The State Versus the Final Frontier
Posted by Thomas L. Knapp on Oct 25, 2009 in Commentary • 5 commentsOn July 21st, 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong became the first human beings to land on the moon. Just short of 3 1/2 years, Eugene Cernan and Jack Schmitt became the last humans to date to repeat the accomplishment. A grand total of 12 human beings, all Americans, have set foot on Earth’s nearest neighbor.
That shouldn’t be surprising: The moon landings were part and parcel of a political “space race” between the US and Soviet governments. The intent behind that race wasn’t to open a gateway to the stars for humankind; it was to score stature points in the decades-long game of “Cold War” posturing. As President John F. Kennedy allegedly told NASA director James Webb, “Everything we do ought to really be tied in to getting on to the Moon ahead of the Russians [...] otherwise we shouldn’t be spending that kind of money, because I’m not interested in space [...] The only justification for [the cost] is because we hope to beat [the USSR] to demonstrate that instead of being behind by a couple of years, by God, we passed them.”
Since the suspension of the lunar landing program, government-dominated manned space travel has been limited to things like hoisting military and commercial satellites into, and doing limited scientific research in, Earth’s orbit. Exploration of the rest of the solar system — of the rest of the universe — has been limited to unmanned missions, and government space agencies have jealously guarded against (and in some cases brutally suppressed) private sector efforts to slip the surly bonds of Earth.
That jealous guardianship has recently begun to relax somewhat. Fans of private space exploration cheered on June 21st, 2004 as Mike Melvill, flying Scaled Composites’ craft SpaceShipOne, reached an altitude of 100 kilometers and became the first non-government astronaut. With two subsequent flights, Melvill and Mike Binnie won the Ansari X-Prize for Scaled Composites for fielding the first non-government, reusable, manned spacecraft.
Still, the state remains the dominant force in space travel and offers every indication of intending to maintain that dominance. There are two good (from government’s point of view) reasons for it to do so.
First, space travel is costly — and likely to remain more costly the longer government retains a grip on it. That means big money for NASA’s bureaucracy, and for privileged government contractors who produce expensive parts for expensive spacecraft. For the military-industrial complex, space exploration is just another way of siphoning money out of your pockets and into theirs through political pull rather than through free exchange. NASA’s FY2009 budget is $17.2 billion. That ain’t chump change — and NASA scatters that money over facilities scattered around the country, buying votes for its congressional patrons with every dollar spent.
Secondly, put yourself in a state official’s place for a moment. Imagine that you’re considering the merits of establishing a permanent colony on — to pick a planet not at random — Mars.
Yes, it’s a big, long-term project: Lots of job security for you, lots of money in play for your buddies at Boeing et al.
On the other hand, what you’re considering is sending a group of human beings to a new home 55 million kilometers from Earth (at its closest approach), and necessarily sending with them the technology to become self-sufficient.
Now ask yourself:
How long before that group decides that the natural next step beyond self-sufficiency is independence?
How long before you transmit the latest government regulation, order or edict to your “colonists,” wait a few minutes (minimum transmission time of about three light-minutes each way) for confirmation, and instead watch a digitized photo of someone’s middle finger roll off the printer in response?
For that matter, the moon is only 385,000 kilometers away … a lot farther than any expeditionary force has been sent to discipline recalcitrant “colonists” before, and it sits at the top of a deep gravity well. Easy for them to throw stuff at you; hard for you to throw stuff at them. Science fiction fans are probably familiar with Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, based on precisely such a scenario.
Bottom line: If you want to get off this rock, don’t expect government to help. Its incentives, both positive and negative, run in the opposite direction. Keeping you here is a lot more lucrative and a lot less risky. Eventually, you’re going to have to ask yourself which you value more — the stars or the state. You can’t have both.
Individualist anarchist great Lysander Spooner's classic critique of the U.S. Constitution: "No Treason No.6: The Constitution of No Authority" in the new and handy Pocket Subversion Edition. Also featuring Roderick T. Long's "Libertarian Anarchism: Responses to Ten Objections". 
