All things being equal, I would much rather visit Mars than the Moon. But I could have a Moon vacation that lasts as long as a Caribbean cruise – a week, ten days. It is a viable destination for Americans who are not astronauts.

Some small part of being right must be engaged with the question of what we intend for space. It’s time to give this topic a fresh look. Largely away from the headlines, and after a long lull, space is ready to take off. We’d better be sure it takes off in the right direction.

We have a solid sketch of a plan, a Vision for Space Exploration, announced by President Bush in 2004. The plan splits the difference between two competing factions in the space enthusiast community: those who have long advocated a return to the Moon, and those who see the big prize as Mars, and have argued that we should voyage there directly, without a lunar interim. We can’t ignore the progress made by our robotic exploration of Mars, and fail to follow up the tire treads in the red dust with human footprints. Nor can we ignore China’s ambitious space program, which is mapping its own path to the Moon — both as rival and as potential partner.  It’s for the best that the Vision includes both the Moon and Mars, but while we as a nation weigh visions we ought to be clear which goal is most important to our national interest. This means, first, disentangling our national interest from the interest of humankind generally, including the interest of pure science. NASA Human Spaceflight may come in peace for all mankind, but all mankind isn’t paying the bills.

Since Gene Cernan left the Moon in 1972, we have made up for the lack of one good rationale for NASA Human Spaceflight by spawning them in bunches. Human spaceflight was either going to provide us with new, microgravity-bred pharmaceuticals, or it was going to inspire international harmony; there was the “spin-offs” argument, which goes approximately that there’s no point to this but at least it pays for itself in the long run; it was going to keep potentially bad-guy scientists busy, so they wouldn’t go to work for our enemies; and then there was, always, exploration, which in this case largely has meant exploring the human body’s varied reactions to the aforementioned microgravity.  One day we may marvel at the concoction of some drug, entirely manufactured in microgravity, which cures some disease you can only catch in microgravity.

While we have been hovering in microgravity, our robots have been to Mars, all the other planets, all those planets’ moons, to asteroids, to comets, and now to the edge of the solar system. I don’t deny that human beings can have an important role in space exploration. It’s just that on a bang-for-buck basis, robots serve this role better.

What we get out of Human Spaceflight has little to do with space exploration. We love astronauts, and not because they can bring the intuitive human eye to the geological study of the lunar terrain, but because they are the first of the rest of us. Where they go, we are implied.

Manned space exploration is at once stirring and advantageous to us all, and will always be part of America’s purpose in funding NASA Human Spaceflight, but sometimes there is a difference between something’s stated purpose and its basic point. When you get to the point, NASA Human Spaceflight facilitates our dreams that the American future will include our expanding into space. NASA Human Spaceflight is to precede the American territorial expansion into space.

There are reasons why it has been so difficult to admit that this is so obvious. For one thing, it is not the role of a Federal Government agency to decide that the United States is to expand. NASA itself has always acted as though it understood that its point was national expansion, but it couldn’t admit this very directly, or at all, in its literature, including any Federal budget text outlaying NASA’s annual funding, nor in any NASA Administrator’s speech. American expansion is our little secret.

We haven’t gotten much help from science fiction, which, at least at its more popular octaves, has tended to imagine futures in which humankind, as precedent to the colonization of space, has surrendered up its nations, and now functions as a united planet. Sometimes this One Worldism is for idealist purposes; we have to have, for instance, transcended war, and what straighter road toward such transcendence than the erasure of those national borders which angry armies might otherwise violate. More often, one suspects that for the writer it’s just way cool making up new nations.

Either way, it’s nonsense. I realize that this is not a pressing problem for any of us at the moment, but think of it this way. Given a future in which there are places to live that are not on Earth, there is no reason whatsoever that an American who wishes to live off Earth must emigrate from America in order to do so.

Nor, for that matter, ought a Japanese, nor an Indian, nor a Russian citizen face this dread dilemma, especially if the American economy can make some money relieving them of it. We are not unified on Earth, and we will not be unified off Earth. In fact, the settlement of space is much more likely to multiply than cluster the number of our nations.

