opinion

Thinking ahead --- and above
by Eric Jackson

As regular readers may have noticed, I do not worship with the cult of The Market God. Belief in "The Invisible Hand" tends to distract a person's attention from the visible hands grabbing at his or her pocket. Plus I don't believe in the sacrifice of those citizens of nations possessing mineral wealth so that people in a few industrialized countries can look just within their national boundaries and pretend that The Market God is beneficent and merciful.

But then socialism, and the public sectors of capitalist societies, also have their failures. If you want to get down to the dialectic that Marx cribbed from Hegel, one would think that as it has been more than a century since the first elected socialist government led by the Australian Labor Party took office in 1904, and nearly a century since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, there would have been some theses and antitheses and new economic thinking.

In the United States, the latest new economic thinking on one side of the political aisle was so shocking for its time that it caused a dinosaur stampede. On the other side, mostly they just think about which lobby is going to pay for their next re-election campaign.

Along comes a wily Chicago politician, by no means a socialist but a man with a centrist default position unless it's to his advantage to be or do something else. He's got a couple of daughters of his own, so is not one to sacrifice young virgins to The Market God, but nevertheless he's unveiled a US federal budget that cancels one of the biggest government projects of all, the Constellation space shuttle, and that privatizes the business of space launches, including for the government's NASA missions.

I believe in NASA. I believe in space exploration. I believe in strong public sectors. But I also think that Barack Obama will actually boost the space launch industry by largely handing it over to private corporations, even though they will be subsidized in various ways so as to muffle any celebrations at places like the Cato Institute.

The current NASA Space Shuttles were much larger and orders of magnitude more expensive than they could have been --- and ultimately, more dangerous, too --- because their design was a compromise among government agencies overseen by Richard Nixon. That compromise allowed for heavy military payloads, but it has kept human space flights in low Earth orbit for decades. That compromise led to US launch facilities being eclipsed by the European one in French Guiana. That compromise limits the numbers of astronauts who can go to the International Space Station because NASA Space Shuttle flights are necessarily infrequent.

The replacement craft, the Constellation, was also a committee design driven by competing political considerations. The program was way above budget and way behind schedule. It needed to die and President Obama killed it. Now five private corporations --- Boeing, Blue Origin, Paragon Space Development Corporation, Sierra Nevada Corporation and United Launch Alliance --- will get contracts to get NASA astronauts to and from the space station and other missions. Virgin and other non-US companies also stand to get some of the business that would have been reserved for the canceled Constellation.

Boeing is a partner in the international Sea Launch consortium, which sends things up into space from a platform floating in international waters, in the Pacific Ocean on the Equator. They have done this about 30 times now.

Launching from the Equator adds an inertial "slingshot effect" that puts a satellite into orbit with less fuel and makes higher orbits more reachable. This is one of the main factors behind the success of the European Space Agency facility in French Guiana.

Launching from international waters extracts many governmental tax, regulatory and petty political hooks from the process, and puts an inherently dangerous activity in a place where there aren't any close-by neighbors.

But there needs to be a home port where components are assembled and loaded for maritime transport to the launch site. For Sea Launch, this is San Diego.

As space travel goes private, it will also spread to even more nations, and Panama would be in a good geographical and commercial position to be the home port for sea launches. We'd need some port facilities big enough. We'd need to train or import the skilled work force. We'd need a government that's wise and honest enough to let this happen, even nudge it along, but mostly one that's inclined to ruthlessly suppress anyone who tried to extort a bribe or kickback.

So what does the quotation at the top of this page have to do with this?

You see, to science fiction fans, privatized space flight is not at all a new idea. Back in 1941 Robert Heinlein wrote two stories for Astounding Science Fiction magazine, which in 1963 were merged into the novel Orphans of the Sky. That was about a corporate space mission gone wrong. The Jordan Corporation sent out a multi-generational interstellar space colonization mission on the good ship Vanguard, but along the way there was a mutiny that killed everyone who knew how to run the ship, which was then left drifting along in space with the progeny of the loyal crew holding the inner decks, the mutineers' offspring controlling the outer decks and constant, mostly low-intensity, warfare between the two groups.

Not being able to see the stars and being deprived of their intelligentsia in the initial fighting, the crew made a religion out of the company policy manual. "In the beginning there was Jordan...."

Panama might be able to get a profitable piece of the privatized space industry without having to worship corporations or markets. The implications of Barack Obama's NASA budget ought to become part of Panama's national discourse.