“Just short of 3 1/2 years, Eugene Cernan”… Uh, no. “Just short of 3 1/2 years later…” would work. He was quite a bit more than 3.5 years old. lol
It’s clear that the establishment, led by grandchildren of mass murderers (one thinks of David Rockefeller’s grandfather ordering the slaughter in the tent cities in Colorado, e.g.) doesn’t want any frontiers, ever. Before they shut off the space frontier, they did a number on Antarctica. You should read the Antarctica treaty of 1957, and its renewal. They also did a number on the deep oceans, especially deep sea bed mining, with the law of the sea treaty, c. 1982. But the vast majority of the universe was closed to human settlement in 1967, and this was done very deliberately. See indomitus dot net slash space for several essays on the topic.
There is no way, presently, to be sure we even *can* send technology to, say, Mars to make colonists self-sufficient. For true self-sufficiency, you’d want to raise plants and animals. You’d want to raise children. And you’d want something to sell so you’d be able to engage in trade and commerce with others. Without a large Moon positioned just so, Mars might leave women infertile. Without oceans, it won’t have fish – 400 years to oceans on Mars by the most aggressive terraforming we know how to conceive today. (Forty years to Earth normal pressure, quite a lot longer to Earth normal partial pressure of oxygen.) It’s clear that we don’t know enough about any of these places, having utterly failed to live there for even a few years out of the last five decades, to say whether we could set up successful settlements, let alone self-sufficient or independent homes for mankind.
It is clearly worth doing. And a frontier, as Frederick Jackson Turner pointed out in 1893, is essential to the American mind.
Gerald Bull was murdered because of his interest in advanced space transportation technology. Everyone agrees to that fact. George Koopman is dead, and might have been killed, and would not have been driving on that road that night if he weren’t involved in advanced space transportation technology driven by commercial motives. My Space Travel Services project was deliberately and maliciously destroyed by government in 1991, and they admitted at the end that we had been engaged in a lawful sweepstakes activity all along. My space port in east Africa project was destroyed in 2001 by NATO policy pronouncements. And, yes, I have had other businesses destroyed by government.
Externally imposed coercion, also known as brutality, government, violence, viciousness, and oppression, is wrong. It is evil. It cannot do anything worth doing. All it can hope to achieve is control over some weak minded persons and the destruction of some challenges to the status quo.
If you contrast the last thirty years in personal computer technology (since Jobs and Wozniak began playing with printed circuits in their garage) with the last hundred years in space technology (since Goddard began to work on liquid fueled rockets) you might get a sense of where we would be without the boot of oppression on our necks. And you might think of the particular level in hell that filth like George Abbey belongs in for his role in holding back mankind.
But the reality to face is that extremely wealthy men became interested in space tourism in 2004. Richard Branson promised he’d be flying tourists in 2007. This year, after a successful test flight, his company is promising that they’ll be flying tourists in eighteen months – some time in 2011. It is rocket science, but that isn’t what is holding things back. Government interference has been extreme. Still.
A very wealthy friend of mine, Walt Anderson, sits in a prison in New Jersey, forced after eighteen months without bail or opportunity to prepare a defense to plead guilty to one false charge of tax paperwork error. He bought the Mir space station from the Russians in 2000, and NASA pressured Russia to force it into the Earth’s upper atmosphere where it was destroyed.
Very few very wealthy men have bought tickets to fly in space, mostly on the internationalist socialist space station. NASA has been jealous of that, but powerless to prevent it – they want to change the language of future agreements to prevent it, though.
So, smash the state. Or avoid it. “Kings of the High Frontier” is still the best way forward – with many thanks to Victor Koman.
Your thoughtful essay has provoked a couple of other responses.
We actually know when the first rebellion in space took place. If you read Bill Pogue’s “A House in Space” book he documents the Skylab astronauts refusing orders and “going on strike” for a couple of days. Their schedule was both over-loaded and continually shifting, and they finally gave up trying to satisfy the scum bag bureau-rats on the ground.
