From: David.Anderman@ofa123.fidonet.org
Newsgroups: talk.politics.space
Subject: "Selling" space
X-Sender: newtout 0.02 Nov 17 1992
Date: 17 Nov 92  18:07:26

        The space movement is doomed to failure until its leaders
recognize that their central strategy will not create a
spacefaring civilization. The principle tenet of the movement is
that it is possible to mobilize a large segment of the voting
public by inspiring them with past and future efforts of the
space program, and by reminding the public of the infinite
wealth in space, and of the manifest destiny of the United
States to explore and develop space.
        Unfortunately, it has proven difficult to convince the public
of the need to spend billions on manned space, and the prognosis
for a major growth in government space in the foreseeable future
is not good. There may be periodic surges of Federal space
spending over the next few years, but not nearly enough to get
you and me into space in our lifetimes. As the space activists
recognize that "selling" space to the public has failed, and
that the present path will not lead to O'Neill colonies in our
lifetime, the number of hard core activists dwindles, and the
hope for realizing the vision of the space movement recedes. 
        How has selling space to the public failed? Over the last few
years, enormous sums of money have been spent on convincing the
public of the value of space exploration. The United States
Space Foundation produced and distributed expensive public
service ads featuring prominent individuals such as Jimmy Carter
and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar promoting space; there have waves of
multi-segment television documentaries such as "Space Age",
"Cosmos" and "Spaceflight" depicting the rosy future of space
exploration to millions of viewers; movies such as "Star Trek"
and "Star Wars" show the future of manned spaceflight; and
aerospace corporations spend large amounts on publicizing the
value of space in the print media and television. The result is
a widespread but weak public perception that there is some
benefit from manned spaceflight beyond simple economics. 
        The impact of the space movement on this process has been
negligible. Space activists who devote their efforts to selling
space simply don't last long - either they burn out, or switch
to more interesting pursuits, such as internal politics. There
are exceptions, of course, but their impact is tiny.
        If anyone disputes this assertion - that space activists have
not had a measurable impact in changing public opinions on
space- then simple random samples measuring local perception of
space could resolve the issue. It is fairly trivial to hire a
graduate student at the beginning of a chapter's fiscal year to
generate a random sample of local attitudes on space, and to
follow up at year's end to measure any changes in these
attitudes (presumably this change would be caused by the
pro-space organization's activities). So, rather than making
assertions that chapters are making a positive impact on the
public, let's see the data!
        The more effective organizations in the NSS family of
organizations, SpaceCause and SpacePac, publicly support the
strategy of mobilizing the public on space, but spend their time
and efforts on influencing those that can be influenced - our
elected officials. Unfortunately, these organizations take the
relatively easy position of supporting the biggest manned space
boondoggle of whatever Administration is in power. This makes it
easy to garner contributions from aerospace companies, and help
from employees of these companies whose paychecks depend on
these mega-projects, but does nothing to get us into space. With
the public slowly losing interest in their tax dollars going
towards these expensive and largely unproductive manned space
programs, aerospace industry support for the "insider" politics
of SpaceCause/SpacePac necessarily increases, but the activist
community suffers.
        There has been a recent twist in this unpleasant state of
affairs: the emergence of the Delta Clipper program to a near
cult status in the space movement. Whatever the technical merits
of the program, we learned long ago that favoring one launch
services program over all others leads to disaster, as the
program with political support will crush all the other
competition, regardless of the merit of the competition. The
Space Shuttle fiasco cost us twenty years. If Delta Clipper is
able to destroy its competition as efficiently as the Space
Shuttle did in the 1970's, we are in for a long wait to get into
space. If you truly believe that the Delta Clipper is capable of
generating economical and reliable access to space, the best
thing to do is help create a market for the vehicle. Once a
sizeable market for launch services exists in this country,
McDonnell-Douglas, or whoever ends up developing a single stage
to orbit vehicle, will have no problem generating capital to
build the spacecraft. 
        We need to support continued and increased manned space flight,
but based on affordable, safe, and reliable access to space.
Space activists need to focus on the only hope for the future:
lowering the cost of their ticket into space. There are many
means of supporting lower launch costs: working to fully
implement the Launch Service Purchase Act; supporting the new
Lunar Resource Data Purchase Act (the "Back to the Moon" bill);
creating opportunities for existing and new launch service
providers; and reforming NASA to support, rather than crush, the
private space sector. This requires looking at space through a
new paradigm, one in which we finally admit that we don't know
which launch technology is the best, but rather we need to help
create a real market that will decide. This also requires some
real work, but compared to the task of convincing a large
segment of the American public that the current space program
will get them into space, (a clearly impossible task), it
appears to be relatively easy for the space activist community
to create the spacefaring civilization of which Gerard O'Neill
and his contemporaries could only dream.

--- Maximus 2.00