starship-design: The Space Phase

["L. Parker" <lparker@cacaphony.net>]

The Space Phase

Los Angeles - Nov 11, 2001
Why don't we have the spacefaring future we imagined? Several writers in
this space have provided answers. But a recent remark of editor Simon
Mansfield caused a perspective shift: rather than wondering why, he asked
"what happened?" Stepping back from the details brought the answer into
focus.

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 info@space-frontier.org
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