Introduction: a personal Story

Visions, Revisions and Paradigms

Spaceflight, space exploration and visions of future space settlement were developed within larger general frameworks, schemata or plans of action that were (later) recognized as “paradigms.” Each paradigm has their “father figure” and a group of followers. When the Apollo program was finished, NASA failed to follow up on its original grander vision of going to Mars. The visionaries left NASA and formed independent space advocacy groups to achieve their objectives.

Throughout the years NASA followed a plan of action that is usually referred to as the “von Braun paradigm” (Day, Neufeld, Klerkx). Its less-well known alternative, the Rosen paradigm or the Rosen-Eisenhower paradigm, named by a scientist and president that defended or practiced its tenets, ultimately did not receive endorsement or major funding. The Rosen paradigm’s domain is robotic explorations; the von Braun paradigm is a master plan of human space exploration. At the height of space age expectations, in 1951, von Braun climbed on the podium in Hayden Planetarium to disclose his proposal to the scientific public (Day 153). The von Braun paradigm has not been changed, only parts of it were modified to accommodate circumstances and contingencies.¹¹⁰ In the Soviet Union the National Academy of Sciences coordinated similar Soviet efforts. The Von Braun plan asked first for reliable access to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Second, a space station is to be built in that orbit and a shuttle to make easy, cheap and frequent transportation to and from the station. Lastly a heavy lifter, a Saturn V class rocket would complete construction of a multipurpose enabling infrastructure. After the infrastructure has been put in place it would be easy to start flying astronauts first to the Moon and soon after to Mars and other celestial bodies, possibly Jovian moons or, for von Braun, also to Venus. This was before the surface data from Mariner 4 was known.

In von Braun’s vision the space station would be circular and rotate to create artificial gravity like the one presented in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Any large size planetary exploration vehicle could be assembled in orbit from small and heavy parts supplied by the delivery system, the shuttle and the heavy lifter rocket. To build and operate such a vast infrastructure in space requires a large and centralized organization and made NASA necessary. This organization would focus on human activities in space and supervise the orderly progress of the explorations pushing the frontiers ever forward. Part of the failure of NASA to consolidate its lunar outpost was too tight adherence to the plan and to its outward move. The objective for von Braun was always Mars (initially also Venus) as the habitable planets. That is also where von Braun’s personal motivation was: he wanted to be an explorer/enabler of exploration on the scale of Columbus, written large, of other habitable worlds.¹¹¹ At the time von Braun formed his vision, both Mars and Venus were considered habitable and, in sci-fi literature written as late as in the sixties, they were inhabited. Mars was usually an older brother, an aging world of highly evolved civilization, with Martians occasionally invading Earth (H. G. Wells); Venus was the younger sister covered with oceans and swarming with Jurassic creatures.¹¹² The last time von Braun’s paradigm was invoked as a goal for NASA was the Vision of Space Exploration to “go to the Moon and beyond” put forward by G. W. Bush in 2004. Obama’s plan follows a derivative scheme charted out in The Next Steps in Exploring Deep Space (Huntress 2006). It also asks ultimately for a vast infrastructure to be in place but does not over specify in order to keep each following step “flexible.”

It was only in 1994 that a Social scientist, D. Day, suggested to name what he considered contra productive NASA’s long term strategy after its principal proponent (Neufeld 325). Apart from NASA, Von Braun’s paradigm was also a program of a group of activists founded by von Braun in 1975, the National Space Institute (NSI), after he perceived that NASA had lost it original mission orientation. Von Braun left NASA disillusioned, his life work unfinished (Klerkx 283).¹¹³ For decades von Braun kept refusing better paying employment options in the industry in order to promote what he considered his space vocation, first in the Army and later at NASA. Now he left to become a private consultant. His terminal illness shortly after also likely had a significant psychosomatic component.¹¹⁴

