THE PLAN:

THE UNITED STATES ELEVATOR.

FEDERAL GOVERNMENT SHOULD CONSTRUCT A LARGE-CAPACITY, UNIVERSALLY-ACCESSIBLE SPACE

CONTENTION 1: GENERAL ECONOMY

ECONOMIC COLLAPSE
NEW PUBLIC PROJECTS IS INEVITABLE IN THE STATUS QUOTHE BENEFITS OF THE STIMULUS WILL RUN OUT ABSENT MASSIVE

MIKE WHITNEY, 2010, 1-6-2010. FREELANCE WRITER CITING JOSPEH STIGLITZ, NOVEL QUOTES FROM MOODY ANALYSIS, THE STIMULUS KILLER <HTTP://WWW.COUNTERPUNCH.ORG/WHITNEY01062010.HTML>
of 2010

PRIZE WINNING ECONOMIST, AND

AVAILABLE

ONLINE

AT:

The economy is getting better, but will it last? Many economists don't think so, including those at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, like Paul Krugman and Martin Feldstein. They think the economy will begin to fizzle sometime in the latter part

when Obama's $787 billion fiscal stimulus runs out and consumers are forced to pick up the slack in demand. That's a safe bet, too, considering that unemployment will still be somewhere in the neighborhood of 9
per cent and households will still be digging out from the $13 trillion they lost during the crisis. The fact that the Fed is planning to end its quantitative easing (QE) program in early April, doesn't help either. That will just suck more liquidity out of the system and push long-term interest rates higher. When that happens, housing prices will fall, inventory will rise, and a surge

in foreclosures will put more pressure on the banks balance sheets. That's why the pros are so glum, because they know the economy needs a second dose of stimulus to stay on track, but the politicos are dead-set against it. Congress is afraid of the backlash from voters in the upcoming midterm elections. They'd rather drive the economy back into recession then risk losing their jobs. Despite the propaganda in the media, stimulus works. In fact, Goldman Sachs attributes all of last quarter's (positive) growth to Obama's stimulus. Here's how Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz sums it up in his China Daily article "Harsh lessons we may need to learn again": "Keynesian policies do work. Countries, like Australia, that implemented large, well-designed stimulus programs early emerged from the crisis faster. Other countries succumbed to the old orthodoxy pushed by the financial wizards who got us into this mess in the first place. Whenever an economy goes into recession, deficits appear, as tax revenues fall faster than expenditures. The old orthodoxy held that one had to cut the deficit - raise taxes or cut expenditures - to restore confidence. But those policies almost always reduced aggregate demand, pushed the economy into a deeper slump, and further undermined confidence." When consumers are forced to cut back on spending, because they're too far in debt or worried about their jobs, the government has to step in and make up the difference or the economy goes into a tailspin. The deficits need be big enough to maintain aggregate demand while the private sector regains its footing. Otherwise, consumer spending declines, which lowers earnings and forces businesses to lay off more workers. It's a vicous circle. But if the stimulus is distributed wisely, multipliers kick in and help to lift the economy out of the doldrums. Here's a good breakdown of how it works from an article in the New York Times: "Every dollar of additional infrastructure spending means $1.57 in economic activity, according to Moodys, and general aid to states carries a $1.41 bang for each federal buck. Even more effective are increases for food stamps ($1.74) and unemployment checks ($1.61), because recipients quickly spend their benefits on goods and services. By contrast, most temporary tax cuts cost more than the stimulus they provide, according to research by Moodys. That is true of two tax breaks in the stimulus law that Congress,
pressed by industry lobbyists, recently extended and sweetened a tax credit for homebuyers (90 cents of stimulus for each dollar of tax subsidy) and extra deductions for businesses net operating losses (21 cents)." ("New Consensus Sees Stimulus Package as Worthy Step " Jackie Calmes and Michael Cooper, New York Times) So far, the stimulus has done exactly what it

was designed to do; give the economy a big enough boost to get through a deflationary rough patch. Unemployment is flattening out, manufacturing is expanding again, the stock market keeps climbing higher, and a recent survey of individual investors shows the highest ratio of bulls-to-bears since 2007. That's a good start, but the economy is still weak and needs more help. So why are policymakers so eager to take the patient off the ventilator before he can breathe on his own again? Politics, that's why. The congress is worried about voter rage at the ballot box, but that doesn't explain why Obama has started moaning about slashing deficits in the middle of a severe slump. The
administration's agenda is entirely different than Congress's. The White House economics team is trying to garner support for policies that will strap the faltering economy into a fiscal straightjacket and pound the green shoots into mush. All the railing against deficits is just empty blather backed by junk economics. Ex-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin--one of the chief architects of the global financial crisis--articulates the position of his proteges at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave thus: "Putting another major stimulus on top of already huge deficits and rising debt-to-GDP ratios would have risks. And further expansion of the Federal Reserve Board's balance sheet could create significant problems.... Today's economic conditions would ordinarily be met with expansionary policy, but our fiscal and monetary conditions are a serious constraint, and waiting too long to address them could cause a new crisis.... First, there must be sound fiscal and monetary policies. The United States faces projected 10-year federal budget deficits that seriously threaten its bond market, exchange rate, economy, and the economic future of every American worker and family. Those risks are exacerbated by the context of those deficits: a low household-savings rate, even after recent increases; large funding requirements for federal debt maturities every year; heavy overweighting of dollar-denominated assets in foreign portfolios; worsened fiscal

prospects in the decades after the current 10-year budget period; and competing claims for capital to fund deficits in other countries." ("Getting the Economy back on track" Robert Rubin, Newsweek) Rubin admits that the recession "would ordinarily be met with expansionary policy", but suggests that he has a better remedy than stimulus. Does that make sense? It was Keynesian

counter-cyclical public spending (stimulus) that just produced positive GDP for the first time in 4 quarters, whereas, it was Rubin's deregulation of the financial system that pushed the global economy to the brink of disaster. There's no question of whose theory is more credible or likely to work. Even so, it's worth considering what Rubin has to say, because it clarifies the views of Obama's chief economics advisors
Geithner and Summers. After all, the trio is joined at the hip. "The American people are growing increasingly concerned about deficits, creating a public environment more conducive to political action. And the Obama administration, in my view, has a deep understanding of the critical importance of addressing this issue..... " Indeed. So, Obama has already joined the ranks

of the deficit terrorists. Rubin again: "As President Obama and the other G20 leaders warned, restrictive trade measures in
response to the current crisis could lead to highly destructive trade wars. For the long run, we should continue pursuing the open markets that the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington think tank, estimates have added $1 trillion to America's current GDP." So Rubin is working for Peterson? That explains everything. Here's an excerpt from a Dean Baker article appearing in CounterPunch today: Peter Peterson is a Wall Street billionaire and former Nixon administration cabinet member who has been trying to gut Social Security payments and Medicare for at least the last quarter of a century. He has written several books that warn of a demographic disaster when the baby boomers retire. These books often include nonsense arguments to make his case. For example, in one of the books making his pitch for cutting social security as matter of generational equity, Peterson proposes reducing the annual cost of living adjustment. So, the real goal is to slash spending to impose onerous

austerity measures that will lay the groundwork for dismantling critical social programs, like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. That's why Rubin is working hand-in-hand with his allies in and out of the White House. It has nothing to do with what's best for the country. It's another looting operation spearheaded by the
same band of Wall Street pirates who just blew up the financial system. Rubin: "For American workers, sustained growth is the most powerful force for higher wages and greater personal economic security....The dynamism of American society, its flexible labor and capital markets, its entrepreneurial spirit and the sheer size of its economy, are great strengths for succeeding in a rapidly transforming global economy....Finally, in an increasingly interdependent world, transnational issues key to all of us can only be addressed through effective global governance." More free trade, more outsourcing, more off-shoring, more

lost jobs, more structural adjustment (at home, this time) more privatization, more screwball globalist Utopianism. It's all right out of the neoliberal playbook, corporate America's sacred text.

CONTENTION 1: GENERAL ECONOMY

BUILDING A SPACE ELEVATOR IS A MEGAPROJECTIT WILL STIMULATE MULTIPLE ECONOMIC SECTORS DR DAVID RAITT & DR BRADLEY EDWARDS, 2004, SENIOR TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER OFFICER, TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER & PROMOTION OFFICE, EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY ESTEC, NOORDWIJK, THE NETHERLANDS, PRESIDENT, X TECH CORP., SARASOTA, FL, USA, THE SPACE ELEVATOR: ECONOMICS AND APPLICATIONS, IAC-04-IAA.3.8.3, 55TH INTERNATIONAL ASTRONAUTICAL CONGRESS 2004 - VANCOUVER, CANADA, HTTP://BIT.LY/JKJHES
many space projects, as well as building bridges, tunnels, are costly and many people, not least the public, consider such megaprojects a huge waste of money. Space exploration, for instance, is estimated to cost Americans $50 per annum, compared
ADDED VALUE OR WASTE OF MONEY? There is no doubt that and maglev systems to $15 in Europe. But a lot has to do with the perceived value of the projects, what the benefits are and to whom, and whether the costs can be recovered in a reasonable amount of time. What good does it do to have a half a billion dollar launch vehicle (the space shuttle) carrying spacecraft worth just a few million dollars into orbit? What is the tangible value of the costly ISS? Will the experiments performed in space, or the experience gained in helping astronauts survive there, result in health and medical products that will improve our daily lives? These are questions that are asked regularly. In some instances, there have already been space spin-offs which are benefitting segments of society4 Some mega building projects bring immediate and

tangible results and benefits to users and therefore may, eventually, justify the cost. In the case of tall towers and
buildings, for some there will be accommodation and housing -and the fact of growing upwards rather than expanding outwards will bring environmental benefits because of the reduced footprint. For many- including the general public the value will be in greater convenience. Bridges allow rapid transport of goods and people between points at a saving of cost and time. The Tokyo Bay Aqualine saves motorists a 50km detour. The 0resund bridge obviates the need to fly or take a car ferry between Copenhagen and Malmo. Similarly the Straits of Gibraltar bridge will immediately open African markets to European goods and vice-versa in an unprecedented manner- the time-saving over sea transportation will be astounding. The Channel Tunnel has opened up the border between Britain and the Continent- permitting quicker freight and passenger transfers. However, despite the fact that the Channel Tunnel was expected to put ferry boats out of business, they still command 50% of the market. Furthermore, budget airlines have also flourished because planes are still perceived by the general public to be faster, even though trains through the tunnel actually provide a quicker city centre to city centre link between London and Paris. Better road and rail links also improve the flow of traffic- the widening of the M25 around London and the Boston Big Dig should doth is, so should establishing high-speed rail links as people movers. Maglev trains will help meet growing travel demands, reducing the need for additional highways, rail capacity and airport expansion. In the Baltimore Washington corridor as well as along the Eastern Seaboard, maglev is projected to divert about 20% of air travel to the maglev mode. It is believed it will divert 27,000 vehicles per day from the highway system in 2010, and reduce daily vehicle kilometres travelled in the corridor in the year 2020 by over 800,000 vehicle kilometres every day. Furthermore, maglev does not produce local air quality impacts associated with gasoline engines, diesel locomotives or jet engines. There are other ways in which communities may benefit. Maglevs are fast people movers and it is suggested that a high speed maglev connection could draw the Baltimore and Washington metropolitan regions closer together by reducing travel times between the two cities to less than 20 minutes. This could foster economic growth, particularly in downtown Baltimore. Maglev could also greatly increase the market share for the Baltimore Washington International airport in the Washington region by reducing the travel time from downtown Washington. The same applies to other maglev systems connecting cities and airports such as Shanghai where the travel time is reduced a mere seven minutes. Like any major construction project, be it aerospace or construction, significant job

opportunities in regard to both construction and operation can manifest themselves. The Channel Tunnel created building infrastructures, shops, petrol stations on each side of the tunnel with all the attendant economic and employment benefits for the regions. The Mackenzie Gas Project aims
to have the involvement, participation and ownership of the indigenous communities and will provide work, cheap gas, and heating for homes as well as creating benefits for aboriginal and other northern and Canadian people. Such benefits include education and training, improved skills, employment and business opportunities. Indirect benefits include the expansion of service, transportation and other industries to support the Project, as well as natural gas exploration and development by oil and gas companies. Governments will also benefit by collecting royalty payments and taxes. The Alice Springs to Darwin rail link exceeded its agreement to use a 15% indigenous workforce and, furthermore, land around the track was rehabilitated using native soils in order to meet environmental concerns. In addition, such megaprojects foster new research and development into new

technologies and materials (including subsequent spin-offs) as well as additional transportation and industrial applications. This will be the case of the Space Elevator. There has been an interest in beaming power to aircraft for over thirty years and NASA has recently completed trials in which a model
aircraft maintained flight through a ground-based laser beam which was converted to electricity by photovoltaic cells on the aircraft to turn the propeller. An aircraft could remain flying without batteries or on board fuel as long as the laser energy source was uninterrupted. The concept has potential commercial value to the remote sensing and

telecommunications industries and the technological advances being developed in laser power beaming for the Space Elevator will be able to be employed in many other applications. The private sector alone cannot usually finance and build these massive infrastructure megaprojects because risks are too great and the return is too small. They need to be either joint public-private partnership ventures, such as the 0resund Bridge, or funded entirely by the State. The construction of the Great Belt Link in Denmark and the 0resund Bridge between
Denmark and Sweden was funded by loans in the Danish and international capital markets and these loans are guaranteed by the Danish and Swedish governments. The entire construction costs (some $10bn), including interest, will eventually be paid by the users of the road and rail links including tolls from the motorists and fees from the railroad operators. The debt for the 0resund bridge is thus expected to be repaid in 2035 - 35 years after the opening of the bridge, although the debt for the landworks will be repaid

within a time frame of almost 60 years. Other bridges and tunnels will also be funded by tolls. A variety of tolls will also help finance Boston's Big Dig and it has been intimated that it wi II take up to 50 years to pay back the project costs. For the Californian maglev system, it is projected that revenues from passenger fares, parking fees, freight and the like will be some $60bn over the next 40 or so years. And despite the huge costs of building the Channel Tunnel, revenue emanating from its use, although lower than projected and anticipated, is still greater than its operating costs. In a similar manner, revenues can be earned by the Space Elevator to pay off public or private loans, by the transportation of goods (e.g. space outpost structural elements, satellites, stores, passengers) to various departure points along the ribbon. Such revenues could be generated early on and the expense of building a Space Elevator could become akin to building a motorway or rail network. Taking into account the cost recovery durations of for example 35 years for the 0resund bridge and even 20-30 years for a typical house mortgage, then there is no reason why the costs of building the Space Elevator should be not be recovered over a similar period. But it could pay for itself in far less time. If the Space Elevator costs $6bn and is paid back over 30 years- that works out to something like half a million dollars per day having to be recovered. If launch (operating) costs are eventually reduced to the projected level of $10/kg and a charge was made of $110/kg then the operators would get this $0.5m with the first elevator just lifting 5000kg/day. At a charge level of $1000/kg the elevator could be run at rates of current launches and make $5m/day. With second-generation climbers capable of transporting 20.000kg, a $1000/kg charge would bring in $20m per day with just one climber. Contrast this to the space shuttle which henceforth is expected to do only four launches per year. Even conventional launchers such as Ariane, Delta, Atlas or Proton are carried out only a few times per year. It has been argued that reusability (in the form of a space shuttle) is the death-knell of low cost access to space. On the other hand, it might

make sense to have reusability if the cost of that convenience outweighs the costs and inconvenience of expendability- as it does with megaproject bridges, tunnels and trains, and as it would do with a Space Elevator. The profit of the Space Elevator will lie not so much in the cheap cost of placing objects and manufacturing
facilities into space, but more in bringing the results down again. So what could the Space Elevator be used for which would outweigh its costs of construction and give a perceived benefit and value to its customers and the public at large?

