What happened was that the "Space Age" was in fact a "Space Phase," the last era of an Industrial Age now as dead and past as the Jurassic. Space has been trapped in the bloodless grip of bureaucratic-industrial zombies from that lost world, while the space movement has yet to find its way into the Information Age. So here we sit, Earthbound.

In every aspect, the Apollo Program and its Soviet counterpart marked the culmination of the Industrial Age. Ideologically-driven state mobilization of labor, great power rivalry, industrial gigantism, the primacy of non-consumer production, pyramidal management structures, a focus on engineering feats, the leading role of the military in developing and using technology - the list goes on.

The Moon race would have made perfect sense to Henry Ford, or the architects of the first Soviet Five-Year Plan, or Ulysses Grant. Lewis and Clark would have been as baffled as any post-Apollo teen by the rhetoric and methods of the space race. By no means does this detract from Apollo's achievement; simply, Apollo marked its time.

That time was coming to an end even as men walked on the Moon. The ability of government to command the hearts and minds of a vast industrial working class was fading, undone by Vietnam, assassinations, and the growing sophistication of an audience made savvier by exposure to the sales pitches of television.

We were becoming vastly more diverse in politics, social class, age and interests. No longer would government exhortations galvanize a nation, as they had through the Depression, hot and cold wars and the space race. That time was past, not to return.

Also past was the utility of the management methods of the Industrial Age. Governmental management by procurement worked during the great wars and forced industrializations of the last century.

But the rise of the Information Age marked faster decision cycles, radically flattened management structures and immense flexibility and responsiveness in the consumer sector. For government-led industry, the pace of change exceeded management ability. It was widely joked that in time the entire Pentagon budget would go to procuring only one infinitely expensive, utterly obsolete airplane - a joke NASA has proven in earnest.

Innovations in information technology helped discredit and weaken the industrial state: CNN and the fax machine did as much to end tyranny as the wiretap and AK-47 did to build it.

New communications and data processing tools revitalized and globalized capitalism, enabling market-driven technological development at a pace that left governments and nationalized industries in the dust.

Information technology critically enabled the globalization of capital flows, transferring vast power out of governmental and into capitalist hands. While government budgets remain immense, the amount of wealth in private hands is sufficient for private space missions to become financially feasible.

In the 1970s and 1980s the world changed, and the Information Age began. "Bits, not atoms," in John Negroponte's famous phrase, became the source of value, the draw for bright young people, the driver for utopian dreams.

And how did the space establishment respond? With bigger throwaway rockets and the multi-governmental International Space Station - an answer natural to Kennedy or Khrushchev, but utterly irrelevant in the new era.

Cyberspace speaks to the post-industrial generation in a way the old message of outer space cannot hope to match. The world of bits is hands-on, hobbyist, playful, creative, responsive, connective, participatory: everything government-procurement space programs are not.

NASA's message has been that space travel is safe and routine - yet still so dangerous that ordinary people must be kept out. That's Industrial Age thinking: bureaucratic-elitist, anti-consumer, slow to adapt to change. In the Information Age, extreme sports fascinate us, and industries arise to cater to that interest: Everest-travel companies for the brave, reality TV for the couch potato, clothing and gear companies for explorer and wannabe alike.

A Space Phase of the Information Age could look like that: a Spacefaring Web networking all levels of interest and participation, an industry of consumer-focused space companies, driven by creating and transmitting experience, opening an age of creative ferment in the technologies of living, working - and most especially, playing - in space.

What must happen next is for the space movement to learn the language of the Information Age, to advocate goals and methods that speak to the soul of the new machine, that advance rather than fight the trends of this Age, that speak to a youth raised not on rockets, tanks and steel mills, but on experience, image and change. Then - and only then - will we enter the Space Phase of the Information Age.

John Carter McKnight is a former corporate finance attorney and member of the Board of Directors of the Space Frontier Foundation. His weekly column, MarsNow, builds on the themes of this article and is available by email by contacting [email protected]

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