The centralized and budgetary stretched-out approach did not appeal to Eisenhower who based his political priorities on exactly the opposite efforts: he was distrustful of large organizations, (military-industrial complex and its self-interests) and struggled to limit budgetary outlays (De Groot 87; Longsdon 2007 91). Eisenhower was a natural ally of the Rosen Paradigm, a contrary approach. It called for maximum effects with minimal investments and for flexible use of the means at hand. It did not matter if the results of explorations were brought in by human explorers or automatic probes. It did not need humans in space.¹¹⁵ This attitude, with the statement of James R. Killian Jr. (the first science adviser to President Eisenhower) in 1960 of no need for human explorers,¹¹⁶ half a year before President Kennedy declared a human Moon shot, created a longstanding rift in the exploration community between human and robotic explorations that is still discussed today (Longsdon 2009 Fifty 243). Rosen is similar in its encouragement of the robotic probes to Deep space exploratory paradigm advocated by Sagan.

Both of the above mentioned plans (von Braun and Rosen) were operational within NASA, with the former dominating: Apollo was the absolute priority. When the shuttle needed expensive redesign, space science projects were being cancelled. When ISS slid farther over the budget (due to big aerospace contractors taking advantage of NASA (Klerkx; Ordway 199, Harrison), more science projects were cut.

After advocacy, independent of NASA, was born in the seventies and eighties, two additional paradigms that were guiding the goals of those other groups were formulated: O’ Neilian and Sagan (Klerkx). The latter focused on Space Science and its popularization (The Planetary Society) whereas the former envisioned outright colonization of space. At the end of his life Sagan put all his weight behind O’Neil’s plan¹¹⁷ and considered final Cosmos: A Personal Voyage sequel, his very popular TV series at that time, to expand on the topic.
O’ Neill’s Space Islands
The first, space colonization paradigm (or vision) is named after Gerard O’Neil and is associated with the activities of O’Neill-ian societies. The most vocal and radical of them was the L-5 society, named after a location of the aspired for space colony in one of the stable gravitational loci known as LaGrange points. There was additionally a number of other, often locally based, O’Neill-ian societies like Virgina Space Settler or Space Now Society! (Michaud 260) O’Neill was a theoretical nuclear physicist with good standing among his colleagues, lecturing in Princeton. Originally, O’Neill attempted a career as an astronaut, but did not pass the final selection by Allan Shepard, the second person (to Gagarin) and the first American Mercury astronaut in space.

O’Neil felt frustrated by the Study of the Club of Rome: The Limits to Growth. Club of Rome run a computer simulation with representation of resource development against the exponential curve of unrestrained population growth/explosion. What they proposed is basically a Malthusian thesis: the resources of the Earth have limits. Those limits will be hit soon. After the limits are hit no more material progress and advancement of individual well-being can be expected. Rather, the society will have to resort to a war-like economy of resource management.¹¹⁸ Likely further wars and conflict over remaining resources would ensue. The Gulf Wars may have already been in this category. With wars and revolutions the world’s situation will deteriorate further. Material progress and advancement of human conditions has fixed limits that cannot be negotiated even with advancement and inventions of completely new technologies and improvement of the current ones. They would only postpone the onset of the general age of misery by a negligible time. As of now, forty years later, The Limits to Growth stand firm.

The historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued strongly that a new frontier was essential to the maintenance of freedom and an open society and growth. The deeper analyses of Spengler and Toynbee reinforced the same kind of conclusion. In their histories - civilization always decayed until a new culture was born, always on new soil, always as a new frontier appeared. And so, rationality demanded reaching out to space, not just as a way of increasing Utility (human happiness), but as a way of reducing the probability that civilization might decay and fall altogether. (Werbos 2004 Space 149)

In spite of arguments about Demographic Collapse (Bainbridge 2004; 2009) in the West, the overall demographic explosion in the rest of the world holds to this day (Allix 2011). But this is what O’Neil rebelled against. He could not imagine that the progress and advancement of humanity would end soon. (It does.)

