ear the beginning of Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, we're treated to scenes of a U.S. government official, Dr. Heywood Floyd, riding a commercial space shuttle to an international space station, for later transfer to an American moon base. Well, it's 2001 now, and the moon base remains a cinematic dream. And the Pan Am company not only doesn't run commercial flights into outer space, it runs no flights at all, having been dissolved by a bankruptcy court in 1991.
Since I'm a "rocket scientist" by training and experience, people often ask me why this column talks more about molecular biology than about the space program. The answer is sad and simple: for many years now, space has been mind-numbingly dull. Where molecular biology is offering astonishing new miracles almost every week, the space program is offering routine shuttle flights and unmanned rocket launches. And a new space station, yeah, but instead of serving as a waypoint to the moon and Mars, it houses a bunch of weird experiments that nobody really cares about. We've already seen two similar stations abandoned and burned up like so many vacant storefronts, so it really is very hard to get excited. And with budgets and safety standards tightening and tightening, each year there are fewer of even these humble missions.
Sure, NASA earns some press with the occasional Mars robot or Saturn orbiter, and you can rest assured I will cover these in loving detail when they occur--which isn't often. But really, the very existence of a "space program"--essentially a government monopoly on space travel--shows how painfully far we are from the dreams of Clarke and Kubrick.
Tough noogies to monopolistic NASA
The shuttles themselves are a 1970's technology, and are slowly but surely approaching the end of their projected 100-mission lifespans. We'll soon need new launch vehicles to replace them, but for 15 years Congress has been killing off programs with names like NASP, Shuttle II, Shuttle-C, HLLV, ALS, NLS, X-33 and X-34. And in 1982, when Space Transportation Corporation (SpaceTran) approached shuttle manufacturer Rockwell International about buying a space shuttle of its own--to set up exactly the sort of commercial space ferry Pan Am was supposed to be running by 2001--it was blocked from doing so by NASA.
"We're from the government, and we're here to help you not get into space." Thanks a lot, fellas. Remind us to help you not get into office next time.
But this week, California multimillionaire Dennis Tito has turned the tables on Kubrick and NASA. In America, nobody could legally sell him a space vacation, so in 1998 he turned instead to the new bastion of liberty and free enterprise: Russia. Losing the cold war has taught those folks a lesson or two, so they happily accepted $20 million of Tito's money in exchange for a rocket ride and a week on Mir. Then, when it became clear that Mir was in fact going down in flames, the Russians, in a fit of positively un-American customer service, switched his ticket to Alpha, the international space station which went fully operational earlier this year.
The monopolists of Washington, of course, turned the idea down flatly. But this time, as the Russians were quick to point out, the U.S. had no monopoly. Alpha is, by definition, the International Space Station, only parts of which are owned and controlled by NASA. For their own modules, the Russians were free to select any crew they wanted, by any criteria they wanted. NASA quickly objected that it would be unsafe to allow a civilian on board the station, particularly one whose command of the Russian language was poor. They even cited last month's fatal submarine-trawler collision as an example of what might happen.
These comments, finally, removed all doubt about NASA's intentions. That collision was not caused by the USS Greeneville's passengers, but by procedural shortcuts on the part of her crew. (Remember Titanic?) And Dennis Tito is not a "civilian," but a former aerospace engineer with California's prestigious Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who has been flight-certified after nine months of grueling cosmonaut training. We send people to war with less experience than that. And leaving aside the fact that Alpha's official language is English, the Russians themselves have stated that Tito's Russian is acceptable, and his adaptation to the barf-o-rama of zero-gravity is actually superior to many "real" astronauts.
Let's think about it for a minute: space station Alpha has to keep a Soyuz capsule docked at all times, to serve as a lifeboat in case of emergencies. But the capsules were not designed for this purpose, so after six months in the harsh environment of low Earth orbit, they have to be replaced. So a new one goes up every six months, and the old one is sent back to Earth for retirement. Since that flight is going to happen anyway, the additional cost of training and flying a passenger on board is trivial. Tito's $20 million is almost 100% profit, and in Russia that's a fortune indeed.
An endless supply of space tourists is already lining up behind Tito, so if the Russians screw up and somehow kill their passenger, or allow him to damage the station in some way, they stand to lose up to $40 million per year in desperately needed hard currency. Are they that stupid, these men and women who once controlled half the planet? In the end, the U.S. arguments carry all the weight and credibility of the "Deep Space Homer" episode of The Simpsons. Less, really, because the ironies of David Mirkin's script aren't lost on a space-hungry public. The problem is simply that NASA, after 40 years of control-freak dominance over every possible variable, is offended to find itself running a hotel.
Well, tough noogies.
No one owns space, we all own space
By law, treaty and basic human right, outer space is like the ocean: it belongs to all of us. Ever since its inception, the U.S. space program has been a slow and methodical beast, obsessed with safety and redundancy, with small steps rather than giant leaps. And with tiny crews, or even no crews at all--when it can, NASA loves to send a robot to do a man's job. But where did they ever get the idea that we, the people, wanted it that way? Popular support for the space program springs from one simple fact: we all want to go. Since the earliest days of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, we've been a nation of frustrated astronauts, imprisoned by the gravity of our planet and its bureaucracies alike.
Every year, NASA receives over 4,000 applications for astronaut positions, and these are just the folks who are serious enough to meet the minimum requirements and seek out the appropriate forms. Of these, only 20 are selected as astronaut candidates, and of those, the few who actually get to fly in space are the ones who dedicate their lives to the cause, passing the training course and then working hard hours for five years or more, never complaining, never speaking a public word against their highly politicized employer, until finally they're assigned as primary crew members on a real mission. And those are the lucky ones--all the rest of us can do is stare up at the stars and dream.
Until now. Admittedly, most of us don't have $20 million jingling in our pockets, but we probably could, someday, if we wanted it badly enough. And even if we can't, there will at least be lotteries and contests. There will be hope, and therefore excitement. All of a sudden, space is real for us in a way that it never was before. We don't have Pan Am shuttles to carry us to a giant, spinning space wheel, but suddenly we do have Soyuz rockets and a berth on Alpha.
By the time this column is posted, Tito will have arrived back on Earth in a Soyuz capsule identical to the one he rode up in. Ironically, during his stay he was barred from "unescorted" visits to the American-owned portions of Alpha, which his own tax dollars had helped to pay for. But upon his return to Earth, he has pledged to fight for the rights of future space tourists, to visit that highest of U.S. properties. Good for him. Good for all of us.
With so many billionaires in the world today--322 at Forbes magazine's last count--we can even dream of a day, not too far off, when private money funds large expeditions to the moon and planets. Perhaps the first landing on Mars will be by yacht, and the bootprints will belong to the family and friends of some future Dennis Tito, or perhaps even a Stanley Kubrick filming space adventures on location. The possibilities are limitless, space is exciting again, and NASA can lead, follow or get out of the way. But as of this week, keeping tourists on the ground is no longer one of their options. And if they object, well, just remember they work for us.
Wil McCarthy is a rocket guidance engineer, robot designer, science fiction author and occasional aquanaut. He has contributed to three interplanetary spacecraft, five communication and weather satellites, a line of landmine-clearing robots, and some other "really cool stuff" he can't tell us about. His short fiction has graced the pages of Analog, Asimov's, Science Fiction Age and other major publications, and his novel-length works include Aggressor Six, the New York Times notable Bloom, and The Collapsium.