There is no reason whatsoever the United States of America should not be one of these nations, and in fact the first of these nations.

A great deal of good common sense follows from our having grasped the proposition that the United States is to expand territorially off this planet Earth. First we need to forget about Mars.

This will be difficult. However one feels about the news from here on Earth, the news from Mars has been splendid. We have examined Mars’ soil, and come to understand that it is very much like our soil. I, for one, love asparagus.

It isn’t American soil, and is not likely to be. There are incontrovertible facts about Mars. None of us, nor any of our children’s children, will be able to breathe the atmosphere, but must consent to going about masked and helmeted.  The gravity is at 0.38 Earth’s gravity.  All day. All night. Year after year. I am not convinced that human women, in any great numbers, will decide to relocate themselves into and bear children in 0.38 Earth’s gravity, committing them to be raised in that gravity, unable to go outside without an enclosed helmet. I am not convinced that human men, in any great numbers, will consent to having sons who, compared to boys raised on Earth, will be weaklings. I am convinced that whoever one day tills the patch of Martian soil our robot Phoenix now examines might call themselves American, Chinese, Russian, or Japanese, but whatever children they do have will be Martians. Robert Zubrin, in his The Case for Mars, refers to future inhabitants of Mars as constituting “a new branch of human civilization.” He’s quite right. They will be great-hearted, if spindly-limbed people, engaged in one of the greatest adventures of the human spirit. Further, there’s every reason to believe this new civilization will always be great friends with America. We should not, however, confuse that civilization with America while we are considering the American Federal budget.

There is an even more concrete disadvantage to Mars as a target for national expansion. I personally don’t want to move to Mars, but I’d love to visit. However, it’s very far away, and takes a long time to get there. Then it takes a long time to get back. The usual estimate is three to eight months each way. The most optimistic reckoning I have seen takes 45 days and involves antimatter rockets. Most probably we’re looking at three months by the time we’re ready to launch. But even 45 days poses limitations when considering a natural progress toward national expansion. It means that men and women who are not professional astronauts will not be visiting Mars in large numbers. Most of us get at most 5 weeks off for vacation, a paltry 35 days. Even the jet setters from whom the early space tourists will be combed will have to return to Earth fairly promptly, in order to arrange their corporate raids, tour with the band, and catch fly balls. Barring some unforeseen breakthrough in space propulsion, the preponderance of those who travel to Mars will be those who, one way or another, are in the Mars exploring business. The rest of us will be watching them on television. It would – it will – be the best thing television ever broadcast, but we ourselves will still be at home, watching them on television.

Again, the obvious point to NASA Human Spaceflight is to facilitate the expansion of the United States into space. Corollary: given this, the Return to the Moon is the most important leg of the Vision for Space Exploration.

This has nothing to do with the relative appeal of the Moon when compared to Mars. Mars is much more interesting than the Moon. All things being equal, I would much rather visit Mars. But I could have a Moon vacation that lasts as long as a Caribbean cruise – a week, ten days. It is a viable destination for Americans who are not astronauts. What follows from this is that private economic activity Near Earth will be a part of our world’s, and our country’s, economic activity. Aside from the occasional slow barge of deuterium, economic activity on Mars will tend to be separate and self-referential.  This in turn means that human spaceflight directly to Mars would come out of the Federal Budget for a very long time; the enormous process of terraforming Mars would have to be a Federal project. By contrast, human spaceflight in Earth’s orbit, to the Moon, and to Near Earth asteroids would immediately be on track to zeroing out the taxpayer’s contribution to human spaceflight. If progress is made toward this end, perhaps the eventual Mars mission will at least be able to deflect a large part of its own expense if not pay for itself entirely.