Not only would earthly desires be fulfilled in Eden’s locations inside Sky Islands, also old dreams would find their fulfillments. The archetypal dream of flight from one’s own power is one of them:

From the time of classical Greece, and perhaps even before, some men have been fascinated by the idea of flight by human power alone. Leonardo da Vinci was obsessed by it, and filled notebooks with sketches of machines, which he hoped might fly. In modern times man-powered aircraft have been flown short distances, but under Earth-normal gravity human powered flight remains an almost impossible dream. In space communities, it will become easy for everyone, not just for athletes. Close to the cylinder axes, in near zero gravity, almost every imaginable variety of human powered flying machine, including some of Leonardo's, will work. We can imagine elderly ladies and gentlemen taking their evening constitutionals by gently pedaling their aircraft, while viewing the world miles below them. Because they will be in a "gravity" produced by rotation, they will be able to change it at will, by flying with or against the direction the habitat is turning in. While as far from the axis as the height of a tall building, they'll be able to cancel gravity entirely by pedaling at only bicycle speed — but in the right direction (O’Neil 49).

Tsiolkovkiy’s enemy would be done. The placement would be initially offered to professional couples that had already raised their families and would retire within a decade. You can imagine cruise ads as you know them, only doing one better. They would be able to contribute both with their expertise and their purchasing power to cover the initial investments. In other worlds, retirees would blow their nest eggs on utopia. The luxuries would beat those of “millionaire only islands” developed in the tropics. Happy ever after of humanity would commence there.

To balance the account, O’Neil was aware of the problems. He painted the habitat in familiar terms; he realized the endeavor would present a formidable challenge (ibid. 45).

What was particular about O’Neil’s vision was his suggestion and detailed calculations that the Space Island colonies were technologically possible in the now of the seventies. At that time the shuttle was on the drawing boards and O’Neil and his supporters were so naïve that they believed NASA’s estimates of cost to orbit and frequency of flight; NASA put those estimates forward as they needed a project to survive and substantiate their existence and that project had to look good. Shuttle never ever came close to the original estimates. In particular, after OMB (Office of Management and Budget) closed their purse only the cheapest and most compromised design was chosen to save on design costs. This return on investment savings is now truly astronomical spending on operational costs (Johnson-Freese 20). Not as lucky as Apollo 1 was unlucky while pointing at the spot NASA was about to cut corners (Woods 27), shuttle lost two crews in about a hundred and thirty flights (additional shuttle particulars will be mentioned further on). Before accidents though, for O’Neil there was no substantial barrier why, using the new and perfect shuttles, Space Islands should not be ventured immediately and made a political priority for the government as was the westward expansion in the past or a long sequence of other federal projects. Congressional hearings were organized.

Soon O’Neil learned about Solar Power Station proposals by Peter Glasser from MIT. He expanded his Space Island ideas with the provision for unlimited clean energy from space to cover all energy needs on Earth without further degradation of the environment and worsening of greenhouse conditions. After the Oil Shock of 1973 this argument had traction. During the summer holidays in 1976 and ‘77 O’Neil organized summer workshops at NASA’s Ames Center in Mountain View, California and after that he was ready to sell, his design perfected. He did not make it. He “hung himself on the concept of space solar power” (Michaud 76).

There were several hearings in congress on Solar Power Stations¹²¹ and cost benefits estimated by NASA and DOE. The NASA calculations ran favorably. But DOE was under the sway of a nuclear and fossil fuel lobby, which bitterly opposed any challenge to the status quo. Without this crucial piece in the economy of Space Islands to start with at the beginning there was no point in moving ahead. Other potential sources of income like in-space manufacturing or space tourism were too risky to rely on. The political will was not there either. Morris K. “Mo” Udall, Arizona’s challenger to Carter with ties to L-5, lost. Walter Mondale opposed the Shuttle. Jimmy Carter favored “small is beautiful” projects¹²². A colony in space, a mega project on the scale of Apollo many times over, did not fit the bill. True, it was calculated to be self-supporting, eventually. But before that could have happened, an investment on a mammoth scale needed to be made. All space projects are risky because of their peculiar location and the inherent dangers of unproven technology. Even with several decades of hindsight the risks are too large. There are many unproven technologies that need to work perfectly. If only a small probability of failure of any particular one of them exists, the combined risk is multiplied and with large and complex projects, sure failure. The International Space Station (ISS) was built on a significantly smaller scale and their budget overrun is enough to trouble NASA for decades. As with Apollo, Shuttle, ISS and all other failed large initiatives, visions, and missions, budgetary appropriations were the first priority. The very fact that O’Neil was given a hearing, studies were made and the project was considered says something about the seventies, even with their so-called anti-technology bias. It was still, in comparison to the time we are in now, an optimistic and naïve age. It is very difficult to imagine a similar government hearing taking place today.