CONTENTION 1: GENERAL ECONOMY

THE MASSIVE EXPENSE OF A SPACE ELEVATOR WILL BE A HUGE ECONOMIC STIMULUS WITH THE ADDED BENEFIT OF ACCESS TO
SPACE

CHRISTOPHER J. KOBUS, 2009, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING AT OAKLAND UNIVERSITY, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 21, ELEVATING OURSELVES INTO OUTER SPACE! THEBLOGPROF, HTTP://BIT.LY/MULKHM
Being a sci-fi fan, long before I became a scientist, I have been fascinated with space travel since a small child. I was definitely one of those "I want to be an astronaut" kind of kids. Even though my field of research is in the fluid/thermal sciences, I keep track of technological developments especially in the area of space travel. One of the best ideas out there, IMO, is the "space

elevator." In essence, it's like swinging a ball overhead on a string, just on a planetary level. The centrifugal forces in the spinning counteract the gravity force that will invariably pull down the object. The centrifugal force, as a result of centripetal acceleration, is related to the velocity. That is why stuff in space orbiting the
Earth have to fly around at tremendous speeds (17,000 mph+). In any case, if we could put a large object in geosynchronous orbit, and then run a strand of lightweight wire down to the surface of the Earth, and then another, and then another, etc. until we have a very solid cord tethered between the surface and the object in space, we can then use the cord to elevate objects into space just like a conventional elevator. Of course, because of the scale, the manufacture of this material might likely have to be in space, not on Earth. So there's that too. Now for the problem: we have nothing that's nearly strong enough and at the same time light enough. So I read an interesting article on FoxNews today: "Engineering Breakthrough May Make Possible 'Space Elevator.' " Could the

dream be closer to reality than I thought? Possibly. If this material could be produced, it will have to be done so on a massive scale. And the elevator will be by far the largest (and most expensive) structure ever built by [HU]man[ITY]. If the investment can be made (hey - the U.S. government is about to dump $1 trillion to maybe stimulate the economy), then we will have vastly cheaper access into space. The shuttle will no longer be launched from the surface of the Earth, which is
too expensive. We will go to Mars. Heck - we might be taking vacations in space stations!

CONTENTION 1: GENERAL ECONOMY

MORE
IMPORTANTLY, SPACE IS KEY TO BREAK OUT OF THE CYCLE OF THE RESTRICTED ECONOMICS OF

EARTHTHE

ONLY

WAY THAT CAPITALIST GROWTH CAN BE SPENT IS EITHER ON MAKING WEAPONS OR THE GLORIOUS EXPENDITURE OF SPACE PROJECTS

NEAL CURTIS, 2006, LECTURER VALUE AND IDENTITY, 74-79

Sacred. In this book he

IN

CRITICAL THEORY, UNIVERSITY

OF

NOTTINGHAM, WAR

AND

SOCIAL THEORY WORLD,

Economy (general versus restricted) In 1939, the year that the persistent ideology of community, spirit and destiny erupted once more onto the world stage, Roger Caillois, the cofounder with George Bataille of the Collge de Sociologie, published Man and the

likened war to the primitive festival, which purifies and rejuvenates society (Caillois, 2001: 166). Like the festival, war, which Caillois called a black festival (179), is the only modern phenomenon that compares in its function with regard to collective life. As in the festival, war assembles, arranges, aligns and welds [people] together, body and soul (166). While Caillois recognizes that the intelligence must condemn war the heart, he remarks, can only respect it, for it appears as the very norm of the universe, the essential mechanism of the cosmos and the most beautiful flower
of civilization (171). It thus has a religious or sacred significance. For Caillois, war is creative in contrast to peace which causes everything to perish through engulfment and erosion (171). Like Simmel there is a struggle here between a creative order and a chaotic entropy, but while Simmel only speculated regarding what the benefits of war might be, speculations he reviewed afterwards, Caillois remained convinced that wars are necessary to regenerate societies and save them from death, to preserve them from the effects of irretrievable time, which is why the quality of the fountain of youth is lent to these blood baths (171). But while

Caillois conceives of war in relation to the centrality of transgression and the expenditure of energy, his analysis is rather limited. A more stimulating and challenging address to the importance of these excessive practices, as well as the community and communion that is their aim, is to be found in the work of Bataille.
To approach the subjects of community, violence and the sacred in the work of Bataille it is helpful to start with the first of the three volumes that comprise The Accursed Share in which Bataille sets out his own interpretive confrontation with our mode of being-in-

proposes a conception of economic thinking that surpasses the calculating concerns of individuals and nation-states in favour of an economy in keeping with the boundlessness and continuity of the cosmos as a whole. The first volume opens with what Bataille calls a basic fact that the living organism receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g. an organism); if the system can no longer grow [. . .] it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically (1988: 21). The question for the living organism is therefore always posed in terms of extravagance (23). This general movement of waste, being a necessity, is also something that [HU]man[ITY] cannot stop. Paradoxically it is also tied to his freedom, or what Bataille calls sovereignty. Being (at) the summit of living matter, Bataille argues that man is identified with this movement and this excess. What is more, it destines him, in a privileged way, to that glorious operation, to useless consumption (23). Failing to understand this does not affect the outcome, which is as inevitable, he claims, as a river flowing into the sea. We can ignore or forget the fact that the ground we live on is little other than a field of multiple destructions. Our ignorance only has this incontestable effect: It causes us to undergo what we could bring about in our own way [. . .]. For if we do not have the force to destroy the surplus energy ourselves [. . .] it is this energy that destroys us; it is we who pay the price of the inevitable explosion (234). The price was paid in 1914 and again in 1939 with the outbreak of wars, the scale and destructive force of which could not have previously been imagined. It is Batailles contention that economic growth in the hundred years preceding the outbreak of the First World War could soak up the excess of the system only temporarily. Increases in resources, production and population that were key features of the age of the industrial revolution all contributed to the use of surplus energy until that expenditure was impossible to sustain. This industrial plethora (25) was at the origin of both wars. To avoid such a future catastrophe, we must learn to divert the surplus into further industrial growth, or we must direct it into unproductive works (Bataille, 1988: 25) that dissipate the excess. Given that Bataille only truly prescribes the latter, it is odd that he should offer these two alternatives. What he regards to be truly necessary is an overturning of economic principles (25), which is also an overturning or transvaluation of ethics. The problem with economic science and the temporary solution of further industrial growth is that such a conception is based on the traditional restricted conception of economic activity and the limited ends of economic man. It does not consider a play of energy that no particular end
the-world and

limits: the play of living matter in general (23). The solution of unproductive works and glorious expenditure is part of a general economy that recognizes how life aspires in manifold ways to an impossible growth; the exuberance of a movement always bordering on an explosion (30). Bataille thus states that this analysis of general economy takes the problem of war as its first priority (40). With this in mind, if part of our wealth is doomed, or ought to be doomed to destruction without profit, it is logical, even inescapable, to surrender commodities without return (25) and subordinate growth to the act of giving. One example of such general economic practices was the Marshall Plan that sought to reconstruct Europe at the end of the Second World War.
The situation that could hardly be better for an awakening of the mind (171) was the onset of the Cold War between the US and the USSR, which Bataille described as an absolute schism, where what prevents one from believing war to be inevitable is the idea that under the present conditions the economy, to alter Clausewitzs phrase, might continue it by other means (171). While the

US economy, as in Germany in the 1930s, remained an explosive threat due to its overaccumulation and need for exudation, Bataille saw in the Marshall Plan an inkling of a war that need not result in military conflict. He writes: While it is true that it is hard to imagine the United States prospering for long without the aid of a hecatomb of riches, in the form of airplanes, bombs and other military equipment, one can conceive of an equivalent hecatomb devoted to nonlethal works. In other words, if war is necessary to the American economy, it does not follow that war has to hold the traditional form. Indeed, one easily imagines, coming from across the Atlantic, a resolute movement refusing to follow the routine: A conflict is not necessarily military; one can envisage a vast economic competition, which for the competitor with the initiative, would cost sacrifices comparable to those of war, and which, from a budget of the same scale as war budgets, would involve expenditures that would not be compensated by any hope of capitalist profit. (172) Did the Marshall Plan indicate that a revolution in economic thinking was taking place,
as claimed at the time by the French economist Franois Perroux; a revolution where the rules of the capitalist world were suspended and goods could be delivered without payment; and where the product of labour could be given away? For Perroux, the

revolution lay in the fact that the Marshall Plan proceeded not from the isolated calculations of one nation on which classical economics are based, but proceeded instead from the general perspective and was an investment in the worlds interest (Bataille, 1988: 177). But while the Plan did indeed contest the economics of isolation, it was not as revolutionary for Bataille as Perroux had thought, for while it operates from the general perspective as an unsecured investment, it nevertheless remains a component of restricted economy by defending capital against the advances of communism in Europe. However, what the Marshall Plan did indicate was that as long as there was a tension between the US and the USSR, as long as there was a threat of war, the war would be continued by economic means and the US would continue to think from the general perspective. But, as Bataille wryly notes, if this tension were to fail, a feeling of calm would be completely unwarranted; there would be more reason than ever to be afraid (188). That the current US administration is isolationist and militarist is testament to Batailles fears of a world with only one hyperpower, a situation in which the economic experiment that was the Marshall Plan no longer has a place. While the Plan never did match the exuberance of living matter as a whole, gift-giving today, in the form of international aid, is absolutely tied to a restricted economy of utility, calculation, strategy and return. Aid is the antithesis of a gift. As
Michael Mann has noted in 2003, despite George W. Bushs announcement of an increase in the US aid budget, aiming, by 2005, at $18 billion dollars, a 50 per cent increase over 2001 levels, this still only represents 0.2 per cent of GDP, a level that will still rank the US as the meanest of the 22 wealthiest nations (2003: 53). What is more, over a quarter of this money is military

assistance and training programmes, with a further quarter going as security aid, that is, the provision of weapons. The instrumentality rather than beneficence of aid is further exposed, as Mann points out, when one examines who actually gets it. A third goes to one of the 20 richest countries in the world Israel. A fifth goes to Egypt, which is effectively being paid not to attack Israel. Tiny Jordan, also paid not to attack Israel,
rivals massive India and Russia as the next largest recipient. So over half the total aid program goes to prop up the small state of Israel, which contains one-thousandth of the worlds population! [. . .] In fact strategic rather than development needs dominate most aid (534). 3 The very possibility and indeed necessity of Batailles gift economy rests on a

complete rejection of the founding principle of traditional economics, namely the notion of scarcity. For Bataille, scarcity was little more than a myth, and a dangerous one, from the beginning. Understanding the world in terms of scarcity is an error based on the perspective of an individual and not society, or indeed, the cosmos as a whole. In truth there is an excess of resources over needs (Bataille, 1988: 45). The problem arises because, as noted above, the current economy proceeds from judgements made from the particular rather than the general point of view. As a rule, particular existence always risks succumbing for lack of resources.

It contrasts with general existence whose resources are in excess and for which death has no meaning. From the particular point of view, the problems are posed in the first instance by a deficiency of resources. They are
posed in the first instance by an excess of resources if one starts from the general point of view (39). According to Bataille, then, the restricted economy is based on a miserable conception (1985: 117) of life. It reduces the

world to utility, conservation, calculation, rationality and useful activity. Pleasure and play become subsidiary, diversionary concessions where bourgeois society, maintaining sterility in regard to expenditure [. . .] has only managed to develop a universal meanness (125). In the light of this, classical economics, argues Bataille, has always misunderstood primitive exchange by reducing it to the restricted world of barter. Against this, Bataille notes how Marcel Mauss discovered that primitive forms of exchange also included the need to destroy and expend as evidenced in a practice known as potlatch, which excludes all bargaining and, in general, it is constituted by a considerable gift of riches, offered openly and with the goal of humiliating, defying and obligating a rival. The exchange value of the gift results from the fact that the donee, in order to efface the humiliation and respond to the challenge, must [. . .] respond with interest (121). Connected with festivals on the occasion
of marriages, funerals and initiations, it is a manifestation of wealth very different from what we understand from the perspective of our restricted economy. It is not about avarice, greed is not good, and wealth is not determined by a

capacity for the expanding accumulation of money. On the contrary, wealth is determined by the capacity to lose, and only through loss can the donee acquire honour. Expenditure is a risk in which man stakes his whole being. It brings unproductive glory, which is the ability to grasp what eludes him, to combine the limitless movements of the universe with the limit that belongs to him (70). To return briefly to the Cold War that was, as Bataille correctly pointed out, a war between economic methods, it is possible to see the space race as a form of agonistic potlatch between capitalist and communist rivals, where one expedition into the heavens would obligate the other to not only match the expenditure, but match it with interest. While space exploration is undoubtedly part of the calculations of restricted economy,
developed with a view to the procurement of new resources, the invention of new technologies and the domination of a realm increasingly important for national security, the intensity of the space race and the fact that NASAs budget

was so dramatically cut after 1989 suggests that the space race was as much a symbolic gesture as it was the cold calculation of an economic prospector. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s vast sums of productive surplus were sacrificed in these extravagant gestures of excess, and while it is reductive to tie the Soviet collapse to the effects of this potlatch, it
was certainly a contributing factor in its demise. The result for the victor was the bestowal of rank with the near sacred capacity of declaring a close to the course of history.

