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starship-design: Smells Like Teen Spirit



Smells Like Teen Spirit


The Spacefaring Web 3.10
by John Carter McKnight
Scottsdale - May 14, 2003

Before long, a private vehicle will make a successful suborbital flight.
That flight will mark a passage from adolescence to adulthood for the space
community, an achievement of independence from the stifling paternalism of
stagnant government programs.

The efforts of the entrepreneurial rocket companies have been reminiscent of
the ritual that marks the passage to adulthood in our culture - not the
Confirmation or Bar Mitzvah, but the drivers' license road test.

Like driving, suborbital flight is no big deal to the adults at NASA and the
Russian Space Agency, who mastered it a generation ago. Everyone else has
been working towards that unglamorous rite of passage, not seeking to storm
the heavens or revolutionize the world, but merely to re-create Alan
Shepard's flight of forty years ago. To get the rest of the space community
its drivers' license.

While the small rocket companies prepare for that suborbital Department of
Motor Vehicles exam, the X Prize, some still cling to adolescence, turning
with cynicism from the real to their fantasies of the ideal.

Cynicism and utopian idealism go hand in hand - both are rejections of the
possible in favor of the ideal. The space cynic considers any constructive
action by NASA not just unlikely but impossible, and treating with the space
agency akin to dancing with the devil. The utopian rejects all current
efforts as dangerous distractions from the "real work" of bringing about a
spacefaring paradise.

A recent press release <http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-base-03b.html>
by the Moon Society and Artemis Society provides a textbook example of that
bipolar adolescent attitude in action. The organization rejects "other
groups'" strategy of engaging audiences with a credible message. Rather,
they implicitly favor preaching doctrinal purity even at the price of public
incredulity, going on to reject the notion of establishing a consensus to
build upon rather than pushing for "utopia now."

Taking a pouty swipe at those engaging in the political "art of the
possible," referring to the Space Settlement Summit effort ( The Spacefaring
Web 3.07 <http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-03y.html>, the Moon
Society/Artemis Society writes that "several other space advocacy groups now
say they are ready to publicly espouse the idea of space settlement after
years of being afraid to do so very loudly for fear it sounded to 'way out'…
but, as always, failed to support any plan directly targeted to promote
space settlement."

After wingeing that the grownups haven't given them their whole Christmas
list, they go on to endorse "the most realistic and achievable method for
encouraging private enterprise in outer space."

A media program? Investor briefings? Low-cost rocketry? No - the "Space
Settlement Initiative," a system for recognizing extraterrestrial real
estate claims.

Bear in mind that this press release was issued the day a crew departed for
the International Space Station - by Soyuz. On a day when the United States
had no means of sending humans into space, when humanity's entire stock of
flightworthy spacecraft consisted of a few steel balls sitting in Russian
warehouses. The level of wishful thinking, of willing disengagement from
reality, is staggering.

This is not to condemn Alan Wasser's Space Settlement Initiative
<http://www.spacesettlement.org> on its philosophical merits. As a
discussion point, a proposal to shape future efforts, the Initiative has
much to recommend it, and is superior to many competing space property
rights schemas in the literature. As a concept, the Initiative is excellent
work.

As a rallying point for political action today, its choice by the Moon
Society/Artemis Society is a breathtaking rejection of adult engagement with
reality as it stands today, reminiscent of the people who consider
themselves "residents" of online gaming worlds rather than the disappointing
land of meatware. It is Peter Pannishness of the worst sort, and an insult
to the people getting their hands dirty in the Mojave in an attempt to earn
the space community's way to adulthood.

The Moon Society/Artemis Society is not alone in clinging to adolescence.
For the Baby Boom generation, efforts to re-create an Apollo program for the
Moon or Mars are an attempt to regain their Camelot, that high school
team-spirit feeling of solidarity, enthusiasm and purpose.

Those of us a bit younger felt that magical teen hormonal rush in the late
1990s, in the founding days and nights of the Mars Society and the Roton
rollout. Recession and robotic failures dashed us with adult reality just as
Vietnam and urban riots did our forebears.

There's a difference between healthy idealism and manic-depressive teen
obsession. It's an easy distinction to lose, especially in a community
united around enthusiasm. The impulse towards space is driven by the majesty
of the universe, by the sense of infinite possibility in our expansion into
the cosmos. Heady stuff, and passionate engagement should arise from our
grand visions.

The mature attitude, though, charts a course between grandeur of vision and
the boundedness of the possible, between the future we would create and the
present we must create it from. Immaturity lies in living in our castles in
the sky, in refusing to sully our dreams with reality.

Religious conservatives refer to this adolescent fantasy as "immanentizing
the eschaton," of trying to live in the transcendent moment rather than the
mundane world. At the other end of the spectrum, Lenin called the socialist
utopianism of leftist dreamers a "childhood disease," to be outgrown through
engagement with "objective conditions."

The Moon Society/Artemis Society press release, and much of the commentary
on future space transportation, manifest that "childhood disease." They
should be quarantined with "space mumps," the symptoms being an urge to move
right into castles in the sky, coupled with a sullen resentment of
unglamorous reality.

Much of the space-education effort displays space mumps symptoms. "Getting
kids excited about space" is pretty much a direct translation of
"immanentizing the eschaton." It's a putting of the excitement cart before
the reality horse.

Space education programs fall flat because the genuine excitement of
hands-on engagement with something uniquely, generationally new and timely
is simply absent. Rather than remedy the problem by advancing space access,
giving rise to genuine passion and interest, these programs attempt to
generate enthusiasm in a way transparently phony to kids, who have a
finely-honed nose for the foolishness of adults trying to act like
teenagers, whether in trying to recapture their own youth by imitating the
young or in trying to talk to them in their own language.

There was little need in the last decade for programs, governmental or
nonprofit, to get kids excited about computers. Why? They were exciting. The
time was right, the technology was available, malleable, and eminently
suited to creative play. Space technology isn't there, and all the wishful
thinking, and "space is kewl" phoniness won't change that fact.

The problem isn't youthful enthusiasm - it's the divorce of that enthusiasm
from appropriate circumstances, like 20-somethings still hanging out at the
high school football games. There will be a time when space property rights
will top rational space advocacy agendas. But not today . There will be a
time when most bright, imaginative kids will immerse themselves in the
reality of space access. But not today. There will be a time when we unite
for an exciting push out into the cosmos. But not today.

Today we're confronted with workaday tasks of engineering, finance and
marketing, with the long-neglected foundational work that must precede
sustainable space development. Much of it is about as exciting as
refinancing a mortgage - but just as necessary for our future.

We have to get up in the morning and go about the workaday tasks of ensuring
interest in space - in real space deliverables, not orbital sky castles or a
Red Eschaton - and cheap, safe, routine access to Earth orbit. Wishful
thinking and pouty utopianism can only keep us from our adult
responsibilities. If we need to feel that teen rush again, well, there's
always rock & roll.

The Spacefaring Web is a biweekly column © 2002 by John Carter McKnight, an
Advocate of the Space Frontier Foundation
(http://www.space-frontier.org/Projects/Spacefaring ) Views expressed herein
are strictly the author's and do not necessarily represent Foundation
policy. Contact the author at kaseido@earthlink.net