There they were, a high-tech, high-firepower couple who spent their weekends setting off bombs out in the desert, both of them science fiction fans since just about the time they could read; there it was, the dawn of the space age, and into their living room walks physicist Dan Jones with Gerry O'Neill's blueprint for a celestial city in his hands. What were they supposed to do, sit back and laugh their heads off?

"I absolutely wanted to go into space," Carolyn said. "I wanted to live there and grow food. I wanted to be a pioneer, in the classic spirit."

'There really isn't much left to do here," said Keith. 'The highest mountains and the lowest valleys have all been explored on earth. The opportunities are rather limited."

"In other words," Carolyn said, "we were worried about things getting very, very BORING if we stuck around on this planet too long" (Regis 49).

The network of tunnels undermined their house. Both were strong personalities and more.¹²³ Bainbridge already made observations about strong personalities of early inventors (see above); in L-5 the primal fervor and passion burned again.

Ed Regis looked at activities into which the members were branching out. Some were up to incredible things (again) like raising the dead (a familiar topic – see above). Keith Henson became a paid advisor to Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the first cryonic company selling a practical vision of immortality. Like Benjamin Franklin did surreptitiously before, to quench the curious minds’ quest for new discoveries and breakthroughs, Alcor went about stealing body parts. Legal status of bodies hanging in the balance between life and death was not clarified. Litigations were entered. Erich Drexler, after his stint with O’Neil and L-5 Society, wrote the pioneering Engines of Creations proposing, among others, restoring frozen bodies to life with a fleet of nanobots, decades before nanotechnology started taking on such a proposition in earnest. They were offering services to Robert Heinlein but were rebuffed (Regis 79-80, 89). Heinlein did not want to face the challenges of life as a stranger in a future dead-raising society, if such leaps in technology were indeed possible.

The L-5 Society was not only a regular advocacy, it was a religion.¹²⁴ There was urgency in their message. They, like the communist youth, believed they were the wave of the future, the next evolutionary step of humanity. They were the trailblazers of the next frontier. At their gatherings, Carolyn Henson, one of L-5’s founders, performed amateurish starry-eyed songs she composed herself:

We gather here together to create the future of Earth,

We are joined together, humankind in rebirth.

The universe is open, the gates of the stars open wide,

Lands of milk and honey in the starry fields of the sky

The universe is open, the future rests in our arms,

Reach for the cosmos, reach for the stars. (Regis 61)

They would be up there, soon. The Infinity unfolds. They felt empowered. They had meaning and identification. They were true revolutionaries. They had their religion.

On occasion their message resonated with the mentally ill. Then they had to convince a new member that “the table is really not a spaceship, really not.” The official plan was to dissolve the society after the goal was accomplished: at a mass gathering on L-5. They believed that would happen soon or at least during their lifetimes (“now”): “The L5 society […] had a slogan: ‘L5 in 95!’ They certainly didn't mean 2095 (O’Neill 182).” They distributed T-shirts with inscriptions like: “If you love it, leave it,” across a picture of the full Earth or in the “small is beautiful” vein, one slogan suggested: “decentralize - get off the planet.” “Do you love Earth? Leave it!” was followed by “The meek will inherit the Earth; the rest of us will go to the stars” (Michaud 89).

Suggestions of space environmentalists are still around today. There is the Space Renaissance Manifesto group (Autino 2008) and books bear titles like Paradise Regained: The Re-greening of Earth (Les Johnson, 2010).