CONTENTION 1: GENERAL ECONOMY

WE
MUST REPLACE OUR NOTION OF RESTRICTED ECONOMIC SYSTEMS RULED BY SCARCITY WITH A BROADER NOTION OF THE GENERAL ECONOMY, WHERE EXCESS AND EXPENDITURE ARE THE PRIME DRIVERSFAILURE TO BREAK OUT OF THE GENERAL ECONOMY WILL LEAD TO NUCLEAR WAR AND MASSIVE ECOLOGICAL DESTRUCTION

ALLAN STOEKL, 2007, PROFESSOR OF FRENCH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AT PENN STATE UNIVERSITY, BATAILLES PEAK: ENERGY, RELIGION, AND POSTSUSTAINABILITY, 36-38
Batailles Version of Expenditure The Accursed Share, first published in 1949, has had a colorful history on the margins of French intellectual inquiry. Largely ignored when first published, it has gone on to have an interesting and subtle influence on much contemporary thought. In the 1960s, fascination with Batailles theory of economy tended to reconfigure it as a theory of writing: for Derrida, for example, general economy was a general writing. The very specific concerns Bataille shows in his work for various economic systems is largely ignored or dismissed as muddled.8 Other authors, such as Michel Foucault and Alphonso Lingis,

writing in the wake of this version of Bataille, have nevertheless stressed, following more closely Batailles lead, the importance of violence, expenditure, and spectacular transgression in social life.9 The basis for
Batailles approach can be found in the second chapter of the work Laws of General Economy. The theory in itself is quite straightforward: living organisms always, eventually, produce more than they need for simple

survival and reproduction. Up to a certain point, their excess energy is channeled into expansion: they fill all available space with versions of themselves. But inevitably, the expansion of a species comes against limits: pressure will be
exerted against insurmountable barriers. At this point a species explosive force will be limited, and excess members will die.

Batailles theory is an ecological one because he realizes that the limits are internal to a system: the expansion of a species will find its limit not only through a dearth of nourishment but also through the pressure brought to bear by other species.10 As one moves up the food chain, each species destroys
more to conserve itself. In other words, creatures higher on the food chain consume more concentrated energy. It takes more energy to produce a calorie consumed by a (carnivorous) tiger than one consumed by a (herbivorous) sheep. The ultimate

consumers of energy are not so much ferocious carnivores as they are the ultimate consumers of other animals and themselves: human beings. For Bataille, Mans primary function is to expend prodigious amounts of energy, not only through the consumption of other animals high on the food chain (including man himself ) but in rituals that involve the very fundamental forces of useless expenditure: sex and death.11 Man in that sense is in a doubly privileged position: he not only expends the most, but alone of all the animals he is able to expend consciously. He alone incarnates the principle by which excess energy is burned off: the universe, which is nothing other than the production of excess energy (solar brilliance), is doubled by man, who alone is aware of the suns larger tendency and who therefore squanders consciously in order to be in accord with the overall tendency of the universe. This for Bataille is religion: not the individualistic concern with deliverance and personal salvation, but rather the collective and ritual identification with the cosmic tendency to lose. Humans burn off not only the energy accumulated by other species but, just as important, their own energy, because humans themselves soon hit the limits to growth. Human society cannot indefinitely reproduce: soon enough what today is
called the carrying capacity of an environment is reached.12 Only so many babies can be born, homes built, forests harvested. Then limits are reached. Some excess can be used in the energy and popu - lation required for military

expansion (the case, according to Bataille, with Islam [OC, 7: 83 92; AS, 8191]), but soon that too screeches to a halt. A steady state can be attained by devoting large numbers of people and huge quantities of wealth and labor to useless activity: thus the large numbers of unproductive Tibetan monks, nuns, and their lavish temples (OC, 7: 93 108; AS, 93110). Or most notably, one can waste wealth in military buildup and constant warfare: no doubt this solution kept populations stable in the past (one thinks of the endless battles between South American Indian tribes), but in the present (i.e., 1949) the huge amounts of wealth devoted to military armament, worldwide, can lead only to nuclear holocaust (OC, 7: 159 60; AS, 16971). This final point leads to Batailles version of a Hegelian absolute knowledge, one based on the certainty of a higher destruction (hence an absolute knowledge that is also a non -knowledge). The imminence of nuclear holocaust makes it clear that expenditure, improperly conceived, can threaten the continued existence of society. Unrecuperable energy, if unrecognized or conceived as somehow useful, threatens to return as simple destruction. Batailles theory, then, is a profoundly ethical one: we must somehow distinguish between/ versions of excess that are on the scale of the universe, whose recognition -implementation guarantee the survival of society (and human expenditure), and other versions that entail blindness to the real role of expenditure, thereby threatening mans, not to mention the planets, survival. This, in very rough

By viewing man as a spender rather than a conserver, Bataille manages to invert the usual order of economics: the moral imperative, so to speak, is the furthering of a good expenditure, which we might lose sight of if we stress an inevitably selfish model of conservation or utility. For if conserva - tion is put first, inevitably the bottled -up forces will break loose but in unforeseen, uncontrollable, and, so to speak, untheorized ways. We should focus our attention not on an illusory conservation, maintenance, and the steady statewhich can lead only to mass destruction and the ultimate wasting of the worldbut instead on the modes of expenditure in which we, as human animals, should engage.13 But how does one go about privileging willed loss in an era in which
outline, is the main thrust of Batailles book. waste seems to be the root of all evil? Over fifty years after the publication of The Accursed Share, we live in an era in which nuclear holocaust no longer seems the main threat. But other dangers lurk, ones just as terrifying and definitive:

global warming, deforestation, the depletion of resourcesand above all energy resources: oil, coal, even uranium. How can we possibly talk about valorizing heedless excess when energy waste seems to be the principal
evil threatening the continued existence of the biosphere on which we depend? Wouldnt it make more sense to stress conservation, sustainability, and downsizing rather than glorious excess?

CONTENTION 1: GENERAL ECONOMY

AND,
SPACE SOLVES THE TRANSITION TO A GENERAL ECONOMY BESTGLORIOUS EXPENDITURE ON THE SPACE ELEVATOR WILL REFRACT BACK DOWN TO EARTH, CREATING NOVEL AND CREATIVE RELATIONS TO OUR ECONOMIC CONDITIONS ON EARTH

ASTRID SCHWARZ AND ALFRED NORDMANN, 2010, INSTITUT FR PHILOSOPHIE, TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITT DARMSTADT AND DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY, DARMSTADT TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY, THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF TECHNOSCIENCE, SCIENCE IN THE CONTEXT OF APPLICATION, ED. NORDMANN AND CARRIER, P. 330-334
Exceeding the Limits to Growth We have seen that feedback-cycles and self-regulation played an important role in the development of systems theories. The notion of self-organization is sometimes identified with this and sometimes implies an added dimension of emergence and creativity. In contrast to the conservative general systems of the cyberneticists, selforganizing systems are said to create genuine, often surprising novelty they take the system to a new level and move beyond intensification to innovation.24 On the one hand, then, self-organization harks back to the model of a well-balanced and rather conservative nature that accommodates itself within given limits. But on the other hand self-organization opens the door to an image of nature that appears to be emergent and creative. The corresponding model is based on a political economy of technoscience that takes

the seemingly unbounded technological creation of genuine novelty as a paradigm of nature.

Technoscience does not accommodate itself to a limited world but seeks to expand those limits by disclosing new space and new resources. Space travel like the Apollo program serves to disclose new space and new resources,

and it does so by way of conspicuous consumption and some would argue an orgy of excess: The resources invested in the Apollo program cannot be accounted for; perhaps they are wasted or perhaps they bring infinite gain, and in the meantime they might be written off as a kind of national fireworks that deliver glorious pictures of the galaxies and the blue planet earth. On the level of research, this program was taken up by cabin ecology and biosphere design. Technoscientifically, the disclosure of new space and new resources corresponds to the construction, literally, of space-ship cabins that enable the discovery of new worlds beyond the biosphere. The idea behind exceeding containment was to construct a closed space that would be suitable for the maintenance of life and thus help to escape earthly confinement. What was to be created, then, was a perfectly controlled space at the limits of intensification selfsustaining without loss as nearly as possible. This exercise in total control served to minimize reliance on the special conditions of life on Earth and to go beyond the absolute limit of space that was set by the biosphere. All this can be seen in the story of the emergence of cabin ecology as a field of research with legions of technicians and scientists working on the technical and conceptual implementation of water, nutrient and gas cycles. This serious scientific-technological research program began in the 1950s with the dream of developing outer space as an unlimited spatial resource by establishing human settlements in Earths orbit or even colonizing Mars.25 The technical conception of constructed ecosystems for
space travel took on added significance when in the 1960s the entire planet became visible as a spaceship that needs to maintain conditions of life for a human population. Spaceship Earth was no longer associated with space travel but increasingly with the emerging environmental discourse. The 1968 Apollo image of the blue planet brought into view not only

the Earth as an enclosed and, above all, limited space but along with that the various scientific parameters for describing space (closed-loop cycles, stability, carrying capacity, and so on). Thus the spaceship became the rational model for the global management of Earth, but one in which humans could suddenly turn into an irritant by producing too much CO2 or waste. Humans became a form of pollution on Earth, spreading like a disease and putting Gaia in mortal danger as ecologist James Lovelock put it (Lovelock,
1996).With economist K. E. Boulding the spaceship underwent a transformation. The actual, technical model of space-travel for astronauts was now projected onto the planet as an object of management. Boulding turned the cabin or spaceship into a macroeconomic model in which carrying capacity played a major role and the limitation of space became identified with all other resource-limitations: the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system which is capable of continuous reproduction of material form even though it cannot escape having inputs of energy (Boulding, 1966, 34).26 This economy of the

spaceship earth came to underpin the concerns expressed in the Club of Rome report on the Limits to Growth. And as with cabin ecology, in particular, the envisioned control by a few parameters of spaceship earth and of planet earth as a total world model implies a form of excess. Travel into outer
space, the current conquest of nanospace, and this project of managing the blue planet share the idea that space itself can be used to exert technical control. Within the conservative framework of an absolutely limited Malthusian earth,

the notion of carrying capacity equated available surface area with available space. For example, alarmist images of how much standing room is taken up by all the inhabitants of the Earth translated into political calls for population control underlined by scientific models. The use of space for technical control came into its own when available surface area became divorced from available space with the notion of the ecological footprint. This notion also serves to send alarmist messages about the land use required to sustain a single citizen of the US or of India. The measure of the ecological footprint signals that we live far beyond our means. At

the same time, somewhat paradoxically, it also signals that we can live far beyond our means:
The sum of ecological footprints already exceeds the available surface area on Earth by a factor of 1.4 and it is simultaneously the worry of limits-to-growth environmentalists and the hope of technoscientific researchers that this factor will become bigger in years to come. One way of doing so is to productively exploit the fact that at the nanoscale surface area is immensely large in relation to bulk. Ever since Richard Feynmans call in 1959 to enter a new field of technological possibility by discovering plenty of room at the bottom, this nanotechnological project is not viewed as a more intensive exploitation of an available resource but as the discovery of an entirely new space of action that permits a form of engineering which draws on the creative processes of nature. While excess in molecular biology or in nanotechnology involves shaping the world atom by atom or molecule by molecule, ecotechnology produces excess through manipulation and enhancement of the cybernetic world machine. Today, scientific expertise about the limits to growth serves as a starting point and technological challenge to the so-called sustainability sciences and related technological fields which are primarily concerned with the control, discovery, and constant renewal of resources. The declaration of the recently founded World Resource Forum is a good example for this kind of agenda: Traditional environmental technologies are no longer enough [. . .].We call for a new global strategy for governing the use of natural resources [. . .]. By combining efficiency and resource productivity targets with sufficiency norms evolved through participative mechanisms, it should be possible to avoid the traditional type of growth.27 This is a conceptualization of limits that already points at its transgression and

therefore exhibits a similar ambivalence as the notion of the self-regulating system. TheWorld Resource Forum asserts that the acknowledgment of limits of resources creates possibilities for escaping these limits by means of efficiency in the sense of enhanced systems performance. This kind of efficiency is to result not primarily from conservation and the avoidance of waste but from technological as well as societal innovation (participative mechanisms).28 This program corresponds to a new environmental movement that embraces technological innovation and that refers for this, in particular, to the luxurious gifts of energy from the sun: We should see in hubris not solely what is negative and destructive but also what is positive and creative: the aspiration to imagine new realities, create new values, and reach new heights of human possibility.29 Conclusion Are we confined to Venadskys conservative biosphere or does the generous gift of the sun produce an abundance and concentration of wealth that needs to be released in the form of excess, waste, and creative destruction such that the technological problem of sustainable development is the
control of how this release takes place: by way of exuberantly rising ocean levels, by grandiose geoengineering schemes, or by ever more sustainable production and consumption? Do we accommodate ideas of technological possibility within the framework of knowledge production in the special, restricted, limited sciences, or do we view technoscientific research as a productive, creative, liberating force of wealth-production? These questions return us to Georges Batailles reflections on

restricted and general economics: How can we conceptualize the transformation from a limited world of scarcity to a world of excess. And can we control the transformation from a special economics of zerosum games and of supply balancing demand, to a general economics of luxurious abundance and abject waste? This essay on some of the transformations undergone by the blue planet and Spaceship Earth allowed us to simultaneously consider ecotechnologies and nanotechnologies as technosciences that do not accommodate to limits. In both cases we are dealing with space travel and the control of space as a technical resource (Nordmann, 2004; Schwarz, 2009). Ecotechnologies and nanotechnologies accept and incorporate arguments about limited growth and in response develop strategies of control that open up a boundless space literally and metaphorically of technical possibilities, for example by discovering vast new surface areas (nanomaterials research), by developing new forms of energy (hydrogen economy), by harnessing morphological and organismic potential (synthetic biology), or by designing the renewal of nature (restoration ecology). There are various ways in which the technosciences seek a transgression of limits, for example, through the production of hybrids. Here we were interested in just one of these ways, namely the transgression of a limited or restricted economy of science that assumes finite resources and finite energy, towards an unlimited or general economy that celebrates the production and consumption of excess. This may have led us to the origin of technoscientific hype and hubris. More importantly, however, it led to a condition where the norms of representation that orient the sciences no longer shape our ideas of a constant and limited world. Instead, the explorative aspects of experimentation and the creative dimension of art and engineering provide an image of boundless technical innovation which suggests that the world itself is constantly renewable and an unlimited source of novelty.

