For five decades mankind has stood in awe of the Road to Everywhere - space - but having taken a single step (if not a "giant leap") upon a distant shore, we have dithered and loitered at the Road's beginning with neither the imagination, courage, or strength of common purpose to truly set out on it. But after years of thinking and imagining, today I have a dream - not a dream of fantasies and false hopes, but of opportunities dimly glimpsed in the distance.
I have a dream of mankind united in common purpose, burgeoning out to the planets and stars like a dandelion seed-head blowing its spore into the wind - not neglectful of its Earthly problems, but not neurotic about them to the point of forgetting how to move forward or how insignificant immediate problems are in the cosmic vastness. A humanity excited about a future it intends to create, and thrilled to meet an ever-surprising universe full of unexpected twists and turns. A diverse humanity intent on becoming still more diverse, growing psychologically and physically into the infinity of new niches opened up by discovery and understanding of new places, deepened knowledge of what is already known, and more subtle technology to engage with it. A kaleidoscope of incomprehensible human-derived conscious complexity plying the vast currents of time and space, with every moment generating more surprises than can ever be fully exhausted.
But before we can build that distant cosmic playground, there is a lot of work to do - getting humanity to set foot on the Road once again, and this time to keep walking rather than step back and admire our own past boldness from the safety of terra firma. Pure government space programs have failed miserably to keep humanity on the path and moving forward - in fact, our capacity to explore beyond this planet has gradually decayed with time while budgets shrink, costs explode, skills are lost to an aging workforce, infrastructure erodes, and objectives become ever-more humble. Governments are not made of visionaries looking beyond the horizon to reach new glories for their nation and species - they are by and large made of shallow, narrow-minded characters with parochial agendas and selfish motives. If by sheer coincidence their agendas align with something that serves mankind on the largest scales, the happy alliance comes with a firm expiration date: The very hour, minute, and second their immediate interests cease to be served by the larger ones.
This is not a broadside on politicians - after all, they come from the publics that elect them, not out of some Pandora's Box full of everything useless and corrosive to human endeavor. In fact, governments are also limited by the fact that they cannot be better than the people they govern for very long, and the American people - while they have always appreciated the drama of a great human mission and the beauty of a great robotic mission - have almost zero commitment to space exploration as a national priority, and are minimally concerned (if at all) when budget hawks start disemboweling the NASA budget with their talons. Any generalized political state simply has too many other priorities to maintain, let alone build on current achievements in space - at least at this stage in the process. Eventually governments will see the clear and immediate benefit of continually pushing boundaries in space, but for now they have, by necessity, retreated from leadership.
Nor has the aerospace industry stood up to the plate in several decades of multi-billion-dollar profit margins. Because they have overwhelmingly done business with government institutions and been paid guaranteed profits, the costs of their space technologies have largely been externalized on to military budgets that can afford them, neutralizing any economic incentive to reduce costs that might over time have brought spaceflight within the domain of millions. Instead, costs accumulated like plaque in an artery because there was no incentive to reduce them, no mechanism to weed out unnecessary expsenses, and no institutional ambition to pursue lower costs through radical innovation. And thus companies who were envisioned in the 1960s to by now be flying their own commercial spaceplanes to orbiting hotels or even to the Moon are still flying subsonic jet aircraft, but with far fewer comforts and a lot more passengers squeezed in. With only one very recent exception, business has totally failed to put mankind back on the Road to Everywhere, and has instead been complacently riding the same dampening wave into entropy as the government.
As for those of us who privately advocate for boldly pursuing humanity's destiny out in the black, our record has been less than pitiful. Alarmed at the stagnation of our space program, private organizations were born to give voice to those who continued to believe in the dream (albeit with different emphases) - groups like the National Space Society and the Planetary Society, as well as many others with more specific focuses and fewer members. Congress is occasionally subject to letter-writing campaigns by these organizations - campaigns that have sometimes stopped a probe here or there from losing funding, but have never managed to push the status quo forward, let alone brought about a bold new vision for the nation as a whole.
The lesson is that without broad-based, multi-faceted participation, all three of these sectors are almost completely useless toward expanding human civilization into space. Government has more than enough money, but lacks both interest in the subject and the wisdom to invest wisely in pursuing it. Big, infrastructure-heavy business is risk-averse to the point of stagnation, and thus refuses to accept the risks of innovation that would allow the industry as a whole to move forward. And citizen groups, despite a few tentative steps toward funding their own small space missions, still by and large are unable to marshal any level of resources to back up what is mainly symbolic advocacy. But what if the strengths of one could be used to overcome the weaknesses of the others? How incredible would the potential of such cooperation be?