It also occurs to me to mention that, as you note, the USA military-industrial complex used to send people to the Moon. (Essentially all NASA contractors are mainly military contractors, aka death merchants.) About the same time (1969) that they got it together to put men on the Moon, they also got it together to fly passengers at supersonic speeds. Their system no longer does so. They screwed it all up with militarism at the airports after 1978’s deceptive “deregulation” of the airlines. They made passengers so unhappy and uncomfortable that wealthy people fly their own jets, or lease them, rather than visit the asinine airports. Since 1972 they stopped putting men on the Moon. Since 2003 or so they have stopped flying passengers supersonic.
Their civilisation has peaked. Their system is broken. It doesn’t innovate, it doesn’t work. Centralisation of authority and a command economy are incompetent to do anything useful. Free market competition and agorism are the path forward to innovation, lower costs, and greater success.
The people who lied their way into the Vietnam war and made $1.8 trillion in war profits (today’s dollars) taught their successors to lie their way into Afghanistan and Iraq where they have made about $2 trillion in war profits, so far. These are evil men and women who are not only willing, but quite eager and enthusiastic about butchering or cutting short seven million lives for Vietnam war profits, and on the same order of magnitude of lives for contemporary war profits. Their system is capable of slaughter, mutilation, gang rape, and destruction. Their hatred of everything outside their control makes it possible for them to thwart human understanding in some areas, limit competition in some areas, and hurt people and property in some areas.
But their mindless desire for total power and total control is imbecilic and, at its root, childish. They beat up the other kids to feel like they are in control, but there is no control.
The personal computer industry, the open source software revolution, the open source cryptography revolution, the Internet evolutions and revolutions, all make it clear that mankind are absolutely out of control. Best of all, it is clear that we cooperate and play well with others when we are least controlled and most left to take our own choices – nothing is more cooperative than finding a market clearing price.
So in the near term, the future is awful. Their civilisation is deteriorating before our eyes, their way of doing things continues to slaughter men, women, and children all over the world, and their desire for total power causes our friends and in many cases ourselves to be beaten, robbed, or killed by the several states.
But in the long term, the future is bright and cheerful. And the long term is nearly here. Their systems are failing, their economy has gone into paroxysms of collapse, their desperation is showing in their idiotic prescriptions for indefinite detention and their enthusiasm for torturing prisoners to death. Make no mistake, we have to suffer a great deal more indignity in the near term.
The universe is infinite in every physical direction, and infinite across parallel narratives or time tracks. God created cornucopia, and we are beginning to see how very much is available all around us. The Sun shines 24 hours in space and bathes our Solar System with energy – more energy than our civilisation at its current rate of usage could consume in a trillion years. A single nickel-iron asteroid has more platinum group metals, detected by spectroscope, than have been refined in the entire history of mankind. Technology now allows us to create pleasure palaces in virtual space that we shall soon see realised in physical space. Nothing that we imagine is denied to us, except by our own stupidity, our own timidity, and the brutality of those who coerce and manipulate us.
In the long and vast history of mankind, all attempts to subjugate humanity have failed. Think of it. All of them.
The dark age that was Rome ended, and a thousand years of monetary stability, trade, and commerce brought forth the Italian Renaissance, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, and we stand on the shoulders of those free men and women. The dark age that is American military empire will also end. And tens of thousands of brutal butchering war profiteers will burn for eternity in the flames of perdition. I can hardly wait.
I gather that the chinese are pressing ahead with manned space travel, to Mars, due to happen in 2012 or so.
I hope they succeed, and that they are not discouraged from further exploration and expansion to permanent space-stations, because I do believe that space colonisation is one of the very few goals, perhaps the only one, which would make sense of the last 12,000 years of human activities.
Of course I meant 2014 unmanned, and 2040 manned! ( ooops )
Sadly, it is not the Chinese people as a whole who are engaged in this pressing ahead. Rather it is the violent, oppressive, murdering, torturing, stealing, raping, and looting government of the People’s Republic of China that makes pretense to be doing such things.
Personally, I regard hope as a waste of time. I would rather pray than hope. I would much rather take action.
I will say that I would rather see every Chinese government launch fail, and every Chinese government facility blown to smithereens than see even one Chinese government bureau-rat astronaut reach orbit. Fuck these filthy anti-propertarian authoritarian shits. Fuck them all.