CONTENTION 2: SPACE COMMONS

THE PRIVATIZATION OF SPACE IS OCCURRING NOWTHIS IS A CONTINUATION OF NEOLIBERAL EXPANSION INTO EVERY SPHERE
OF LIFE

R. THOMAS BUFFENBARGER, 2010, INTERNATIONAL PRESIDENT OF THE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION AEROSPACE WORKERS, DEAR MR. PRESIDENT, HTTP://THESENT.NL/JQ30I9

OF

MACHINISTS

AND

At a time when the U.S. economy in mired in the worst recession in 70 years and is in desperate need of a jobs creation program your Administrations proposal to have NASA rely on the private sector to develop and operate manned space craft will contribute to the loss of several thousand well paid domestics jobs. These are the kinds of jobs that our economy needs if we are to have a strong economy recovery. Moreover, it will sacrifice new and innovative industries that could emerge from a NASA which continues to have its own space vehicles. NASA plays a critical role in both our national and economic security. Our space program has been a critical driver of innovations in such key technologies as computers and composite materials, and plays an important role in emerging industries such as wind energy and sensors to detect biological threats. As NASAs own Scientific and
Information (STI) website states, For more than 40 years, the NASA Innovative Partnerships Program has facilitated the transfer of NASA technology to the private sector, benefiting global competition and the economy. The resulting commercialization has contributed to the development of commercial products and services in the fields of health and medicine, industry, consumer goods, transportation, public safety, computer technology, and environmental resources. While our military services rely on private contractors to design and build most of their equipment, the military owns the planes, ships, armored vehicles, weapons, information systems, and other key technologies. The armed services also own their domestic bases and operate their own foreign bases. The military, like NASA, uses private contractors, but the military exercises control of its operations and the technology. NASA has owned its manned space vehicles and its launch facilities. Laws and regulations govern NASA and military procurement so that sourcing, security, technology transfers, and a wide range of key decisions promote U.S. security and economic interests. NASA

Administrator Charlie Bolden stated that NASA will partner with the aerospace industry

in a fundamentally new way to provide astronaut transportation to the International Space Station. An enhanced U.S. commercial space industry will create new high-tech jobs and spin off other new businesses that will seek to take advantage of affordable access to space. Yet he provided no evidence that this privatization proposal would create more jobs or spin off more new

businesses than under current policies; and even if it did, that these new jobs and industries are more likely to be located here at home. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) makes the unfounded claim
that this privatization proposal Embraces the commercial space industry and the thousands of new jobs that it can create by contracting with American companies to provide astronaut transportation to the Space Stationthus reducing the risk of relying exclusively on foreign crew transport capabilities. The only reason the United States must rely on foreign launches, while losing thousands of jobs currently engaged in transporting astronauts, derives from the Bush Administrations misguided policies to phase out the space shuttle before a replacement program was operational. Yet, even with your Administrations proposal the United States will still be relying on foreign launches since the space shuttle will still be phased out before a private sector program will exist. OMB also claims A strengthened U.S. commercial space launch industry will bring needed competition and help reduce the cost of human access to space. Yet OMB does not explain why relying solely on privately-owned

vehicles and launch facilities will generate more competition or reduce costs compared to NASA keeping control of its own space flights. Without strong convincing evidence to back up its claim, we have to assume that this is ideological blind faith in private markets and a failure to acknowledge NASAs long and valuable history of managing complex systems in constrained budget environments. By dramatically changing the policy under which NASA owns and controls the
operation of its manned space craft, the U.S. will weaken both our national security and economic interests. Although details have not yet been made available on your Administrations proposal there are many areas to be concerned about. These

include:

The movement of critical research, development and design out of the United States, further weakening our science and engineering workforce. The movement of production, maintenance, and assembly operations out of the United States as U.S. and foreign-based companies with industrial capacity outside of the U.S. capture this work. The loss of high-level manufacturing skills as more jobs are lost in this vital area. This will have a deep impact on the U.S. for years to come and will have direct impact on the development of new industries and technologies 3 The failure to adopt strict accountability provisions.

We have seen what happens when huge government programs are privatized far too often. As we saw in Iraq, over reliance on contractors can lead to all sorts of disasters, frauds, and abuses that undermine the goals of the U.S. and cost taxpayers money. The private sector may compromise fundamental safety issues. For safety reasons, NASA uses redundancies and back up systems to provide
protections from even very low probability problems. When the space shuttle is launched, a second shuttle is also put on a launch pad just in case it is needed to rescue a crew of astronauts. When the private sector is in control of the manned

space program, it is only too easy to imagine that safety will be compromised and sacrificed to maximize profits. The private sector cannot respond to emergencies as efficiently or as quickly as NASA.
If the private sector cannot respond to an emergency, will this responsibility fall to the Federal government and taxpayers? The private sector cannot ensure the level of security that NASA exercises. There is tight security when NASA is using its own manned vehicles and launch facilities. Once private sector vehicles are being launch from private sector facilities, it will be hard to maintain

the same security levels to protect both key technologies and prevent other threats, including terrorism. The

continued uncertainty about the financial viability of the private sector space industry poses serious questions over the reliability of essential NASA programs. When a private sector company which NASA relies on for space travel has a disaster or goes into bankruptcy, will the government end up footing the bill? Will this be another example of privatizing profits while the government bears the risks and covers the losses? The threat posed by foreign interests who may directly
or indirectly control companies that perform work that has been privatized. Do we really want to be dependent on other countries for our space industry? The space industry, whether it is in the U.S., Russia, Europe, Japan, or China, is

a creation of government spending. If the private markets could create a successful private space industry we would have seen it develop somewhere by now. Other countries promote their space programs because they understand it is an important industry for both economic and national security purposes. 4 The push to privatize space travel is similar to efforts to privatize other critical government services. These efforts are based on anti-government ideology and are promoted by companies that want to profit from government outsourcing. It defies common sense to believe that the way to save NASA money is to outsource even more when these same contractors are already frequently over budget and often involved in over-billing and even fraud. As U.S. Senator Bill Nelson said in a recent hearing You cant do it on the cheap. The problem is that you have put all
the eggs in the basket of assuming that those commercial rockets are going to work and that NASA is not going to have to spend a lot more on making sure those commercial rockets are safe for humans. There is no fail-safe position . If those commercial rockets dont work, then for the foreseeable future were going to be relying on the Russians just to get to our space station. Thats got to be changed. I respectfully urge you to reconsider the proposal for NASA to become completely

dependent on private contractors for space travel. Thousands of high wage, high skill jobs critical to our long-term economic future are at state. In the meantime, instead of relying on the Russians to
launch our astronauts, we need to extend the space shuttle program and accelerate and modify the Ares and Orion program to meet NASAs mission needs. Only then can we be assured that America will continue to be the world leader in new and innovative space technologies vital to future economic and national security.

CONTENTION 2: SPACE COMMONS

PRIVATIZATION
OF ACCESS TO SPACE WILL LEAD TO THE NEXT GREAT WAVE OF MILITARISM AND DESTROY THE ABILITY EXPLORE SPACE IN THE PROCESS

BRUCE GAGNON, 2003, COORDINATOR OF THE GLOBAL NETWORK AGAINST WEAPONS HTTP://WWW.SPACE4PEACE.ORG/ARTICLES/ROAD_TO_CONFLICT.HTM

AND

NUCLEAR POWER

IN

SPACE,

The news brings us the story of "space pioneers" launching privately funded craft into the heavens. A special prize is offered to the first private aerospace corporation who can successfully take a pilot and a "space tourist" into orbit. Is this "privatization" of

space a good thing? Is there any reason to be concerned about the trend? Are there any serious questions that should be raised at this historic moment? Three major issues come immediately to mind concerning space privatization. Space as an environment, space law, and profit in space. We've all probably heard about the growing problem of space junk where over 100,000 bits of debris are now tracked on the radar
screens at NORAD in Colorado as they orbit the earth at 18,000 m.p.h. Several space shuttles have been nicked by bits of debris in the past resulting in cracked windshields. The International Space Station (ISS) recently was moved to a higher orbit because space junk was coming dangerously close. Some space writers have predicted that the ISS will one day be destroyed by debris. As we

see a flurry of launches by private space corporations the chances of accidents, and thus more debris, becomes a serious reality to consider. Very soon we will reach the point of no return, where
space pollution will be so great that an orbiting minefield will have been created that hinders all access to space. The time as certainly come for a global discussion about how we treat the sensitive environment called space before it is too late. When the United Nations concluded the 1979 Moon Treaty the U.S. refused, and still does, to sign it. One key reason is that the treaty outlaws military bases on it but also outlaws any nation, corporation, or individual from making land "claims" on the planetary body. The 1967 U.N. Outer Space Treaty takes similar position in regard to all of the planetary bodies. The U.N., realizing we needed to preempt potential conflict over "ownership" of the planetary bodies, made claim that the heavens were the province of all humankind. As

the privateers move into space, in addition to building space hotels and the like, they also want to claim ownership of the planets because they hope to mine the sky. Gold has been discovered on
asteroids, helium-3 on the moon, and magnesium, cobalt and uranium on Mars. It was recently reported that the Haliburton Corporation is now working with NASA to develop new drilling capabilities to mine Mars. One organization that seeks to rewrite space law is called United Societies in Space (USIS). They state, "USIS provides legal and policy support for those who intend to go to space. USIS encourages private property rights and investment. Space is the Free Market Frontier." Check their web site at http://www.space-law.org The taxpayers, especially in the U.S. where NASA has been funded with

taxpayer dollars since its inception, have paid billions of dollars in space technology research and development (R & D). As the aerospace industry moves toward forcing privatization of space what they are really
saying is that the technological base is now at the point where the government can get out of the way and lets private industry begin to make profit and control space. Thus the idea that space is a "free market frontier." Of course this means that after the

taxpayer paid all the R & D, private industry now intends to gorge itself in profits. One Republican
Congressman from Southern California, an ally of the aerospace industry, has introduced legislation in Congress to make all space profits "tax free". In this vision the taxpayers won't see any return on our "collective investment." So let's

just imagine for a moment that this private sector vision for space comes true. Profitable mining on the moon and Mars. Who would keep competitors from sneaking in and creating conflict over the new 21st century gold rush? Who will be the space police? In the Congressional study published in 1989 called Military
Space Forces: The Next 50 Years we get some inkling of the answer. The forward of the book was signed by many politicians like former Sen. John Glenn (D-OH) and Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL). The author reported to Congress on the importance of military bases on the moon and suggested that with bases there the U.S. could control the pathway, or the "gravity well", between the Earth and the moon. The author reported to Congress that "Armed forces might lie in wait at that location to hijack rival shipments on return."

Plans are now underway to make space the next "conflict zone" where corporations intend to control resources and maximize profit. The so-called private "space pioneers" are the first step in this new direction. And ultimately the taxpayers will be asked to pay the enormous cost incurred by creating a military space infrastructure that would control the "shipping lanes" on and off the planet Earth. After Columbus returned to Spain with the news that he had discovered the "new world," Queen Isabella began the 100 year process to create the Spanish Armada to protect the new "interests and investments" around the world. This helped create the global war system. Privatization does not mean that the taxpayer won't be paying any more. Privatization really means that profits will be privatized. Privatization also means that existing international space legal structures will be destroyed in order to bend the law toward private profit. Serious moral and ethical questions must be raised before another new "frontier" of conflict is created.

CONTENTION 2: SPACE COMMONS

SPACE
CONFLICTS WOULD BE EVEN MORE DESTRUCTIVE THAN EARTH CONFLICTSTHEY WOULD IGNITE INEVITABLE EARTH WARS AND INVOLVE ORBITING DEATH STARS

GORDON R. MITCHELL, 2002, COMMUNICATION AT UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH, BEYOND WITH US OR WITH TERRORISTS, 2002 ORVILLE HITCHCOCK LECTURE, UNIVERSITY OF IOWA, JANUARY 29, 2002, HTTP://BIT.LY/LKAIP0

THE

Space weaponrys political baggage comes in part from the frightening technical dynamics involved. The dizzying speed of space warfare would introduce intense use or lose pressure into strategic calculations, with the specter of split-second attacks creating incentives to rig orbiting Death Stars with automated hair trigger devices. In theory, this automation would enhance survivability of vulnerable space weapon platforms. However, by taking the decision to commit violence out of human hands and endowing computers with authority to make war, military planners could sow insidious seeds of accidental conflict. Perrows analysis of complexly interactive, tightly coupled industrial systems shows that it is impossible to anticipate all the ways in which such systems can fail. Space weaponry certainly qualifies as the sort of system Perrow says is vulnerable to normal accidents. Space weapon platforms, by design, must be complex, centralized, and tightly coupled. As Perrow explains, normal accident theory holds that that given such system characteristics, multiple and unexpected interactions of failures are inevitable. Deployment of space weaponry with pre-delegated authority to fire death rays or unleash killer projectiles would likely make war itself inevitable, given the susceptibility of such systems to normal accidents. Even staunch space control advocates such as Dolman
acknowledge the risk of accidents. Echoing Perrows normal accident theory, Dolman notes: . . . [C]oupling the dissemination of control with rising international tension clearly could serve to increase the possibility of inadvertent war tightly coupled systems are notorious for producing overcompensation effects. The military response to heightened world tension is to heighten readiness. As readiness increases, tensions increase, producing a spiraling decision matrix that can take on a life of its own, complete with full tautological rationality (p. 47). Dolman continues to point out that the type of space-based laser system

envisioned by Bush planners becomes more prone to Murphys Law of accidents the less the system is under direct control: Spacecraft with military missions, especially unmanned ones (for
example, the proposed Brilliant Pebbles/Brilliant Eyes kinetic kill vehicles envisioned in the Strategic Defense Initiatives (SDI) antimissile shield) will of necessity work in a threat environment that may preclude constant

monitoring and contact. The probability that a computer or other mechanical error will cause an unauthorized or unintended malfunction/unauthorized attack increases in accordance with Murphys Laws the less the system is under direct control (p. 47).

