyson says, is: if you're going to explore on the public dime, you'd better do so as cheaply as possible -- or else be very good at lying about the supposed practical uses of your exploration. Very few pioneers have ever become pioneers out of a sense of adventure. They have done so because of good old-fashioned economic necessity.

As a final note on the supposed intangible justifications for a big manned space program right now, I quote one angry response to my previous article: "For those Americans who do carry the fire in their heart regardless (or maybe because of) of the tragic loss of a few weeks ago, take heart. Humans will continue to sail the cosmos. They will return to build stations in orbit, return to the moon, and walk the rusty dunes of Mars. Only there will be one catch -- you will have to learn Mandarin to understand what they are saying."

Well, China may indeed run its manned space program at the frenetic pace this reader wants -- if it remains a dictatorship that uses its space program the way the Soviet Union did: to whip up nationalistic hysteria in an attempt to distract its people from their country's internal corruption.

If China becomes a democracy, it will unquestionably rein back its space program to the more reasoned pace favored by every other democracy -- which is hardly the same thing as canceling it completely. And until China becomes democratic, its economy will unquestionably be so feeble that its space efforts will present no real threat of any sort to the West.

Ahead of affordable pioneering a century from now, the one economic justification for a major manned space program in the reasonably near future would be something akin to Gerard K. O'Neill's monumental vision, in "The High Frontier", of a human race supplied with limitless cheap energy by giant earth-orbiting solar power satellites constructed from lunar material by giant orbiting colonies of humans.

Placing this idea is modern context is the 2000 edition of "The High Frontier", published by the Space Frontier Foundation. This really is a new book as it combines the late O'Neill's original text with about 50 pages of essays by various authors on why O'Neill's dream of this happening before the end of the 20th century didn't happen, what was wrong with it, and what is still right with it.

The introduction is by none other than Freeman Dyson. As he and the other authors point out, O'Neill's main point may very well be correct -- it is far from certain that there ARE any other possible energy sources on Earth itself, other than huge orbiting Solar Power Satellites, that will ever be capable of supplying humanity with the huge supply of cheap energy needed to lift most of the human race out of poverty without those supplies being exhausted in just a few years.

But, as Dyson also points out,

"O'Neill... certainly expected that the first large-scale human settlement in space would be occupied between 1995 and 2010. We now know that this will not happen. "The International Space Station... is in no way a fulfillment of O'Neill's dream. It will not be commercially profitable; it will not be producing anything of value commensurate with its cost; and it will not be a spacious and comfortable habitat... [I]t will not have access to lunar materials. " The ISS is not a step forward on the High Frontier. It's a big step backward, a setback that will take decades to overcome. "It's no wonder that the general public, seeing the irrelevance of the ISS to human needs, concludes that O'Neill's dream is equally irrelevant. It is up to us, the believers in the dream to explain what went wrong and why the dream still makes sense. "What went wrong was O'Neill's belief that NASA would provide the infrastructure to help him do what was needed... O'Neill's dream makes sense if, and only if, the cost of launching stuff from the ground into space can be drastically reduced. Present costs, using either the Shuttle or other available launchers, are roughly $10,000 dollars a pound. "Estimated costs for launchers now being developed by aerospace companies are roughly $1000 a pound. These costs are still to be demonstrated, and are probably as low as can be expected as long as we continue to use chemical rocket launchers. "The next big jump after that will require a 'public highway' launch system, with a stationary machine on the ground supplying the energy so that the payloads to be launched don't need to lift the weight of their own fuel... "The public is well aware that with present-day launch costs, human activity in space must remain a spectator sport, with a small team of elite performers paid for by the crowds of people who stay on the ground and watch the show on TV. O'Neill's dream was to open the sky to the crowds, to allow ordinary people to homestead the asteroids... "In my opinion, ordinary people will take O'Neill's dream seriously as soon as the cost of emigration for a family falls below a million dollars. At that price, only a small fraction of the population will have a chance of going, but the idea will no longer seem absurd. "At present-day prices, the cost of emigration would be at least a hundred times too high...With the next generation of rocket launchers, the cost will still be ten times too high. But with a public highway system, the cost might be reasonable... "I hope that the majority of readers of this book will be skeptics rather than believers in the O'Neill dream. For believers, the book may tend to raise unrealistic expectations. "Believers should be warned that the infrastructure described by O'Neill in 1976, with launches provided by the Shuttle and other Shuttle-related vehicles, no longer makes sense. "Believers must accept the fact that O'Neill's reliance on NASA to bring his dream to reality was a grand illusion. Believers must resign themselves to a long delay, probably as long as 50 years, before the dream will become practical. "But the real value of this book is the message it will bring to skeptics... [who] need to be convinced that the O'Neill dream can still make sense as a realistic future for our species, whenever in the fullness of time we shall deploy a new technology that reduces launch costs by a factor of a hundred."

Accompanying commentaries by John S. Lewis and George Friedman point out that O'Neill was wrong in saying that the only economically practical way to construct the huge Solar Power Satellites that he thought necessary to humanity's continued well-being is by mining lunar materials -- instead, a far better way is to mine near-Earth asteroids.

And they also point out that all the near-future steps necessary to start that enterprise are far better done WITHOUT human presence in space -- or with a minimum of it -- and without NASA controlling the process as a suffocating monopoly: "[R]equiring human presence places an enormous economic barrier in the way of asteroid resource exploitation..."

On this point O'Neill agreed: his proposed lunar mining town, extracting the materials necessary to build Solar Power Satellites for an acceptable cost, would be mostly automated, with humans visiting it only as occasional repairmen.

Lewis and Friedman conclude that the most productive ways for the government to encourage such space resource mining are to initially limit itself to funding the development of:

(1) deep-space propulsion systems (while leaving development of cheap Earth-to-orbit launchers to competitive private industry);

(2) miniaturized electronics and highly sophisticated autonomous Artificial Intelligence systems capable of carrying out complex deep-space operations with a minimum of human supervision;

(3) mechanical systems capable of mining asteroids in microgravity (which can be tested mostly using unmanned satellites and spacecraft).

Later, the government may perhaps also have a role to play in testing the ability of totally self-contained habitats to support human beings in space for long periods of time -- the same capability that will be necessary for any manned Mars expedition -- but that should be carried out at a more leisurely pace, and in the cheapest possible way.

In short, if both O'Neill and his followers are correct, the very survival of the human race in the next century -- without its collapse back into a state of worldwide poverty and war as the supplies of fossil fuels and radioactive fuels run out -- may conceivably depend on radically reorienting the space program away from NASA's current obsession with putting humans in space as often as possible, and indeed largely away from NASA itself.

Certainly it may be important to carry out initial tests and preparations for such an enterprise at the same time that we try to develop other ground-based forms of energy sources.

But what should we do in the really short run? If we cancel the Shuttle and the Station, there may still be a need for occasional launches of human beings into space during the next few decades. If we do so, what's the best way to do it? I will try to examine that question in the third and final part of this report.

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