Screeds
Monday, September 20, 2004
“Squire, Bring My Spaceship Around…”
January 5, 2004
All praise to NASA, the Jet Propulsion Lab, and all other parties involved in the success of the Mars Spirit probe to date. It’s a mighty achievement to send an unmanned craft across a gulf of so many million miles and have it reach its intended destination. No one has yet devised a way to implement reliable terminal guidance on such a vehicle, and the possibilities that might have diverted the probe from its proper course were various. A piloted craft has far more flexibility, even if the pilot can’t pull over and ask a bystander for directions. So just getting Spirit to Mars was a major feat.
After that, Spirit faced the hazards of planetfall. Though Mars’s atmosphere is thin, it still presents a friction barrier to an entering spacecraft. The provisions for heat ablation and withstanding incidental buffeting from atmospheric turbulence had to be substantial, and had to work without the intervention of human judgment. So also did the system for cushioning the landing impact, which could easily have destroyed the probe and rendered the rest of the voyage irrelevant.
Finally, there was considerable suspense over whether Spirit’s motion systems and sensor arrays would work once the probe was on the Martian surface. So far, the results have been everything one might have hoped. Spirit is moving and transmitting pictures back to Earth as we speak.
In a year that contained one of the worst disasters ever to befall the American space program, a success like this one is heart-lifting indeed. But don’t expect too many such. The political incentives are against them.
Spaceflight and space research are about as bad a fit to the dynamics of democratic governmental decision making as your Curmudgeon can imagine. The constituency for them is composed almost entirely of selfless idealists. Their costs are substantial, but such expenditures are difficult to defend on the basis of immediate gains to “the nation,” “society,” or anyone in particular. Though a program’s goals may be inspiring and it may open to enthusiastic support, the interval between its inception and the achievement of its goals leaves a lot of time for its opponents to attack it; any misstep along the way will provide a rationale. Almost as bad, when success finally arrives, the tendency of the political Left is to efface the significance of the achievement and ask why so much money went to space “when children are starving in our inner cities.” Truth be known, even some on the Right have fallen to that temptation.
Spaceflight is the province of visionaries, a species notoriously in short supply in government.
Yet spaceflight seems like a natural for governmental involvement. It’s big. It requires lots of money. It shares many technologies with the military sciences. The skill set required of an astronaut makes military aviation a perfect place to look for one. The research spaceflight makes possible provides huge benefits for all mankind, and huger ones to the superpower that masters it.
But that “vision thing”...how does an organization whose operations are dominated by bureaucracies and the decisions of whose masters are subject to the “public choice” effect supply itself with enough of that, and protect it from external evisceration for long enough? How can a vision of Man spread throughout the galaxy, or even throughout the Solar System, compete with the vote-trolling incentives and Parkinsonian dynamics that control our federal government?
To your Curmudgeon, the picture appears bleak. He’s been hoping for a strong private space research initiative to spring up for more than a decade. America has enough daring entrepreneurs and investors. So far, there haven’t been many developments.
Which raises the question: what sort of governmental structure would be most friendly to, and supportive of, a program of space research, or, for that matter, of any other sort of initiative that shared spaceflight’s major political characteristics?
First and foremost, it would have to be a structure that provides latitude and copious resources to individual visionaries. Vision is rare in government because it’s tied to courage and initiative, commodities that flee from bureaucratic rules and procedures. So if a government possesses a bureaucracy but wants an energetic space program, the direction thereof must be in the hands of a single man, or at most a very small committee, immune to interference by the bureaucratic machine.
Second, it would have to be a structure that could resist the incentives that cause “raiding”: the transfer of funds from one ongoing enterprise to another that’s currently more popular. Raiding is prevalent in a democratic government; the constant search for voting blocs to buy guarantees it. Since the active constituency for space research will always be small, it would be perpetually vulnerable to starvation-by-transfer in a democratic order.
Third, it would have to be a structure which allows an enduring alignment between the political power and the visionaries. An elected representative government reduces the probability that such an alignment of desires and enthusiasms can be achieved. A representative government with a high rate of potential turnover, such as the House of Representatives, is the very worst kind for this purpose, since incumbents who support the space program are vulnerable to attack by aspirants on that very basis, for reasons explained above.
Fourth, it would have to be a structure that would tolerate severe setbacks. Once again, representative governments composed of democratically chosen officeholders are vulnerable here. Note how even the most disastrous federal programs are always characterized as “necessary,” and by some interpretation “successful,” by those who have tied their political fortunes to them. No one who has to face the voters, or any comparable group capable of removing a ruler from power, wants to be associated with failure, or defend a failure in any way—and failures in space exploration are too spectacular to be hidden.
The ideal structure would be an absolute monarchy, ruled by a space nut.
Now, just how badly do you want to put a man on Mars?
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