FORTUNATELY,

THE SPACE ELEVATOR CREATES A PLATFORM UNIVERSAL ACCESS TO SPACEIT WILL BE A PUBLIC GOOD

ANYONE CAN USE

BRAD LEMLEY, JULY 2004, GOING UP, DISCOVER MAGAZINE, VOL. 25, ISSUE 7, EBSCOHOST.
THE FIRST PROJECT UNDERTAKEN BY A COMPLETED space elevator should be building more elevators. While he estimates that constructing the first one would be a six-year $6 billion task, the second could cost as little as $2 billion and take just seven months because it could employ the first to boost construction materials into space. The requisite time and money would shrink for each
IN EDWARDS'S VISION, subsequent elevator, and payload size could increase dramatically. Edwards's long-term plan calls for climbers on the third and fourth elevators, each hoisting 140 tons. He says that's why NASA needs to get serious now: "The guy who builds the first one

can have several built before anybody else can build a second one. Now the first guy has so much capacity, his payload price is down to zero. He can run the other guy out of business. Talk about grabbing
the brass ring." And Edwards emphasizes that the United States is by no means fated to win this race. The first builder might not even be a government. "We have actually been told by private investors, 'If you can reduce the risk and prove it can be done, getting $10 billion is nothing.'" Having an international consortium of public and private entities pitch in may

be the best scenario for ensuring the common good. A world blessed with a half-dozen space elevators
constructed cooperatively, radiating from the equator like lotus petals, could provide near-universal access to space at a payload cost of as little as $10 a pound. In the long run, "you wouldn't want the elevator only on Earth. A similar system

would work on Mars or

some other planetary body," says NASA's David Smitherman. Indeed, says Edwards, any large object in the solar system that spins could become a candidate for a space elevator. But for now, Edwards remains focused on getting the first one built. Along with all the other boons it would deliver to humankind, the elevator also has the potential to realize Edwards's personal dream of voyaging into space. "In 20 years, I'll be 60. I should still be plenty healthy enough to go on the space elevator. Maybe it will turn out that the only way I can get into space is to build the way to get there myself."

CONTENTION 3: ASTROFUTURISM
SPACE
IS INEVITABLECRITICAL PERSPECTIVES MUST HARNESS THE IMMENSE CULTURAL AND POLITICAL ENERGY OF THE PUBLICS DEDICATION TO SCIENCE AND SPACE

GIRONI, 2010, AHRC FUNDED PHD STUDENT IN THE DEPARTMENT OF STUDY OF RELIGIONS IN SOAS, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON [FABIO, SCIENCE-LADEN THEORY : OUTLINES OF AN UNSETTLED ALLIANCE, SPECULATIONS VOLUME 1, HTTP://WWW.PUBLICPRAXIS.COM/SPECULATIONS/?PAGE_ID=73]
The Copernican Revolution, in Colour The most obvious place to look, when seeking a condition7 for this new philosophy, is to direct our attention to the developments of the natural sciences in the last forty years, both in terms of their dramatic

internal growth (the elaboration of successful new theories or promising new research projects) and external public engagement (the increased interest amongst broader society in the results of science). My contention is that these two elements, by shaping the last decades of western intellectual history, have indirectly contributed to the re-emergence of realism as a philosophical trope. Within speculative realism, a science-friendly attitude is explicitly associated with the rejection of a certain kind of (post-critical, human-centred, phenomenologicalin a wordcorrelationist) philosophy: see for example Ray Brassiers demand that science be taken seriously, since [t]aking as a given the empirical fact that all philosophical attempts to define conditions of possibility for scientific thought have proved to be dismally unsuccessful, we conclude that these failures are a matter of principle rather than empirical circumstance, and that it is the presumption that philosophy is in a position to provide a transcendental footing for science which must be abandoned. There is no first philosophy. Consequently, although relatively autonomous vis a vis science, philosophical ontology can neither ground nor disregard the ultimately physical description of the universe provided by the natural sciences.8 Or, take Graham Harmans claims about the dullness of philosophical literature, as opposed to the speculative range of scientific texts: pick up a random book of recent physics and you will find dazzling speculation on all manner of things: the creation and destruction of the universe, the existence of parallel worlds, chance and necessity, hidden spatial dimensions, time travel, and two-dimensional holograms that delude us into believing in
three.We have reached a point where I, a passionate reader of philosophy, prefer any section in bookstores except philosophy [P]hilosophy has become boring.9 And, of course, the entire argument against correlationist thought in Meillassouxs After Finitude is another such example, which hinges upon a precise dating of ancestral phenomena such as the origin of the universe, something which has only been possible through (relatively recent) scientific techniques. So, rather than a contemporary philosophy flat-lined by the phenomenological climate, it was science that made it meaningful to disagree about what

there might have been when we did not exist, and what there might be when we no longer exist just as it is science that provides us with the means to rationally favour one hypothesis over another concerning the nature of the world without us.10 The authority of contemporary science is fuelled by its achievements. The extraordinary experimental success of the Standard Model of particle physics and of the description of quantum mechanical interactions between those particles, the observational data confirming the Big Bang theory and the age of the universe, as well as the discovery of its accelerating expansion (not to mention more speculative hypotheses/research programs such as those linked to the Multiverse and String Theory), are momentous results that have been achieved in less than half a century. Such a massive scientific output11concentrated in such a relatively short time-spanhas had an enormous cultural impact outside
laboratories and observatories, largely thanks to the increased resources dedicated to public outreach from the scientists side. Whether because of their eagerness to share the revolutionary discoveries of their discipline, or for the more pragmatic realization that general public interest aids the acquisition of governmental and private funding; natural scientists have come to

represent intellectuals in close contact with the public. Following this increase in public engagement with science
in the last decades we have witnessed pieces of scientific equipment raise, possibly for the first time,12 to the status of cultural icons and sources for entertainment and awe. A solid example of this is the Hubble Space Telescope (hst), whose huge impact on physical astronomy since the early 1990s is matched by its impact on the general public, providing us with an unprecedented peek into the far universe via a dazzling series of images of distant galaxies and nebulae making their way onto the front covers of hundreds of magazines. Pictures of these astronomical objects, immensely far in both space and in time, have offered us a whole new understanding and visual grasp of the term things in themselves.13 By opening up a space beyond the moon, the outer planets, and the icy Oort Cloud with its stagnant mist of dim future comets the Space Telescope14 has allowed us to probe deeper into the fabric of the universe while at the same time imposing upon us the humbling acknowledgement of our myopia, since beyond the gaze of these instruments are sites more distant than these, some of them grimmer than the plains of Hell.15 So strong has the cultural impact of the hst been, that the 20th anniversary of its commissioning (24th of April 2010) has been celebrated with full-page articles in several major newspapers around the globe, commemorating its birthday with a selection of its most iconic images accompanied by words of praise for this overworked piece of technology. And the hst is only the most iconic of an army of such instruments: we have enjoyed the sunset on Mars thanks to the images from the Mars Exploration Rover, we have peered at the distant Earth through the rings of Saturn when receiving the images from the Cassini probe and we have observed the aeons-old first light of the universe thanks to the wmap satellite. Moreover, it is thanks to the discoveries granted by the data received from less iconic but equally successful probes, that our vocabulary has extended to include terms like expanding universe, black hole, dark matter, dark energy and exoplanets, concepts that soon proved fertile new metaphors for philosophersand speculative

realists.16 It is well known how speculative realists call for a return to the true meaning of the Copernican Revolution, against the Kantian hijacking of this term. If, according to Meillassoux it is due to a sense of desolation and abandonment which

modern science instils in humanitys conception of itself and of the cosmos17 that we are forced to face the contingency of thought and therefore to rethink the priority of human access, it appears that no cultural force has managed to present more powerfully to humankind as a whole the disconcerting vastness of the great outdoors than the last forty years of physical sciences, particularly
astronomy. To substantiate this claim, I would like to take a brief historical excursus. In his Earthrise, historian Robert Poole explains how the famous Earthrise picture taken in 1968 by the crew of the Apollo 8 mission (showing the planet rising from the lunar horizon), and its even more popular Blue Marble successor, taken in 1972 by the astronauts of the Apollo 17 (showing the planet in its full spherical appearance) were appropriated and diffused in popular culture by the dominant ideologies of the time. In a complex network linking such different forces as the technical constraints of the Apollo missions, cold-war era political interests, the amazement of the first astronauts seeing the planet from above, and the lsd-fuelled rise of 1970s hippie counterculture, the first images of planet Earth ended up as bearing an unprecedented meaning. In particular, Poole argues that [t]he famous Apollo

17 Blue Marble photograph appeared in December 1972, just in time to supply the environmental movement with its most powerful icon. It was, however, the Apollo 8 image of December 1968 that had started it all off. Both images owed much of their instant power to the way they tapped into a ready-made agenda: in the case of the Blue Marble it was the eco-renaissance; in the case of Earthrise it was Spaceship Earth. What happened over the years in between was that natural metaphors for the planet
began to take over from technological ones.18 Hence Blue marble, according to Poole the single most reproduced image in human history,19 was fruitfully assimilated by contemporary culture, and at the same time produced a feedback effect, fuelling the amazement for a living planet, and shaping a holistic attitude which subsequently appropriated the Gaia hypothesis as a scientific proof of the life-cycles of the global organism that Earth was. The picture from outer space, even if showing the fragile beauty of Earth, effectively increased the intrinsic value of the planet, so that the focus of the environmental movement (and of the emergent New Age spirituality) which adopted the photograph as a graphic reminder of the wonders of our planet, was not wilderness or nature but the environment, with humankind very much in the picture,20 a humankind now seen as never before as the lucky inhabitants and custodians of a natural marvel, strikingly alive in an empty, dark, and colourless space. Let us try to compare the Blue Marble picture, and its effect on the cultural unconscious, with another, more recent picture of our planet. On the 14th February 1990, the Voyager probe, having completed, the main part of its mission in its first 13 years of interplanetary flight, was instructed to turn its camera around, and to take a picture of Earth from a distance of approximately 6 billion kilometres. The alive, dynamic planet that in the early 70s was shown in its blue marble glory was now, in the famous words of Carl Sagan (the man responsible for convincing nasa to take the picture and for its successive popularization),21 a pale blue dot, a handful of pixels on a background of black nothingness. The Earth, which thirty years earlier had been a glorious Blue Marble was now shown as a pale blue dot. If this picture did not directly slide so glamorously into the popular media and in popular culture it is not only because of its inferior intrinsic aesthetic value, but also because of the radically different social climate of the early 90s. And yet, I believe that we can fruitfully look at the pale blue dot picture as having as strong a cultural significance as its predecessor. Indeed, where to find a better, more powerful representation of the true meaning of the Copernican Revolutionas we are reminded by Meillassouxthan in this pale blue dot picture, sent as a faint electromagnetic signal by an unmanned probe, from a distance where no human had ever, or has since, reached? If humanity could previously be seen as the privileged custodian of a sacred cosmic gem, it was now merely dwelling on a infinitesimal speck of dust, a planet whose awe-inspiring face was now irresolvable, irrelevant, disfigured. If the coloured face of the planet dominated the Blue Marble picture, it is the featureless cosmic space which dominates this second picture, a space where the Earth, and the environment it hosts, is but a mere point floating across an arbitrary set of coordinates.22 Science delivered the photographic evidence of theat bestprovincial placement of our planet, a graphic memento that there is much more to the universe than our world (both in the sense of a correlationally defined existential space and in the sense of our material planet), a picture that indeed in its coarse immediacy strikes a powerful blow to the pathetic twinge of human selfesteem.23 The philosophical trope of otherness itself was now to be revised: from the otherness of a human neighbour to that of a nonhuman, utterly alien,24 external reality. Eight years after the pale blue dot picture, physical cosmology delivered some even more stunning results: the empty, cosmic space, through which our planet, our solar system and our whole galaxy is wandering, is not only expanding but accelerating in its expansion.25 The discovery of this increasing rate of expansion effectively sanctioned the fate of the universe to be one of cold dissipation, and thus created the possibility for a passage like the following to appear in a philosophy book not merely as a thought experiment, but as a factual truth to be philosophically appraised and exploited: sooner or later both life and mind will have to reckon with the disintegration of the ultimate horizon, when, roughly one trillion, trillion, trillion (101728) years from now, the accelerating expansion of the universe will have disintegrated the fabric of matter itself, terminating the possibility of embodiment. Every star in the universe will have burnt out, plunging the cosmos into a state of absolute darkness and leaving behind nothing but spent husks of collapsed matter. All free matter, whether on planetary surfaces or in interstellar space, will have decayed, eradicating any remnants of life based in protons and chemistry, and erasing every vestige of sentience irrespective of its physical basis. Finally, in a state cosmologists call asymptopia, the stellar corpses littering the empty universe will evaporate into a brief hailstorm of elementary particles. Atoms themselves will cease to exist. Only the implacable gravitational expansion will continue, driven by the currently inexplicable force called dark energy, which will keep pushing the extinguished universe deeper and deeper into an eternal and unfathomable blackness.26 If, to quote this important passage once again,

contemporary philosophical thought needs to engage with the sense of desolation and abandonment which modern science instils in humanitys conception of itself and of the cosmos,27 it is because of such scientific narrations of the fate of our universe, holding today such a powerful social and cognitive authority and offering us a speculative opportunity.28 By exposing the cosmic irrelevance of humankind and its dwelling place and by denouncing the contingency of its existence as subordinate to random cosmic caprices, science has set the scene for the development of a new metaphysical revolution consisting in a new blow to human narcissism, where man is dethroned from his position of centrality in the order of being and situated in his proper place as one being among others, no more or less important than these others.29

CONTENTION 3: ASTROFUTURISM
UNFORTUNATELY,
THE NARRATIVE OF MODERN SPACE EXPLORATION HAS ITS ROOTS IN IMPERIAL PROJECTS OF PERFECT SOCIETIES AND TERRITORIAL EXPANSIONCONTINUATION OF THE STATUS QUO WILL JUST REPRODUCE ALL THE VIOLENT HIERARCHIES OF EARTH IN SPACE