Between the Moon and the asteroids, an enormous yield of minerals is available, much more than enough to provide materials for extensive construction in space. NASA is already thinking toward mining and manufacturing the lunar regolith if only as prerequisite to the construction of its own Moon base. At last, we have found the first traces of water on the Moon. Should that be insufficient, there is the potential of oceans of fresh water crossing the Earth’s path in the form of extinct Comets </a>, mixed in among the asteroids we are so worried about, of which 962 sweep in close enough, and are large enough, to be designated “potentially hazardous.” Perhaps we should get them before they get us.

We continue to benefit from the luck of being alive during the Golden Age of robotic space exploration. NASA’s Dawn begins the exploration of the vast mines that make up the Asteroid Belt, between Mars and Jupiter. Pushed by its steady, cool-running ion propulsion engine, Dawn is due to encounter Vesta in 2011, and Ceres in 2015. As narrator of Dawn’s promotional films, Leonard Nimoy intones of Ceres that it alone might contain as much fresh water as all the lakes on Earth.

The economic development of space near Earth – within travel range – has already begun. With NASA smiling down beneficently, the young human spaceflight industry has found its core of ambitious men with money, and is taking its first steps. This private-public cooperation isn’t just the familiar Government-contractor relationship, which of course endures; NASA’s forthcoming Constellation Project will feature the Ares space rocket and Orion Crew Vehicle, which will be the work of Lockheed Martin, whose name likely will not appear on the finished spacecraft. Constellation, the Moon leg of the Vision for Space Exploration is impressive in its own right. More important, in the long run, is that the entire Project is being shadowed by private industry’s own effort. It is worth reflecting that this has never been the case before, not once in the storied history of NASA Human Spaceflight, from Mercury to Apollo, from Skylab to the International Space Station.

Virgin Galactic, the conjunction of Richard Branson’s money and Bert Rutan’s space plane,is presently lining up customers for suborbital space flight. You can sign up here.

Space X, with designs upon both orbit and, ultimately, the Moon, is the biggest player in a fairly bristling commercial space rocket business. The Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 have successfully fired their rockets on Earth. SpaceX hasn’t gotten the Falcon into orbit yet. They attempted another launch last week; unfortunately the stages failed to decouple. On the one hand, this is a third failed launch. Being hopeful, the Merlin rocket fired just fine, again, and there is something reassuringly mechanical about stages that don’t unclasp and separate. One suspects it’s the sort of problem rocket scientists ought to be able to work out. Founder’s Fund obviously thinks so, or it wouldn’t have given SpaceX another $20 million investment two days after the launch. $20 million isn’t easy to come by in this economy.

It is now an open question whether NASA or private enterprise will be first to the Moon. NASA is being cooperative, offering the use of its laboratories, of Cape Canaveral itself for the SpaceX launches. NASA ought to be cooperative, because every NASA employee who cooperates is probably writing himself and herself a very big paycheck, either now, or some years from now, if these businesses succeed. A sign of the age: scroll down this page concerning SpaceX’s Dragon space craft. You’ll come to a logo, a stylized dragon. In itself, it is nothing. But we’ve never seen anything like this on a space craft before. Dragon isn’t inviting you to watch it on TV. It’s inviting you to come in, take a ride.

Bigelow Aerospace, built on hotel money, is set to give all these space rockets and their well-heeled passengers someplace to go.  Robert Bigelow’s concept is to send his modules up in collapsed form, get them into orbit, take out the bicycle pump and blow them up like tires.  The concept is working. Bigelow’s Genesis I and Genesis II have been orbiting the Earth, inflated and unmanned, since 2006 and 2007 respectively. Genesis I passed the 10,000 orbit mark just this past May.
 
Bigelow has a larger commercial craft on the boards, Sundancer, due near the beginning of the next decade. Unlike its older brothers, Sundancer is being fitted with rockets for maneuverability and propulsion.  Moreover, Sundancer is to serve as the core module of a new space station. Sundancer will service Earth’s orbit at first, but the concept is applicable anywhere in open space, and Bigelow too dreams of the Moon.

As an American who is not an astronaut, space Near Earth is my potential playground, and I’d pay for a few hours floating in microgravity, maybe even for a week floating in microgravity. Then I would pay for a week on the Moon. Beyond that, as a consumer I’m going to want gravity.

