Beyond NASA: Dawn of the Next Space Age

The contest promises to be an exhilarating spectator sport, if only we can figure out the rules—which starts with sorting out the players. There are a number of possible ways to approach the job.


By credibility. The players are “real” or “not real,” “the ones who get the hot planes” vs. “the pud-knockers who dream of getting the hot planes,” in the words of the bartender at Pancho’s Happy Bottom Riding Club in The Right Stuff. The real players, as Keith Cowing of the Web-based NASA Watch puts it, “are the people who actually do stuff,” as opposed to “the space weenies” with “paper rockets” who walk around saying, “If you gave me this, I could do that” and are, demonstrably, “full of shit.”

By destination. They are Lunatics or Martians. They believe, in other words, in the Moon or Mars, respectively, as the next logical goal. The Moon because you can work out space problems there with a more or less real-time link to Earth, and there are resources there worth investigating, and observatories to be built. (And because, as Tumlinson puts it, “beyond the Moon you get laughed out of the boardroom.”) Or Mars direct because it’s the elephant in the living room—the only place we really want to go. (A third possibility: They are fence-sitters, gunning for a gravitationally neutral Lagrange point, there to set up an orbiting platform to launch flights to . . . wherever.)


By how well they play with others. They are with the
government or against it. We can develop “frontier-enabling technology” without NASA’s help. Or we can’t, and should collaborate with the space agency: The government provides the interstate highway system, for example, and we provide the cars.




But there’s another, more satisfying way to peer into these folks’ souls and sort them out: By their reasons for wanting to go. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s sci-fi novel Red Mars, the first Martian colonists—a diverse group of scientists known as the First Hundred—investigate their new domain. A debate quickly ensues.

“We really ought to make a run up to the pole,” says one.

“There’s no geological reason,” another replies.
“You just want to go. . . . We’re up here to get water. We’re not up here to fool around.”
“It’s not fooling around. We obtain water to allow us to explore, we don’t explore to obtain water! You’ve got it backwards!”

The exchange illuminates the chief competing impulses that propel all space-farers: exploration for its own sake versus exploration for a specific purpose, be it acquisitive or creative. It’s a difference in perspective: We are investigating how we fit into the universe, or we are trying to immortalize our own species. And here is perhaps the best typology of all. In a paradigm Tumlinson dreamed up, the space world fractures into three groups: Saganites, O’Neillians and von Braunians.


Saganites, named for astronomer Carl Sagan (1934â€1996), are the philosophers and voyeurs of the cosmos, intent on low-impact exploration that promotes a sense of wonder. They consider the universe an extension of Earth, and want space explorers to be politically correct pacifists and environmentalists.


O’Neillians take their name from Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill (1927â€1992), who imagined city-size colonies in space contained on vast, rotating platforms (think of the space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its spinning rings and artificial gravity). Getting people out of here en masse was the thing—not to kiss Earth good-bye in the rearview mirror, but to give it a chance, by consuming extraterrestrial rather than terrestrial resources. (An O’Neillian motto, riding a bumper sticker of his day, read: “Save Earth: Develop Space.”)


Von Braunians are, strictly speaking, the old guard, named for the V-2 and Saturn rocket-meister Wernher von Braun (1912â€1977). Von Braunians advocate a centralized approach: large expensive projects like the ones NASA undertakes, projects that ordinary people can be proud of but not participate in.