DE WITT DOUGLAS KILGORE, 2003 PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT INDIANA UNIVERSITY, ASTORFUTURISM: SCIENCE, RACE, AND VISIONS OF UTOPIA IN SPACE
Dreams and Realities in the Space Age This book

is an investigation of the ideals and conflicts evident in America's dream of its future, as represented in the intellectual, aesthetic, scientific, and political tradition of astrofuturism. Devoted to breaking the limits placed on humanity by the surface of this planet, astrofuturism forecasts an escape from terrestrial history. Its roots lie in the nineteenth-century Euro-American preoccupation with imperial expansion and Utopian speculation, which it recasts in the elsewhere and elsewhen of outer space. Astrofuturism imagines the good or perfect society not simply spatially but in what might be called, to use Einstein's term, "spacetime." This speculative tradition has developed as a part of U.S. intellectual and popular culture since the Second World War. Not surprisingly, the future it imagines is an extension of the nation's expansion to continental and global power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The idea of a space frontier serves contemporary America as the west served the nation in its past: it is the terrain onto which a manifest destiny is projected, a new frontier invalidating the 1893 closure of the western terrestrial frontier. But it is also the space of Utopian desire. Astrofuturist speculation on space-based exploration, exploitation, and colonization is capacious enough to contain imperialist, capitalist ambitions and Utopian, socialist hopes. Visions of an American conquest of space go hand in hand with thought experiments seeking some barely glimpsed alternative to the economic and political problems that dominated the twentieth century. Astrofuturism posits the space frontier as a site of renewal, a place where we can resolve the domestic and global battles that have paralyzed our progress on earth. It thus mirrors and codifies the tensions that characterize America's dream of its future. By astrofuturism, I

mean the tradition of speculative fiction and science writing inaugurated by scientists and science popularizers during the space race of the 1950s. Although it draws upon a rich history of science-fiction, astrofuturism as a narrative genre is distinguished by its close connections to engineering projects funded by the government and the military. The first generation of astrofuturist writers including Wernher von Braun, Willy Ley, and Robert A. Heinleinbegan as a band of science-fiction and rocket enthusiasts, backyard experimenters dreaming of the ideal spaces that they would conquer.1 They were followed by successive generations that inherited their passion, if not their politics. Contemporary astrofuturists fall along a political spectrum that ranges from Jerry Pournelle on the right, offering readers a neocolonial, space-based Empire of Man that escapes the democratization of mid-twentiethcentury America, to Vonda N. Mclntyre and Kim Stanley Robinson on the left, whose struggles to articulate the conventions of imperial exploration with a left-egalitarian politics have resulted in genre-bending thought experiments. Astrofuturist writing appears as both fiction and popular science. Its dramatic conventions include: characters that embody the future of humanity; the historical, political, literary, and scientific knowledges that those characters represent; the environments they craft, explore, or occupy; and the machines/ instruments they create, control, and deploy. These conventions are shared by the expository and fictional aspects of the intellectual tradition. In its fictive guise as a subgenre within hard science fiction, astrofuturism is as concerned with education as it is with entertainment.2 It is a self-consciously didactic literature unapologetically aiming to produce readers who understand the mechanics of science and technology, are able to defend their rationale, and take pleasure in their dramatization in particular exotic contexts. Astrofuturist novels regularly include what Kim Stanley Robinson calls "expository lumps" imparting the knowledge necessary to understand why and how the world of the future might differ from our present.3 In their guise as science writers, astrofuturists often include miniature fictions illustrating lectures on rocketry, celestial mechanics, soil composition, terraformation techniques, and so on concepts that might otherwise be too dry or complex for pleasurable consumption. The space-born societies that futurists imagine are not physical anomalies or satiric fantasies. They are not catalyzed by the romantic, scientifically uninformed speculations of a Lucian of Samosata or a Cyrano de Bergerac. Rather, they are grounded in the astronomy, mathematics,

biology, and engineering that evolved from the terrestrial explorations

of the nineteenth century. Advocating the benefits of new knowledge and new tools, astrofuturist narratives make that knowledge accessible, even familiar. They transform the expensive and complex machines and habitats of the space frontier into familiar tools and mundane, lived spaces. The science fiction and popular science from which the space future emerges are invitations to worlds (real and imagined) that are ordinarily inaccessible. Most importantly, the space future is presented not as an impossible Arcadia, but as a feasible movement into new territories that conform to established and predictable physical laws. While I consider astrofuturism primarily an American phenomenon anchored by the nation's mid-century commitment to the space race, its roots and membership are international. Its early form emerged among the groups of amateur enthusiasts in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States who laid the groundwork for the rocket technology that became a dominant factor in international relations. Although many of those early experimenters were involved in the arms race prompted by Germany in the 1930s, their initial imperative was the seemingly impractical dream of the "conquest of space." This dream brought together groups of people separated by barriers of language, nation, and political difference. It brought some of their number a form of American absolution for their wartime links to the Nazi party. It influenced and justified American global ambitions for a few crucial decades in the cold war era. And it gave many Americans a new faith in a national destiny at a time when the popular culture was awash with nostalgic images of the lost western frontier of dime novels and Buffalo Bill's Wild West show.4 The future imagined by the scientists and writers who built and promoted the space program offered an endless frontier that would redeem the past and transform the present. The astrofuturists I follow are

distinguished by the ease with which they move between prosaic and expositive accounts of

their singular objective: spaceflight. That objective demands a progressive, evolutionist account of physical reality and social history; correspondingly, the political hopes fostered by astrofuturism are classically liberal in orientation. The futures proposed under its banner generally advocate individual freedom,
equality, and rationality as primary social and political goods. The space frontier represents for astrofuturists the landscape in which the human condition can improve. From this perspective, the existing order, which limits human activity and aspiration to the Earth, 4 INTRODUCTION is a conservatism that cannot help but preserve the status quo. Although it is possible to reduce the work of any particular author to his or her political affiliations, their faith in the political and environmental potential of the space frontier links them as astrofuturists and distinguishes them from the resolutely earthbound concerns of their non-astrofuturist political allies. However disparate their political agendas, all astrofuturists are unreconciled to the moment of their production, the world as it exists now. Their futures can be treated, according to Peggy Deamer's characterization of Utopian thought, as "not a guide to the future but a protest of the present."5 Whether their dis-ease is caused by irritation with the welfare state (Pournelle), discontent with what architectural critics and urban sociologists call "the mailing of America" (O'Neill), exasperation with the limits-to-growth thesis (Bova), a rejection of the direction and methods of late capitalism (Robinson), or a desire to intervene against institutional arrangements around race and gender (Mclntyre), their political and technical solution to discontent is the human expansion into space. This

prospect provides astrofuturism's fundamental rationale and shapes its character as an expression of contemporary American thought. Whatever the particular political persuasion of a futurist,
astrofuturist fictions inevitably present new societies that result from advances in knowledge most readily evident in technoscientific achievements. Indeed, advances in science and technology are the catalysts that prompt social and political experimentation. This

characteristic alerts us to the genre's affiliation with the technological utopianism that Howard Segal identifies as a persistent feature of American thought.6 As a reflection on the legacy of American imperialism and utopianism, astrofuturism provides a window into the way we construe the relationship between scientific knowledge, the
uses of technology, the entertainments we find attractive, and the political arrangements we proclaim desirable. Astrofuturism is speculation about the progress and final aims of technological and political power.

It calls for the creation of technosciences, which will perfect humanity's control over itself and the natural world. This impulse
has produced a strand of futurist thought that seeks an eternal extension of contemporary political and economic arrangements, albeit stripped of unpleasant resonances and rendered innocent. However, astrofuturism also carries within it an idealism, a liberal or Utopian commitment that seeks alternatives and solutions to the problems and conflicts characterizing contemporary American life. It can imagine space frontiers predicated on experimental arrangements and the production of relationships uncommon or unknown in the old world. Astrofuturist speculation is deeply implicated in debates on race, class, and gender: inequities and INTRODUCTION 5 conflicts thought to represent the chief impediments to the perfection of democratic society. The

astrofuturist version of the good society is double-edged. It can, in the hands of Vonda N. Mclntyre or Kim Stanley Robinson, challenge the hierarchies described by traditional definitions of difference, or it may, as with writers such as Heinlein and Pournelle, reinforce those hierarchies in the name of space-born technocratic elites. In all
instances, the intellectual tradition described by astrofuturism insists that moving beyond the Earth's physical envelope will have a salutary effect on human development and prosperity.

CONTENTION 3: ASTROFUTURISM
OUR
PLAN TO COOPERATE GLOBALLY FOR UNIVERSAL ACCESS TO SPACE FUNDAMENTALLY RESHAPES THIS FRAMEWORK AROUND A NEW ETHIC OF EQUALITYSPACE BECOMES A PLACE WHERE WE CAN CONFRONT THE ANTAGONISMS OF EARTH INSTEAD OF FANTASIZE THEM AWAY

DE WITT DOUGLAS KILGORE, 2003 PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT INDIANA UNIVERSITY, ASTORFUTURISM: SCIENCE, RACE, AND VISIONS OF UTOPIA IN SPACE
Ben Bova: Race, Nation, and Renewal on the High Frontier Perhaps, as we place the extraterrestrial domain into the service of all people, we may be permitted to hope for the greatest benefit of all: that the ugly, the bigoted, the hateful, the cheapness of opportunism and all else that is small, narrow, contemptible and repulsive becomes more apparent and far less tolerable from the vantage point of the stars than it ever was from the perspective of the mudhole. After all, should we not take a cue from the fact that since the beginning, we have always placed our dreams and aspirations among the

Bova's significance to astrofuturism derives from his canny responsiveness to the fora and stratagems used by spaceflight advocates in pursuit of their dream. In the 1960s, he was deeply involved in the immense public and private institutional structure of the space program. In the 1970s, he found
stars? Krafft Ehricke1 Beyond the Limits? Ben himself on the outside looking in, writing popular science and science fiction in the hope of keeping the dream alive in Apollo's aftermath. As editor for Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact and Omni,

he became a prominent force in adjudicating the field's shift toward the political left. In the 1980s, he became president of the National Space Institute (NSI) and helped organize a grassroots lobby for
the spaceflight agenda in Washington. His spaceflight advocacy, therefore, has covered almost the entire range of expression available to a secondgeneration futurist. Bova's work serves as a test case for the impact of the liberal persuasions of second-generation astrofuturists on the narrative

Bova's interventions allow us to query the extent of revision possible in the context of a shifting political terrain. BEN BOVA 187 Bova was president of the NSI during the time of its merger with the O'Neill-inspired L-5 Society. Through that merger and Bova's response, we see how sharply the spaceflight community was divided over the political implications of their dream. The merger between the
conventions established by a largely conservative first-generation consensus. Specifically, two groups is significant because it encapsulates the conflicts that occurred between technophiles from the middle to the left of the American political spectrum in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The bulk of this chapter is devoted to gauging the effect of that conflict on Bova's astrofuturism, in both its

Bova's astrofuturism is a direct response to the political moment of its production. While relying on the sociomilitary and boys' adventure conventions of earlier futurists, Bova attempts a revision that eschews the narrative of imperial conquest for one of pluralistic inclusion. The narrative of a human advance into space becomes one of secular salvation rather than one of greedy acquisition. Indeed, he argues that the only way to resolve contemporary social and political ills, especially those involving poverty and race, is to develop space-based technology and industry. In scenario after scenario, narrative after narrative he hammers home this point: the security of democracy and the expansion of the American experiment can only occur through opening a new, perhaps endless, frontier. The trajectory of his career makes Bova a test case for examining astrofuturism's ability to respond to the challenges posed by its critics. While deeply committed to the core values and ordinary practices of the genre, Bova has nevertheless sought to reconfigure the social relations it assumes. As a result, race, as an emblem of all the injustices that must be addressed by the space future, has become an increasingly prominent feature of his work. His futures seek compelling strategies for including formerly excluded individuals from the space-future adventure. Initially in the novels of the
fictional and nonfictional iterations. Kinsman saga, those strategies are found in precedents from Euro-American history and, more narrowly, in the sociomilitary form as represented by the U.S. Air Force. Bova, like others of the futurists we have examined, takes the military as the model of a meritocratic organization that can satisfy calls for

Bova imagines a space future that is more colorful than the present but which is ruled by values and systems familiar in contemporary American life. The future of the Kinsman
a society based on equality of opportunity rather than arbitrary hierarchy. In this way, novels is not designed by and "for all mankind," but is an American future ruled by a disciplined elite who direct an international and putatively democratic order. As a result, these futures become an improving mirror of things as they are rather than a prophetic glimpse of things that might be. However, Bova grew dissatisfied with this solution to America's racial 188 CHAPTER 6 * problems and made resolution of a history of racial injustice the central problematic of his 1990s novels Mars and Return to Mars. In these texts,

he takes on the challenge of recuperating the tradition of scientific exploration foundational to the astrofuturist project while disentangling that ideal from the histories of conquest and dispossession that accompanied and perhaps even enabled its pursuit. He does so through his mixed-race protagonist whose combination of European and Navaho lineages holds out the possibility of redeeming the history of America's conquest, transcending national divisions, and integrating the races in joint progress toward a common future. By granting authority to control space settlement to the Navaho nation, Bova points to space as the new frontier that offers a fresh start, a chance not to repeat our past mistakes.
Although we should not underestimate the challenge Bova poses to astrofuturist conventions by closing the Mars novels with a new Eden possessed by a darkskinned Adam and Eve, questions about the efficacy of replacing white men with red men in a relatively stable narrative of benevolent ownership

Bova proves that the wonderful dream is sufficiently flexible to welcome the formerly dispossessed into its ranks. But whereas the openness improves the lot of the newcomers, their
take us up to the limits of liberal astrofuturism.

assimilation does not pose a substantive challenge to the core of the genre. Their impact is limited to saving astrofuturist ideals and its connection to past imperialisms, and does not extend to revising its foundations.

CONTENTION 3: ASTROFUTURISM
THIS
ABILITY TO CONTEST STATIC NOTIONS OF THE FATE OF HUMANITY THAT CAN PROVIDE A FRAMEWORK OF IMAGINATIVE THINKING THAT ALLOWS US TO RECLAIM SPACE AS AN OPPORTUNITY FOR FUTURE ALTERNATIVES TO THE HUMAN DESTINY THAT DO NOT LEAD TO THE ERASURE OF ALL DIFFERENCE

DE WITT DOUGLAS KILGORE, 2003 PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT INDIANA UNIVERSITY, ASTORFUTURISM: SCIENCE, RACE, AND VISIONS OF UTOPIA IN SPACE
Popular narratives that rely on the reflected glory of military adventure make way for the Utopian potential of science Political hope is expressed neither as monolithic galactic empires as racially pure, space-based bantustans Hope exists in the invention of heterotopias, spaces that escape the simple oppositions maintained by our possessive investments heterotopia as a space that is always material and bounded, partial and transitional, hybrid and momentarily, if ever, homogeneous heterotopia is distinguished by always being somewhere and at sometime and is inhabited by identities and agendas that mirror the complexity of our ordinary world thought experiments are run that suspend ordinary rules long enough to allow us to consider alternative ways of being. In heterotopian astrofuturisms, we find potential for space futures that do not depend on the imperatives that govern everyday life Third-generation astrofuturists create heterotopias by changing the bodies and identities that inhabit space futures they extend the astrofuturist engagement with modern technological Utopia they mount "an intense and incessant interrogation of powerladen discourses in the service of Their thought experiments force an audit of the investments in whiteness, masculinity, and bourgeois primacy The most promising development from these inheritors of the astrofuturist tradition is the move from Utopia to heterotopia to multiplicity; from unidirectional growth to multiple space-based projects that answer to the many histories on earth we find room for the inclusion of disenfranchised peoples as active developers of new worlds. All three writers directly engage astrofuturism's conservative tendencies by troping them away from their intended meanings
stories that explore that is not entrained to corporate capital or the projection of national political power. and federations nor whose distance from one another is supposed to guarantee the survival, peace, and prosperity of the species. . Following Foucault, I define ON MARS AND OTHER HETEROTOPIAS 227 . 14 Although Utopia may never shake the charge of being nowhere at any time, . It is achievable through available means, . In heterotopic spaces, fresh . Geographer Derek Gregory writes of Foucault's heterotopias as "marginal sites of modernity, constantly threatening to disrupt its closures and certainties."15 extraterrestrial . In so doing, from a stance of postmodern skepticism. Thus, like the disaporic intellectuals valorized by Cornel West, neither restoration, reformation, nor revolution but rather of revolt."16 Allen M. Steele, Vonda N. Mclntyre, and Kim Stanley Robinson have sought to reconfigure astrofuturism from the perspective of working class culture, antiracist feminism, and Marxist intellectual history respectively. that elsewhere constitute the ordinary business of our culture. The incipient revolts of thirdgeneration astrofuturists target race, gender, class, and nation as regulatory devices that stabilize the potential of bodies and identities in rigid hierarchies. ; from singularity . Writers such as Steele, Mclntyre, and Robinson turn away from uncritical celebrations of enlightenment science wielded by an elite, albeit benevolent, few. Instead, these authors imagine a more participatory culture of , not as grateful recipients of the science and hence a greater spectrum of possible futures. In their novels, largesse of powerful scientists and capitalists, but , either by satirizing its conventions or . Allen Steele, for instance, satirizes the class prejudices of early astrofuturists and the naivete of their deterministic faith in the beneficent 228 CHAPTER 7 effects of technological advance. His first two novels, Orbital Decay (1989) and Lunar