Space organizations, both public and private, are slow to understand this because they’ve been working with astronauts, who we expect to be uncomfortable. It’s a significant sacrifice to produce one gravity in space. Start granting this to astronauts as a matter of course and next they’ll be demanding windows in their capsules. One g will be a prerequisite, however, if there are to be large numbers of long-term private residents in space, and certainly if there is to be actual space settlement.

Bigelow, perhaps uniquely, is in the position to be first to produce a one g environment off Earth. It would need only two Genesis craft and a tether, and we already have space tether companies, too. One g can be simulated given a tether length of 223 meters – about 244 yards – at two rotations per minute. Ostensibly, at this range a human being can remain healthy. From there, the greater the length, the slower the rotation, the more people, the better.

One g, and within several days of Earth, is the sweet spot at which national expansion begins in earnest. The rest is the rekindling of the time-honored American tradition of Building Big Things, which in the American space program has been submerged beneath the American tradition of Going Far Distances.

At first, these would be “mere” resorts and other sorts of campus.  Rotating to provide the same gravity with which we are familiar on Earth, a space settlement could well be considered not so much an expansion of humankind beyond Earth, as an expansion of Earth itself; Earth considered as environment, as biosphere, rather than as location. For a very long time none of these environments will be more than several days from Earth. Doubtless the first will be in orbit, others will cluster near the Moon. Some might share the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, leading or trailing our planet.  The space environments will be close enough for the continuation of human contact with Earth. At several days’ distance we create preliminary levels of space visitation, short of full-out settlement.  We now fall within the range for a young couple’s honeymoon, for a student’s Summer or even Winter Break, and certainly for the Construction Superintendent who might visit home only monthly. We no longer insist upon a commitment of several years to a new Mars settlement.

The transition from long-term resort campus to space settlement might be as slow and subtle as the process by which many people decide whether they’ve found their home, or are just passing through. Proximity to Earth, however, will make permanent relocation that much more attractive. Family relationships, institutional relationships, and the bond to country need not be strained to the breaking point; and so all these can expand with the expanding (or rather, multiplying) Earth biosphere. Crucially, such settlements and Earth would prosper in the same, now enlarged economy.

Indeed, the space settlements themselves would represent the supreme products of such an economy. Achieve one gravity, and then add scale.  These are places to which I can imagine myself relocating, within which I can imagine myself raising a family.

The United States has never been defined as being particular to any one set of geographical boundaries, and these boundaries have been remarkably fluid throughout our history. What begins as a territorial expansion for the United States, China, Russia, Japan or the European Union collectively would become a similar expansion for India, Canada, Brazil, and Australia, for the individual EU nations, and eventually for smaller countries, large cities – the sixth Borough of New York? – even private interests. Once mature in this sector, our economy could blow out space settlements like a child blowing bubbles, consecrating each of them to Earth, as Earth, but elsewhere.  “There’s plenty of space – in space,” and plenty of raw materials. Naturally, as we grow more familiar with space, there will be those that break off, individually or in “island groups,” for Mars, and even further, but the majority will certainly tend to cluster within days of Earth, and each other.

Strictly speaking, I am now sketching the end of this century and engaged in science fiction. But it is a future that seems not just one possibility among many, but that which seems most likely given who we are, and the steps we take each day. August 2 in fact, Cal Polytechnic, hosted the 2008 Regolith Excavation Challenge.  No one won the $750,000 prize. This competition, like the X Prize Bert Rutan finally won, might be worth some attention from the public. Here begins a new generation of industrial machines, to join the new generation of space craft.

It isn’t news that we’ve been in a collective funk about our lack of progress in human spaceflight during the past decades of the Shuttle and ISS. It is easy to read the Vision for Space Exploration, skip ahead to Mars, find that we don’t intend to land on Mars till the 2030s, and despair.

Don’t. There’s a thing we meant once when we said, “The future.” That thing may soon be upon us. Didn’t you used to draw pictures that looked like this when you were a kid in school? I know I did.