Libertarianism Reaches for the High Frontier

By Thomas Gangale
California Progress Report
1 October 2007

No one who has read the opinion editorial I co-authored the day after Mike Melvill became the first human to reach outer space in a privately-financed spacecraft and launch system should doubt that I view the growth of free enterprise capabilities in space as positive. Burt Rutan, financed by Paul Allen and Sir Richard Branson, is doing fantastic, innovative work. After several decades of waiting, human spaceflight may be entering an entrepreneurial barnstorming era, and I look forward to it with excitement.

However, there is a disturbing political undercurrent running through the cheer-leading section of enthusiasts that hypes privately-financed operations in outer space. They are convinced that the reason it is so difficult for free enterprise to take all of us into space for vacations at hotels orbiting Earth or on the Moon, or to mine the Moon, Mars, and the asteroids for industrial raw materials, is that the international law of outer space that has developed during the last fifty years is a barrier to space entrepreneurship.

I just returned from the space industry's preeminent annual symposium, where, as usual, I present several papers, to find that, sure enough, someone is yammering about that bad old Outer Space Treaty. This time it's an associate professor of Government and International Studies at a small Georgia college. He repeats the same old silly story about how Lyndon Johnson was frightened into signing an anti-capitalist treaty with the Soviet Union in 1967 out of fears that the Evil Empire would reach the Moon first and claim it as sovereign territory.

This is bunk. First of all, the legal status of outer space as res communis had been established a decade earlier, both in practice by the two space launching powers of the time, and in principle via several United Nations resolutions that had the support of both the United States and the Soviet Union. Second, by the end of 1965, halfway through the Gemini program, it was clear that the US had closed the "space gap," having set new records previously held by the USSR, and that it was well on the way to landing the first humans on the Moon. The Soviets started their own lunar program so late and botched it so badly that for the next twenty years they were able to plausibly deny it had ever existed! What possibly could have frightened Lyndon Johnson?

Nothing. Furthermore, there is nothing in the Outer Space Treaty that inhibits free enterprise. Don't take my word for it, just check the cell phone in your pocket. Typical of their uncritical thinking, the space cowboys confuse coincidence with causality. The American push to the Moon in the 1960s was born of Cold War geopolitics and ended when it had served its political purpose. The treaty is not to blame for the fact that the US slashed its space budget and retreated from human space exploration. In any case, what does the rise and fall of the Apollo program, a government project, have to do with the private enterprise economy of outer space? It clearly does not, and if one removes the boom and bust spending cycles of government aerospace budgets, what is left is a fairly steady increase in the private space economy over the past five decades, with its occasional downturns attributable to the economic cycles of the global economy. This is not a mystery.

What has been going on in the space libertarian community for a decade or so is the construction of a Big Lie, a deliberate re-writing of history to make international law the fall guy for the fact that Baby Boomers didn't grow up to live and work in space as our 6th grade Weekly Readers promised us. As an aerospace engineer, I could give you a long technical explanation of why there is no spaceflight analogue to Moore's Law, why the cost per mass to orbit doesn't drop by 50 percent every few years in the same way that the computing power of microchips double every few years, but your eyes would glaze over. As would the eyes of the space cowboys, not least of all because they don't want rocket science to puncture their space mythology.

As a measure of just how far off the edge of the political charts these people are, the most violently unilateralist American regime in history--the one that has been the most destructive to international law, the one that has taken over two formerly sovereign nation-states and turned them over as profit centers for Halliburton, Blackwater, and other American enterprises--backs the Outer Space Treaty to the hilt. Now, you have to scratch your head and wonder why, if the treaty somehow keeps American capitalism from running rampant across the Solar System. Certainly, the Bush Administration has no such qualms regarding Earth! Nevertheless, space libertarians continually clamor for the US to withdraw from the treaty that this administration has called "the bedrock of international space law."

So why should you care what these space cadets say? Because a Big Lie, repeated often enough, can become the Big Truth, as this lie became the truth for the Georgia professor. Because California long has been a big aerospace state, and the Lockheed-Martins, Northrop-Grummans, and Boeings could be corrupted, even more than they already have on Earth, into serving an aggressive American militarist capitalist ideology in outer space. These corporations operate in space, but they are essential to the California economy, and they have an influence over California politics. In this sense, space is right here. The citizens of California have an interest in the character of these companies, and how that character is shaped by US policy and international law. As an Air Force officer, I worked side by side with Lockheed and Grumman engineers, and they're good people, but a military officer far above my rank and well before my time warned of the influence of the military-industrial complex. We need to keep these beasts on a leash, not set them loose to plunder the Solar System as the robber barons of the 21st century.

The space libertarian Big Lie is an easy one to repeat because after fifty years of spaceflight, most people take space-enabled technologies so much for granted that the many ways that they touch us every day is largely invisible to us. In this sense, we are living in space and we don't even know it. The space libertarians have an agenda to change the way we live in space, and therefore how we live on Earth. We ought to wake up to that agenda's ramifications, otherwise there could come a time when these people are taken seriously. They are not kooks and they are not evil. They are well-intentioned but misguided. They gaze at the possible riches of the Solar System, which have blinded them to political consequences.

I believe that it is imperative for us to explore space, not only because the endeavor calls to the better angels of our nature, not only because in the ideal it is adventure absent aggression and risk without robbery, but because in understanding the natural processes of other planets, we calibrate our understanding of processes on our own planet, and thereby gain a better understanding of humankind's environmental impact and how to mitigate it. I believe that we will exploit the natural resources of the Solar System as it becomes economically feasible and necessary, but we must do so thoughtfully, in a way that fosters healthy competition but prohibits the establishment of nation-sized, corporate-feudal estates on the Moon and Mars, where the company towns of a century ago, in which slavery was practiced in all but name, would seem like small potatoes.

About the time that the Outer Space Treaty entered into force forty years ago, Arthur C. Clarke wrote of The Promise of Space. Far more of that promise awaits than we have attained; however, there are not only technical and physical risks in how we reach for the stars, but in the course of that endeavor there are also dangers to American political ideals and economic principles right here on Earth.