Descent (1991), respond to one of the oldest dreams of liberal astrofuturism, articulated by Arthur C. Clarke in the 1950s: the creation of a satellite-based global communications network that will force the breakdown of old nationalisms, ease social divisions, end tyranny, and result in a grassroots, decentralized global democracy. Steele criticizes cold war astrofuturism's uncritical advocacy of space technology and its blindness to the dangers of supporting governmental, military, and corporate space projects. He recognizes, as Clarke and others of his generation did not, that space technology is more likely to be used as an instrument of political repression than as the basis for a global Utopia. In Orbital Decay, Steele's working-class protagonists see that in the wrong hands, space-based communications technology can be used to consolidate and extend the tyrannical power of wealthy governments and their corporate allies: Y'know, the thing which always got me about the exploration of space was how naively the human racebut Americans particularlyhas approached the whole thing. I mean, because we'd proven to ourselves that it was possible to send men and machines into orbit, we always assumed that everything would always work right, that people would always do the right thing out there, that just being in space would make everything so right. Jesus, you would have thought that after 1986, after the Challenger blew up and killed seven people because some people at NASA disregarded good advice not to launch that day, that after SDI was proven to be a monstrous sham which knowledgeable people who knew that it couldn't work as advertised tried to foist upon the world anyway, after the L-5 Colony bullshit which even more so-called reliable sources tried to present as being economically feasible and practical.. ,17 The narrator trails off, leaving us to wonder at the folly of entrusting any reasonable space program to governments, corporate bureaucrats, and academic visionaries. According to Steele, the space futures institutionalized in NASA by the von Braun rocket team in the 1960s, O'Neill's space colonization proposal of the 1970s, and the enthusiastic acceptance of the Strategic Defense Initiative by spaceflight advocates such as Pournelle and Bova in the 1980s have all been discredited by subsequent experience. Conducted through his portrayal of the managerial, middle-class character of Henry George Wallace, Steele's critique raises the question that was often asked of astrofuturists during the 1960s and 1970s: who will pioneer the final frontier? While first-generation authorsincluding von Braun, Ley, Clarke, and Heinleinpromoted the space future as the next step in human evolution, they represented only a small slice of the human race as fit explorers of the ON MARS AND OTHER HETEROTOPIAS 229 space frontier. A scientific and engineering elite, often in uniform and nearly always organized in military-style hierarchies, was their ideal of the space cadet. Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe both valorized the type in their journalistic accounts of the 1960s space program.18 In Steele's version of the space future, however, there must be a place for ordinary, working-class people. While delineating that place, he imagines the class conflicts that might complicate the old technocratic mission. The conflict between labor and management starts, as these things often do, with the relatively minor insistence of workers that they be allowed some degree of autonomy, in this instance expressed as the right to keep pet cats. But Captain Wallace interprets their show of independence, perhaps rightly, as defiance that strikes against the very heart of his ideal of the well-disciplined, smoothly functioning, hierarchical society: "It wasn't the cats that started this, it was Skycorp, and before them, NASA. It was all the space experts like Clarke and O'Neill, the groups like L-5 and the National Space Society, claiming that outer space was meant to be colonized by the so-called common man." He laughed again. "All the common man is good for is to pave the way for homo superior, those who have disciplined themselvestrained their minds, hardened their bodies, become ready to live in this environment. This frontier was never meant for the common man Ed, it was meant for ..." He searched for the right word, waving his right hand in the air. "The master race," Felapolous supplied slowly. Wallace smiled and jabbed an index finger in his direction as he walked away, his eyes searching the floor of the darkened compartment. "Yes, although not by the classic Hitler definition. I would hate to have my theories compared to his." "No, of course not," Felapolous murmured.19 Steele makes explicit the trajectory that leads from first-generation astrofuturism's roots in the oven state of Nazi Germany to its final resting place in the comic-book evolutionism that became popular in the late 1970s.20 By the end of the novel, it is clear that the cherished vision of the conquest of space by a technocratic elite is bankrupt. Hence we note that the character of H. G. Wallace is a dig at H. G. Wellsa founding father of space futurismat his most imperially enthusiastic. But despite his indictment of astrofuturism's most hallowed convictions, Steele is not ready to dispense with the wonderful dream altogether. Orbital Decay's working-class heroes, the novel's principle protagonists, prevent the conquest of space from inaugurating an increasingly complete apparatus of oppression. By the end of the novel, they salvage the democratic hopes that sustain Steele's interest in the space frontier. Interwoven with his satiric review of the blindness and hypocrisy of cold war astrofuturism is a sympathetic portrayal 230 CHAPTER 7 of the blue-collar conspiracy that saves the novel's spaceflight mission. Steele's argument is not with astrofuturism's motivationthe desire to explore and further inhabit our universebut with its social texture. He is opposed to the almost bloodless vision of the space future that was canonized in Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. By narrative convention and design, 2001 presents the space future as a fulfillment of the technological utopianism embodied in the white cities of the modern world's fair movement: clean, bright, patriarchal, Eurocentric, affluent, and supported by a push-button technocracy.21 This sanitized, pneumatic Utopia has been iconographically rendered from the 1930s through the 1960s in such films as H. G. Wells's Things to Come and George Pal's The Conquest of Space, and in television series from Star Trek to The Jetsons. By contrast Steele's future is dirty, dangerous, hard working, and suffused with the popular culture of rock and roll, outlaw bikers, and marijuana. Its characters are culturally and geographically specific, with backgrounds in middlewestern and southern American cities. Although he writes of the space future as a man's world, he adheres to a liberal feminism that allows women to be equal partners with the men.22 Racial diversity among the workers is an unremarkable fact of life, occasioning comment only when white bigotry rears its ugly head.23 Working-class people are the moral center and the heroes of his future; their preoccupations and tastes shape its norms. And labor's ability to win struggles with management regarding the

In short, Steele takes the Utopias of boys' adventure fiction, turns their class hierarchies upside down, and speculates about a heterotopian space frontier where terrestrial norms can be suspended and revised. an elsewhen in which the common labor gains the moral and political stature it is denied on the Earth space can only fulfill its promise through the agency of ordinary men and women We are left with the hope of a better future organized for the good of the common people, rather than for dominance of comfortable elites
development of space signals Steel's faith that it is still possible to invest political hope in the wonderful dream. He imagines essential to survival . His space future is built from the bottom-up rather than from the top-down. Steele is emphatic that . At the end of Orbital Decay and Lunar Descent, successful insurrections and strikes enable workers to wrest control of space stations and lunar mining colonies from corrupt, earthbound authorities. the continuing . This preference for multiplicity arising from below rather than uniformity imposed from above is evident as well in the work of Vonda N. Mclntyre. In her Starfarer series, published in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Mclntyre uses Gerard O'Neill's engineering proposals and Robert Heinlein's familial arrangeON MARS AND OTHER HETEROTOPIAS 231 ments as a starting point for a nonimperial space future. But she goes far beyond anything her predecessors imagined in her speculations about the malleability of human biology and identity, and consequently proposes multiple transformations of kinship structures, individual identities, and social organization. O'Neill's space future tends to look, as Allen Steele has suggested, something like the affluent suburbs of New Jersey writ large;24 Mclntyre's parodic engagement transforms it into a site of experimentation.25 Thus, she follows the lead established by Marge Piercy in Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) and appropriates a technology strongly figured by masculinist and racist ideologies (even if liberal) for feminist and antiracist ends. Most obviously, in Mclntyre's space future the centrality of a black woman is represented as commonplace. With this gesture, the narrative engages the use of black and female figures in astrofuturist fiction, particularly in texts produced since the 1960s.26 In the hands of other futurists, such characters exist primarily to authorize Manthe Anglo-American male, the only being capable of representing universal humanityin his role as author and actor, artist and astronaut. In both liberal and conservative narratives, we are never allowed to lose sight of the fact that the black character is other to the writer and to any imagined reader.27 And the job of the other remains that of marking the frontier as the place where the regimes of whiteness and masculinity find their apotheosis.28 Mclntyre breaks with these habits by re-creating herself within the text as a black woman: Victoria Fraser MacKenzie shares her first initial, a middle surname and a Celtic patronymic with Vonda Neel Mclntyre. The character is neither a flattering foil nor a saintly rebuke; Mclntyre exchanges the flatness of otherness for depth of social detail, historical specificity, and imaginative scope. In MacKenzie,

science fiction often assumes that the problem of racism will be solved in the future by the disappearance of race. this assumption disregards the historical and cultural specificity of people of color Eliminate difference and the problem of racism evaporates this solution enshrines white masculinity, unmarked or troubled by culture, race, and gender, as the norm to which all "difference" must assimilate
she creates a character that is both marginal to the social relations of mainstream science fiction and central to its astrofuturist discourses. Despite the dissenting work of a handful of black writers, While intended to improve on the contemporary politics of race, .29 That specificity, coded as "difference," represents the trouble and danger from which racism is thought to emerge. . Within this logic, the problem of racism can be erased if its victims forgive its perpetrators and if we all forget the history of racialization and the richness of cultural variation.30 The problem with is that it . In this 232 CHAPTER 7 * vision, anyone who goes up to space in ships is, to echo Donna Haraway in another context, "necessarily a white boy in moral state, no matter what accidents of biology or social gender and race might have pertained prior" to the great adventure.31 Mclntyre's characterization of MacKenzie is notable because she allows the character to indulge in the full range of human activity without giving up her historical and emotional affiliations. The history of slavery and racism is presented as informing the future, rather than as a shameful past that we must forget. The Starfarer does not require a "band of brothers" who forget all social attachments in their trek to the stars.32 In choosing to make MacKenzie's family history an issue, Mclntyre graces the character with a social specificity rare for black characters outside the bounds of African American writing. The history and experiences of MacKenzie's African and African Canadian ancestors are invoked in the text through the figure of her great-grandmother. When this black woman defends a charter that forbids colonization and exploitation, the history she represents lends urgency and poignancy to her words. Mclntyre replaces Vivian Sobchack's "virgin astronaut," the white space hero, but does not attempt to fill his shoes.33 Instead, her character speaks from and for the victims of colonial heroism and articulates their desire for a different future. Thus, Mclntyre's intervention is intended to force scientific humanism to live up to its ideals, and suggests that it can do so only by changing its subject. The character and spirit of Starfarer'& social experiment is signalled further through Victoria Fraser MacKenzie's membership in what she calls a "family partnership," a form of marriage that allows several sexually active adults to cohabit in a socially recognized relationship.34 Although the partnership resembles polygamy, the family structure in which a spouse can have more than one mate, MacKenzie is quick to clarify the difference between the two: "The technical term is 'family partnership.' It is not as rigidly defined as polygamy. A family partnership is gender-transparent. It does not require a particular mix, like several members of one gender or one member of the other."35 Mclntyre underscores the transparency of the MacKenzie partnership through the nonidentification of an offstage member named Merit. Merit, the family's initiator and "house manager," is the victim of a tragic accident that predates the events narrated in Starfarers. Merit's absence gives Mclntyre the luxury of not having to describe the character beyond a name and fond memories. In her silence about this character's sex, race, class, sexual preference, and other identifying features, the reader is forced to face his own assumptions regarding the figure that would fit this unmarked space. Identity as a function of racial or gendered specificity disappears, to be replaced by Merit's memory. For this ON MARS AND OTHER HETEROTOPIAS 233 character, race and gender becomes the most superficial of markers. By implication, the human beings of Mclntyre's future can become open to an as yet unimaginable range of social affinities.36 But the MacKenzie family partnership does not imply the advent of a Utopia in which difference does not make a

