Is Rich People in Space the Best We've Got?

This post is not a rant against rich people - after all (I think I've said this before), I want to be one some day. But reading about SpaceShip Two got me thinking about why it is that $200,000 a trip tickets are being sold for 4.5 minutes of weightlessness. What happened to the grand visions of the 1950s and 1960s, when man was supposed to have been half way around the galaxy by now?

I was tempted initially to blame NASA. They are the ones charged with getting us "there", after all, and since we aren't there it naturally follows that it's their fault. Not so fast. The more I thought about it, I realized that our stagnation has little to do with NASA and everything to do with competition. Or rather the subtext of competition.

History lesson - in the late 50s and early 60s the United States faced an actual menace in the form of the Soviet Union. Our respective national space programs were the public fronts for propaganda and diplomacy. In effect we were able to communicate key strategic capabilities to our enemies through the proxy of our space programs - in other words, putting a satellite in orbit was an indication of the ability to deliver nuclear weaponry from space.

This doesn't paint the whole picture, but it's a large part of it.

The competition of the space race created the subtext within which NASA was able to make wondrous and very rapid advances. It's amazing to see how many barriers fall, as well as how many resources emerge, when government wants something done badly enough. Our success in delivering men to the moon was a self-defeating success, however, as in the end we found that the subtext that drove our efforts vanished when we succeeded in outpacing the Soviets.

So complete was our victory, in fact, that for the last 30 years we've been the victims of our own success. The subtext of competition doesn't work as a motivator to public sentiment when all the other competitors have quit the field. We have since been unable to come up with any other subtext compelling enough to justify our return to space en mass, and this is a failure of our society as a whole, not just NASA. Scientific research alone isn't ever going to be enough to justify a continuance of our space efforts when we've got cancer, AIDS, crime, poverty and any of another hundred issues to worry about at home. What worked in the 60s worked because people had a tangible fear of the Soviets that was soothed when we launched bigger, better rockets than they did. Bigger rockets have simply come to be seen as wasteful in our modern era.

What's to be done? A new subtext needs to emerge towards which the space program can strive. Competition in strategic weaponry is passe, but I'd suggest that striving to provide for strategic energy independence might be the trick - specifically, fusion powered by Helium-3 mined from the Moon.

This might be a little far fetched, so I'm not totally endorsing this plan yet. But seen in light of our current national crises of energy dependence and pollution, we have to start thinking big again. We have to start thinking about what things will free us from rogue nations who happen to sit on top of oil reserves and the effects of the use of those resources. Exploitation of natural resources outside our own planet seems to me to be the ultimate solution, and it will all be led by the newly refocused NASA.

Edit - More information about Helium-3 (this last article is very interesting).