01/19/00

For over a hundred years men have been designing plans on how to explore space. The subject is like a century long chess game where each turn is made by a new visionary. The game got started with Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky making the first move. Then men like Robert H. Goddard and Hermann Oberth made their play, laying down basic strategy used by later players. Willy Ley and Wernher Von Braun made colonizing the moon and Mars the overall goal of the game. After that various men like James E. Oberg, T. A. Heppenheimer, G. Harry Stine, Gerard O'Neill, and many others, have tried working on the endgame, hoping to define the winning strategy.

The latest move is being made by Robert Zubrin in his new book Entering Space. His move is so good, I believe he's calling out check. Secretly, I think he believes he might even have mate. His book visualizes many, many moves ahead. His play sounds exceedingly logical, but it is easy to make false assumptions, so time will tell.

The book is very informationally dense with a careful analysis of recent ideas put forth on the subject of space travel, exploration and colonization. Zubrin evaluates a number of propulsion systems that would lead to travel to the moon, Mars, the asteroids, the moons of the outer planets, the Kuiper belt, Oort cloud, and nearby stars. This ain't Star Trek. It's Sir Francis Drake, Roald Amundsen, Robert Scott, Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton and all those other explorers who struggled mightily, and sometimes died. The study of long sea voyages and working in Antarctica probably best describes what it will be like to explore space. Zubrin uses many analogies with the age of exploration and exploring space to rationalize why mankind should spend the money to conquer the planets.

Science fiction is limited by publishers and the book buying public. I think up until the sixties when the space program got started, SF appealed to the same people who wanted to explore space. Then movies and TV made SF big entertainment. Fans were no longer space nuts or futurists. Writers decided the public wanted to read for fun and entertainment and not science. Science fiction flavored fantasies like Star Wars make a lot more money than science inspired books by the likes of Hal Clement, Gregory Benford or Kim Stanley Robinson.

Even though SF is one of the world's most popular settings for entertainment, there are damn few people really interested in space travel. How many people have signed the Think Mars petition? How many people are in The Mars Society? What about The Planetary Society and The National Space Society? A crude guess would lead me to believe that there is fewer than a half million people all together.

Zubrin brags about the NASA Pathfinder site getting 700 million hits during the week after touchdown as if that proved space exploration is popular. I doubt that he's taken into account that 700 million hits are not 700 million unique visitors. One page could generate many hits because it is composed of many individual files. Most readers would probably look at several pages. Also, some people returned many times to the site during the week. The novelty of Sojourner could have attracted a lot of people with no long term interest in space--such as clicking off of a CNN link, or because a school teacher assigned it as a task. Reading the news doesn't make you a space supporter.

The harsh reality of exploring space is it's very expensive and most people aren't really interested. Zubrin's book deals well with the first, but doesn't face up to the second. Well, most people weren't interested in what Columbus wanted to do either. The exhilarating reality of colonizing the moon and Mars is easily within our technological skills and low cost enough to be done by a willing government or even a private enterprise. Five billion a year would put any group or nation into the position of Portugal and Spain was in 500 years ago. There are individuals on this planet that could afford to colonize Mars out of their own pocket. Four million dedicated people, contributing $100 a month would also do the trick. Or 40 million signing up for $10 a month.

Zubrin carefully shows that exploring space beyond low earth orbit won't be a money making proposition. Although, Zubrin doesn't explicitly say it, space exploration will either be paid for by taxpayers or private nonprofit funding. None of the current group of presidential wannabes want space exploration, and the general public is against spending taxes on anything new right now.

Just after the success of the Mars Pathfinder mission two years ago, the student paper at the university where I worked polled a number of students. Of the students quoted, none showed any enthusiasm for space exploration whatsoever. I found this very depressing, but the reality is most people prefer spending money for pursuits that lead to immediate gratification. Space enthusiasts are like horny teenage boys who expect every pretty girl they fall for to reciprocate their love because their great passion justifies a meaningful and heartfelt response. They can't see beyond their desire to notice that both their physical bodies and their intensive feelings are invisible to most females. Space enthusiasts, with their soaring pioneering passions, fail to see that most people's hearts are cold and indifferent to the subject.