Back to the futureNick Land / text
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Back to the future
By Nick Land
Shanghai Star. 2004-07-15
For well over a century, writers of science fiction have looked to the stars
when imagining the future. Of the two technological breakthroughs inherited
from World War II - rocketry and computers - it was the former that most
feverishly excited the science fiction imagination, even though the latter
delivered vastly more real social and economic change.
Now, at the start of the new millennium, the world has been webbed together
by electronic communications, based on fabulously sophisticated machines
whose capabilities double every two years while their prices steadily plunge.
Meanwhile, the cost of lifting payloads off the earth's surface has scarcely
changed in decades.
As a number of disillusioned space commentators have recently noted, if it
was possible to alchemically transform lead into gold by merely lifting it into
outer space, the US space agency NASA - given the cost of space-shuttle
flights - would be unable to turn this fact into a profitable business.
However, two contemporary trends seem set to finally revolutionize this
dismal situation.
First came China's first manned spaceflight in October 2003, with the
Shenzhou V rocket successfully carrying astronaut Yang Liwei into space
followed by his safe return to earth. The potential for productive international
space competition took a giant leap forwards. Hopefully China, and India too,
will spread the dynamic spirit of economic reform to the sluggish world of
government space activity, where it is most definitely needed.
Secondly, the launch last month of the world's first private manned space
vehicle, "SpaceShipOne", backed by the fortune of US Microsoft
entrepreneur Paul Allen, raised the exciting prospect that non-government
agents could radically transform the field of space exploration.
The SpaceShipOne flight cost US$20 million. This is an astounding figure.
Depressed NASA-watchers might be forgiven for doubting whether America's
giant space bureaucracy could successfully move a paper clip across a desk
for US$20 million, let alone design, build and launch a complicated space
vehicle capable of carrying a human passenger beyond the earth's
atmosphere.
Fields of human activity in which government bureaucracy prevails are
consistently characterized by diminishing expectations. One only needs to
reflect on the US school system or the British health service to realize why
NASA was doomed to disappoint space-enthusiasts, and why - conversely the launch of SpaceShipOne has so invigorated the faded dreams of postwar science fiction. Only when business rationality drives the overwhelmingly
predominant part of human space activity will the colonization of the "final
frontier" begin in earnest.
Best of all would be a combination of both trends, with international and
commercial competition interlinking to dramatically accelerate the pace of offplanet projects. Technological innovation needs to be combined with
commercial logic - as well as raw courage - to make a worldwide
mushrooming of space activity economically compelling, and thus inevitable.