And indeed, something like this is in the initial stages of transforming the space community: A massive paradigm shift is slowly transforming how NASA contracts with aerospace companies, due to the Obama administration's embrace of commercial services contracts and milestone-based developmental awards - an approach that rewards accomplishment rather than attempt, and incentivizes lowering costs because the price is agreed upon before the company knows for certain how much they will have to spend. So, along the way, the company has an imperative to do things more efficiently lest their overruns impact the bottom line - an impact that cannot be passed on to the consumer with a fixed-price contract. Both government and industry sides of the equation are being affected by the paradigm shift, and modest derivatives are already being seen - but these changes are slow, and really only one company, SpaceX, is driving them forward to meet their full potential. It's not enough.
One company seriously trying to get mankind out into space is not enough, and if they succeed at everything they try, will likely still take decades to even begin walking the Road beyond Earth orbit. So, I have a dream, and in it the paradigm shift extends to public advocacy organizations as well as to government and business, adding the power of numbers and distributed wealth to the equation.
Imagine, if you will, an umbrella organization encompassing individuals, businesses, scientific institutions, and advocacy groups - everyone who is directly involved with or personally committed to expanding human civilization out into the universe. Imagine it is a semi-democratic institution where people, companies, and NGOs put money into a general fund and then, according to whatever weighting is given to the amount of money donated and the number of people represented by it, votes are taken on what investments to make with it - some for-profit, some PR / educational, some scientific. Think of it as the legislative body of all people and organizations interested in space, pooling resources and appropriating money toward the direct purpose of human colonization of space - something that doesn't come anywhere close to happening in the US Congress or any other national legislature.
In this body, whose exact procedural details are an exercise for later development, the interests of Business, Science, and The People are balanced and synergies cultivated. Each sector develops its own internal agenda, coordinates overlapping parts with the other two, and reaches compromises on conflicts. Business participates in order to get a shot at the large and growing pot of communal wealth the organization can invest in their projects, as well as to network; science participates to get a valuable additional funding source beyond traditional grants; and individuals and citizen groups participate to keep the other two honest and focused on the dream, as well as to keep them in touch with the motivational base of the whole endeavor.
Business sends anything into space that will make money; science sends instruments into space to bring back data; but The People are there because they want to go into space, and the three sectors would provide valuable reality checks for each other. The citizen groups and individuals can encourage both Business propositions and Science research that get them closer to their goals; the Science sector can encourage and support both Business proposals and citizen initiatives that advance science; and the Business sector can support Scientific research proposals and citizen initiatives that will help them close business cases. The more people there are from all three sectors, the more money there is in the pot, and thus the more people will come in the future to get a piece of it in exchange for chipping in - because some will get back directly a lot more than they put in, while others will be content to use their legislative role to create a more favorable environment overall.
I see no reason to believe such an organization could not happen, and I also see no inherent limit to its size and economic power. In fact, the more I ponder the birth and growth of such an organization, the more two highly evocative words keep springing to mind: The Federation. Obviously this wouldn't be a government per se - at least, not in the foreseeable future - but it would increasingly come to resemble one as it grew, and it would be a body with human expansion and exploration right at the core of its institutional being. Can you imagine such objectives being at the heart of an organization with hundreds of millions of dollars at its disposal? Billions? Tens of billions? Hundreds of billions? I can, and I do imagine it. But as dizzying as this dream is, to get anywhere it would have to start somewhere, and where exactly could such a heady future possibly begin without a massive up-front input of wealth?
Like all things, it would begin humbly, in ways that don't in the least suggest the glories that might lay in its future: One person and a website, inviting likeminded people to come and pool a few bucks for the Cause - money they would then democratically divvy up into a budget. The thing is, as easy as it is to just write a check to some organization and never hear from them again how it was spent, it's a lot more invigorating to directly participate in deciding what the money is used for - especially when the grand total of the budget is a lot more than your individual contribution.
I may be able to direct my $5 to some specific project in a given organization, but I would have no say in how the rest of the budget goes unless I'm lucky enough to be appointed to a board. But if putting in $5 to a general fund gives me a vote in how $500 is spent, that feels significant - like I'm directly making a difference. People would appreciate that - especially activists in a field where People Power is minimal to nonexistent, and effort is made on pure faith that some day it will all make a difference. There are millions of people worldwide who care deeply about this issue, and some of them would love a chance to play a direct role in shaping humanity's future, even if it starts with a few bucks here and there - and that is just the beginning, before a single business or large-scale institution takes notice and accepts an invitation to buy in.
I have a dream. And now I know where to begin.
2:48 AM PT: I should stress that whatever follows from this would merely be exploratory in the initial stages - I don't yet know the details of setting up an organization or the type of website that would be needed, let alone the accounting vagaries with a non-traditional budgetary process. So it's an exploration, not a cliff dive. But you will hear back on this, that much I can say.