it is the harbinger of a social formation in which the proliferation of differences provokes a disruption of norms
difference. Instead, . In other sections of Starfarers, Mclntyre entertains the possibility of an astrofuturist posthumanism, of the sort fictionalized in Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix (1985).37 Again, it must be emphasized that the family partnership does not reflect a military structure in which individual differences are sanded away to create a mechanical sameness. Rather, Mclntyre allows for individual specificity as a part of what has to be negotiated in domestic and public life. The members of the family partnership do not live in some impossible harmony, but are forced to address the tensions created by Merit's death, financial stress, and personal differences. An open-ended structure made even more so by Merit's death, the family is vulnerable also to the influence of newcomers. Through the family partnership, we begin to realize that Mclntyre's interest in the space future lies in the possible malleability of the markers of individual and social identity. The biographical and historical specificity of her characters sympathetically emphasizes their differences in a way that evacuates the content from the notion of "universal man." In fact, the wide range of differences that Mclntyre imagines, both artificial and natural, encourages the speculation that in her space future, there will be as many genders, races, and sexualities as there are people. The author usurps the universal humanity into which all must fit, not in order to prescribe a particular alternative to conventional social relations, but to imagine a society built around the freedom to refashion one's self and one's associations. Social and political consensus, if it occurs, arises out of the affinities that people of very different backgrounds may find through reasoned argument, common interest, and emotional commitment. It cannot be imposed from above by a mandated similitude of interest, purpose, or character. Working with the materials she inherits from previous articulations of the space-future project, Mclntyre finds room to speculate about social alterity. She avoids the simple humanism that would have social good automatically flowing from any movement out onto the space frontier. Instead, she articulates a feminist astrofuturism that reflects a changed and changing political engagement. The negotiations, promises, and compromises of politics do not disappear, and freedom requires not only eternal vigilance, but also eternal experimentation. 234 CHAPTER 7 ON MARS AND OTHER HETEROTOPIAS 235 f As do Allen Steele and Vonda N. Mclntyre, Kim Stanley Robinson mounts an opposition that is loyal to the transcendence imagined through space exploration but critical of the political and economic assumptions that guided astrofuturism's founding voices. He is third-generation astrofuturism's most deliberately Utopian writer for, as he argues, the habitation of new worlds is always and "almost automatically a Utopian effort":38 "The people who put down Utopia as 'pie in the sky,' impractical, and totalitarianall that is a political stance aiding the status quo, which itself is clearly unjust and insupportable. Utopia has to be rescued as a word, to mean "working towards a more egalitarian society, a global society."39 But if for astrofuturists such as Jerry Pournelle and Ben Bova, the conquest of new worlds is a flight from terrestrial political conflicts, Robinson responds that the red planet should never be thought of as a convenient escape from the consequences of our actions here on Earth. Rather, the Mars of his imagination is a test site for the innovations required to solve the social and physical problems of our native planet. Robinson's Mars trilogy Red Mars (1993), Green Mars (1994), and Blue Mars (1996)is a deliberate strike against the bourgeois fantasy of escape into an unspoiled frontier. In a 1996 interview, he remarks, "I was particularly worried that it would seem that I was proposing Mars as some kind of bolt-holethat we could let Earth go to hell because we could make an even better second Earth on Mars. That is so contrary to my feelings that I had to make the entire plot say the oppositethat Mars can't function as a bolt-hole, that it can't even exist as a human place, unless Earth is doing well."40 Hence Robinson offers Mars as a thought experiment that can help us address urgent terrestrial problems. Chief among these is the question of the environmental impact of an exploding human population's aggressive use of the Earth's limited resources. Although Robinson agrees with Mars Society president Robert Zubrin that Mars is a wilderness that must be domesticated by powerful new technologies, he is skeptical of the frontier metaphors prevalent in contemporary astrofuturism. 41 In the Mars trilogy, his characters grapple with the "intrinsic worth" of the Martian environment on the one hand and, on the other, the need to alter that environment in order to sustain human activity.42 The conflict illuminates Robinson's position that

humankind must rethink its relationship to land it inhabits. The species must learn to think of itself as people of the land not conquerors, exploiters, or escape artists. Robinson's rejection of astrofuturism's empire-building conventions is the space-clearing gesture that allows him to offer alternatives.
whatever and Whereas for Robert A. Heinlein or Arthur C. Clarke the space future is a reflection of nineteenth-century glory, Robinson insists that historical analogies to past revolutions and conquests have little bearing on the future that will

emerge from present circumstances. Any representation of terrestrial and space futures must reckon with two centuries of struggles for liberation by subjugated lands and peoples. Hence the history of the future cannot be fully controlled by any single individual or group, ideology, or nation. Robinson's theory of history is self-consciously opposed to the monolithic, capitalist future histories that so engaged science fictionists from the late 1930s to the 1960s.43 Instead, it engages the strand of space futurism pioneered by David Lasser in the early 1930s. His futures are not the gift of a single privileged people or messiah but emerge from a cacophony of voices that never quite resolve into a single, harmonious choir. Moreover, against the great majority of space-future fiction that entertains us by reconstituting nineteenth-century industrial capitalism on grander scales, Robinson seeks to construct a narrative unregulated by "the mechanistic world view [that uses] the old futures like tired stage sets."44 Using astrofuturism's resources, he breaks with the technological determinism and political naivete of his predecessors. Over the course of Robinson's Mars trilogy, it becomes clear that the human habitation of extraterrestrial spaces does not redeem American history. Rejecting both a redemptive repetition of our past

. Neither a frontier to conquer nor the site of a revolution that leaves Earth behind, Mars is a heterotopia that could change the very nature of revolution
and a triumphant escape from endless cycles of rise and fall, Robinson imagines future history as a slow, nonlinear, often frustrating shuffle of the cards that must constantly reckon with the state of things

. The making of a new world is an enterprise so vast and complex that it changes the course of human history. The historical bloc under which we live undergoes a

"phase shift" marked by changes in structures of feeling and social relations that add up to a new culture. Although Robinson is careful to problematize the analogies that have fixed the meaning of revolution to paradigmatic moments in America, France, and Russia, he acknowledges that these precedents provide the vocabulary we need to interpret phenomena that would otherwise be incomprehensible. The revolution of Blue Mars appropriately begins with "a gunshot," echoing Ralph Waldo Emerson's commemoration of the start of the American Revolution as "the shot heard round the world."45 However, Robinson's future revolution is also heralded by "a bell rung, [and] a choir singing counterpoint."46 This third and final Martian revolution, he writes, "was so complex and nonviolent that it was hard to see it as a revolution at all, at the time; more like a shift in [an] ongoing argument, a change in the tide, a punctuation of equilibrium" (734, author's emphasis). The crisis that sparks this final revolution is the clash between 236 CHAPTER 7 ON MARS AND OTHER HETEROTOPIAS 237 t Earth's desire to solve the political problems created by overpopulation and unrestrained resource exploitation and Mars' need to protect the fragile new social ecology its inhabitants have established. Given our history and fictional cliches, we expect a final conflict in which one side conquers the other (in the process planting the seeds of the next inevitable clash) or in which both combatants are reduced to preindustrial quiescence or extinction. In seeking a way off the treadmill of these plots, Robinson proposes an acceleration of history that outruns humanity's violent impulses: At any point in the process, in a thousand different places, things could have turned violent; many people were furious; but cooler heads prevailed. It remained, in most places, at the level of argument. Many feared this could not continue, many did not believe it possible; but it was happening, and the people in the streets saw it happening. They kept it happening. At some point, after all, the mutation of values has to express itself; and why not here, why not now? . . . This was the moment of mutation, history in the making, and they could see it right before them, in the streets and on the human hillsides and on the screens, history labile right there in their handsand so they seized the moment, and wrenched it in a new direction. They talked themselves into it. A new government. A new treaty with Earth. A polycephalous peace. The negotiations would go on for years. Like a choir in counterpoint, singing a great fugue. (745-46) Here the value of inhabiting another world, with its implications of a tremendous increase in the human ability to manipulate natural forces, lies in our progress toward what Gerard Piel has called the "humane phase" of history. 47 Thus, in the Mars trilogy, Robinson not only rescues Utopia from the intellectual backwaters of twentieth-century literature, but also makes credible the possibility of change from one historical era to another. That latter option is directed toward the here and now, for his task is to destabilize the structures of feeling that nurture our inequalities. The Utopia he imagines does not banish change and struggle because it exists inside a history that is never finished.48 In his account of the rise of homo ares, Robinson imagines humanity transformed by its interaction with the advanced technoscience that allows it to make Mars inhabitable. His hopes for our terrestrial and space-based future is articulated powerfully in his description of the revolution as a resolution between two human species: On the coast ofTempe, the new Kampuchean settlers got out of their landers and went to the little shelters that had been dropped with them, just as the First Hundred had, two centuries before. And out of the hills came people wearing furs, and carrying bows and arrows. They had red stone eyeteeth, and their hair was tied in topknots. Here, they said to the settlers, who had bunched before one of their shelters. Let us help you. Put those guns down. We 'II show you where you are. You don't need that kind of shelter, it's an old design. That hill you see to the west is Perepelkin Crater. There's already apple and cherry orchards on the apron, you can take what you need. Look, here are the plans for a disk house, that's the best design for this coast. Then you'll need a marina, and some fishing boats. If you let us use your harbor we 'II show you where the truffles grow. Yes, a disk house, see, a Sattelmeier disk house. It's lovely to live out in the open air. You'll see.49 The new Martians are humans who have gone native and become the people of their new land. They appear with all the signs of racial difference we have been conditioned to recognize as threatening or amusing: the topknot as a sign of cultural difference; bows, arrows, and furs that signal their technological commitments; and "red stone eyeteeth" to signal physical difference from terrestrial humanity.

The

Martians have become the "natives, "primitives," and "Indians" of imperial adventure

, but they are also the inhabitants

of a scientific Utopia, the possessors of a technological inheritance that trumps the military hardware deployed by terrestrial authority. Hence a powerful new social ecology has resignified the meaning of race. Their knowledge, indeed their creation of the land and their choice to hunt it with bows and arrows, indicate an order opposed to the extractive industrial capitalism represented by the settlers' guns. They are the "future primitives" who Robinson hopes will supplant the commonplace industrial futures imagined by astrofuturists such as Gerard O'Neill and Robert Heinlein.50 And he imagines them to be the hybrid descendents of all the African, Asian, and European varieties of humankind. Moreover, the settlers are not the white Europeans of our own colonial heritage, but people who were the colonized of the recent past. Race and difference have not disappeared; they have been complexly troped and reassigned in light of past miseries, present desires, and future hopes. This space future contains all the scientific and narrative conventions we have come to expect, but they are opened to possibilities not imagined by Robinson's predecessors. Robinson regards astrofuturism as a collection of "Utopian statements of desire, full of joy and hope and danger, re-opening our notion of the future to a whole range of wild possibilities."51 It is in this way that science and its fiction may be used as resources for addressing the political hopes of peoples who struggle for futures unfettered by authoritarian injunctions to accept what is. Robinson embraces the potential that astrofuturism and science fiction represents for his generation: "I love this part of the literature: the thought-experiment that attacks social problems and suggests solutions, Utopian goals, or envisions societies that we might then work towards. It seems to me that that's one of the most important things that it does, and it doesn't necessarily have to be like taking castor oil. It can be playful, and it can be fun 238 CHAPTER 7 * to read, and yet still be a way of increasing the meaning of our lives and sharpening our political

we shape our responses to contemporary politics and maintain our skill at inventing other futures. What is at stake in narrative constructions of a future in space has never been as simple as refurbishing power. Astrofuturism represents the kind of dreams that can arise from within our ordinary culture; although contained within the boundaries of the dominant cultural hegemony Herein lies the dynamism of recent history and the force that will shape whatever future we encounter the spaceflight movement has been considered almost exclusively within the frame of the dominant projects of a regnant America, a nation solely concerned with an unambiguous victory over its ideological, economic, and political rivals
will."52 Finally, astrofuturism expresses the desire to bring together science and art in a concerted engagement with the questions we address in our private and political lives. By these means, discovering other places and Astrofuturism has also been motivated by a desire to push the boundaries of convention, to exceed the physical and social imperatives that structure the contemporary order. Trends in thirdgeneration astrofuturism indicate that even the most conservative and obdurate instruments of power have in them potential that can be tuned to other agendas. , such dreams also nourish dissent. Mclntyre, Steele, and Robinson all engage elements of our ordinary culture that have been nourished poorly by our dominant institutions. . Heretofore, its complicity in burnishing its image abroad and achieving . Although this research agenda is undeniably important, by itself it is inadequate. The astrofuturism of the spaceflight movement is by turns an extension of exploratory dramas that celebrate conquest and exploitation and those that seek wildernesses that are free from the powerful hierarchies of our world. We might consider what help there is in this tradition for communities suffering the political and economic consequences of mendacity, bigotry, and greed. Their engagements exemplify our ability to imagine just social orders using the materials at hand, seizing help from unexpected

It is through this kind of imaginative work that we develop the tools we need to change the future
quarters.

CONTENTION 3: ASTROFUTURISM
FINALLY,
NOW IS THE KEY TIME FOR THE SPACE ELEVATOROUR ACTIONS NOW WILL LOCK IN THE FRAMEWORK FOR THE NEXT SPACE AGE

DAVID A. MINDELL, 2008, DIRECTS THE SPACE, POLICY, AND SOCIETY RESEARCH GROUP AT MIT. HE IS DIBNER PROFESSOR OF THE HISTORY OF ENGINEERING AND MANUFACTURING, PROFESSOR OF ENGINEERING SYSTEMS, AND DIRECTOR OF THE PROGRAM IN SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIETY AT MIT, ET AL, THE FUTURE OF HUMAN SPACEFLIGHT, HTTP://BIT.LY/M5OIFX
Threshold of a New Era. 2008 marked NASAs fiftieth anniversary and a series of halfcentury commemorations of early milestones in human spaceflight. We are even months away from the fortieth anniversary of Apollo 11s first landing on the moon, surely one of the watershed events of the twentieth century. What was once the essence of the future human ventures into

space and to other worlds is now a part of history. But what of its future? Despite the exciting record of accomplishments, questions remain about human spaceflight. Why should we have a government-funded program to send people into space? What are the benefits? What are the rationales for an expensive program in a time of economic crisis, tight budgets and competing priorities? Similar questions have surrounded human spaceflight since its beginning, but the answers have changed with each generation. Early on, Cold War competition provided a sufficient rationale; later, the goal became to develop routine access to space with the promise of commercial benefits. More recently, only the loftier aims of exploration seem to justify the risks and costs of sending humans into this hostile environment. Events of the past six years have thrust NASA and the country into a major transition. The transition has begun, but how it evolves remains undefined. Early in its first term, amidst severe financial pressures, the new administration will make the most important decisions in U.S. human spaceflight in a generation. These concern the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station (ISS), and future plans and systems for exploration. How should these decisions be made in the best interest of the country? The Space Shuttle, mainstay of U.S. human spaceflight for the past thirty years, is scheduled for retirement in 2010, although proposals exist to extend its life by a few missions to
several years. NASA is building a series of new rockets (Ares I and V) and spacecraft (Orion, Altair), together known as Constellation, to carry humans into orbit and to the moon. The International Space Station is scheduled to be completed in 2010, and questions remain about how best to support and utilize this $100 billion asset (some modules will reach the end of their service lifetimes as early as 2013). The Bush Vision for Space Exploration, (the Bush vision) which in 2004 laid out plans for the retirement of the Shuttle and the construction of Constellation, remains underfunded. The period between the Shuttles

last flight and Constellations first operations will last at least several years, leading to a schedule gap where the United States must rely on other means, including Russian launchers and spacecraft, to provide access to the ISS. Meanwhile remote and robotic science missions have yielded astonishing new discoveries on and about our solar system and beyond. These vehicles have generated proof of water ice on Mars, detected organic material venting from a moon of
Saturn, and led to discoveries of exoplanets outside our solar system. Despite their technology, none of these missions are automatic each is controlled by, and sends data to, human beings on Earth. NASAs budget has remained essentially fl at with

is attempting to support its new programs by rebalancing its priorities, leading to fierce debates about appropriate allocations between human spaceflight and science, aeronautics, remote missions, and earth observation.
inflation (just over 2.1% average annual increase from 2005-2008, to $17.3 billion), and the agency