L-5 Society published a newsletter and invited research into the issues of space colonization.¹²⁸ In it, they had opinion pieces and motivational exhortations. A major part of why co-founder Keith Henson wanted to go out there was to become a billionaire. By choosing a field, presumably, on the cutting edge of the “inevitable progress into space” he could not position himself better. His wife, Carolyn Henson, wrote an article suggesting that this wealthy society (Space would open the frontier of wealth) is also a peace loving and democratic society. The argument was that in desperate and destitute societies of the world left behind the value of human life was marginal. By engaging in social unrest, riots and violence the perpetrators had little to lose. Their life was not worth much. They stood only gains. (The “Proletariat has nothing to lose but their chains” chant of Marxists makes a spectacle of the same supposed end of the line of desperation that drives a drug addict who robs a bank. The addict is done-in for real.) In contrast, people in the West stood to lose their prized possessions that filled their lives with options: their biking and hiking gear, their scuba diving suit, their TV and media systems, minivans, luxury yachts and billionaire islands. Today, Carolyn could have expanded mentioning Elon Musk and Richard Branson with their privately owned space rockets or space planes, and dreams of other-worldly retirement, if not [almost] life immortal (Vedda 2009 130). Wealth is the best prescription for democracy (see also the argument about current revolutions in the Arab world by Financial Times: Democracies are stable only above a certain level of income. They succeed better in Turkey than in Pakistan. Egypt hangs in the middle (Rachman 2011). When consumers have toys they do not devise mischief. They are busy writing rave consumer reviews on Amazon about the new angled computer power cords.

At times L-5 was embarrassing even for O’Neil who did not want to have anything to do with “those strange people from Arizona” (Michaud). But they were keen organizers and compensated up to a degree for O’Neil’s lack of political astuteness. Carolyn Henson had connections and experience with politics from before she exploited for L-5. It was Carolyn who introduced L-5 to a democratic candidate from Arizona, Morris K. “Mo” Udall.

The one and only real success of L-5 society was the defeat of the Moon Treaty. The proposed treaty, later signed by minor states that had no space programs of their own, like Austria, was perceived as a particularly dangerous basis for a legal regime in space. By its provisions all private entrepreneurial activities would have been effectively impossible. If entrepreneurs gained from exploitation of the resources, they would be expropriated “in the name of humanity.” This regime already governs ocean resources and the plans for ocean bed mining, long in the works of private entities, never went through because of it

If governments remain in charge of a Lunar base under the Outer Space Treaty, or, worse, the Moon Treaty, the Moon will always resemble Antarctica under the 1958 international agreement that barred private property and commercial activities: a frozen, dead wasteland (Allan Steele189).

Tumlinson believes that Apollo was not defeated by Nixon’s personal enmity, the Vietnam War drain on the budget, or even NASA’s own adverse institutional dynamics. Rather Apollo was killed on the sly by the Soviets in 1967, two years before the landing. The Soviets induced America into signing a noble sounding Space treaty with a CHOM (Common Heritage of Mankind) clause in it. This treaty governs exploitation of space bodies by an international regime to secure that “all mankind” benefits. “All mankind” would rent the Moon, asteroids….perhaps including sunshine. Under such a regimen expansion and exploitation is pointless. America, the promised land of layers¹²⁹, chose not to venture into legal trouble. (Harrison 277).

Project Orion, Freeman Dyson’s solar system opening transportation, was defeated, some believe, similarly in 1963 by another international treaty with the Soviets that banned nuclear installations in orbit. The Soviets with their Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) were de-facto in breach of it, duplicitously clinging to the letter (the bomber was not really orbiting) (Burrows 1998 546). But they pushed for absolutely no exception when approached by Americans regarding Orion. The duplicitous Soviets did not believe the other side had peaceful intentions. Dyson was a vocal international activist for the universal ban of all nuclear weapons. For him, Orion was the ultimate rehabilitation of nuclear energy. He was shocked that technology development was manipulated (Sykes in To Mars by A-Bomb). Orion fell through the crack in between bureaucratic competencies of DOD and NASA: it was a spacecraft (NASA space domain) that used atomic pulse propulsion (DOD weapon domain).

Space frontier activists believed that, if left standing, the Moon Treaty, defeated by L-5 lawyers, would further tighten the stranglehold on frontier enterprise. The opposing view holds vigil to prevent another round of Imperialism and Colonialist exploitation, this time in outer space (Billings, Pyne, Marshal, Grewell). The issue is ideologically charged and tied down to core values and questions of war and peace, private or common, competition or cooperation, right or left … But there is no mistake that the wealthiest individuals today want to venture into space (why?) And so do wealthy nations.