Too high the moon

The French literary critic Michel Butor once suggested — quite seriously, it seems — that the world-wide community of science fiction writers get together, decide what the future of the world should look like, and, by setting all their novels and stories in that agreed-upon future, call it into being. Anyone familiar with the community of science fiction writers does not need to be told that this could never happen, since about the only thing there is any agreement on is that the long-term future of the human race is as a space-faring species with a solar-system-wide civilisation.

The sci-fi community has long taken credit for being the visionary force behind the American space programme that began in 1959 after the Russian launch of Sputnik and climaxed, in a very real sense, when Project Apollo landed Americans on the moon ten years later.

Space travel, the colonisation of other planets, or in more imperialistic terms, the ‘conquest of space,’ has been at the core of the genre’s aesthetic for as long as it has existed. And it is certainly true that many of the scientists and technicians who put Americans on the moon — and indeed, many of the astronauts themselves — were not only sci-fi readers, but acknowledged that science fiction had inspired the vision that set them on their career paths.

Project Apollo was a triumphant apotheosis for the sci-fi community, hailed therein as the beginning of a golden age of space exploration. If men had landed on the moon in 1969, surely the 1970s would see expeditions to Mars, a lunar colony, and, as depicted in the Stanley Kubrick film, 2001 Space Odyssey, exploration of the outer reaches of the solar system by 2001. But by 1980 it was obvious that this was not happening. Instead it was clear that Project Apollo had not been the beginning of the human exploration of space but its pinnacle. The budgets of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) were in decline, and the lion’s share was going into the Space Shuttle programme, which wasn’t going to take humans any further than low Earth orbit. The golden age of human space exploration was over. The moon landing had been the end, not the opening act.

At this moment a sci-fi writer, Dr Jerry Pournelle, decided that something had to be done. He had been president of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He had also worked in the American space programme. He had also worked in right-of-centre political campaigns, mostly for Republican candidates, and through his political work, he knew Richard Allen, National Security advisor in the incoming administration of Ronald Reagan.

Pournelle, in conjunction with sci-fi writers like Robert A Heinlein, Poul Anderson and his collaborator Larry Niven, space industry executives and scientists, the retired general Daniel Graham, the astronaut Buzz Aldrin, and others, put together the ‘Citizens’ Advisory Council on National Space Policy’.

While this seemed to be a private citizens’ space lobby group whose goal was to influence the incoming Reagan administration to create a visionary manned space programme, it evolved or devolved into something both more and less. The Citizens’ Advisory Council reported directly to Richard Allen through Pournelle, preparing reports for the incoming administration’s transition team, and continuing when Allen became National Security Advisor, giving it direct access to the highest levels of the Reagan administration.

At the time I was president of the Science Fiction Writers Association. I succeeded Pournelle but he did not invite me into the committee since my disdain for Reagan and his people was well-known.

We were nevertheless friends and discussed these matters openly and often. During the transition, there had been some talk of Pournelle becoming head of NASA. ‘I don’t want it,’ he told me with a laugh. ‘Better to be in a position with more power.’ He was only half joking.

Pournelle was dedicated to launching an age of human space exploration, as were most sci-fi people across the political spectrum. Many space lobby groups were trying to sell such a programme to the Reagan administration on naively idealistic grounds.

But Pournelle had political experience and sophistication, an inside track directly to the National Security Council through Allen, and a rather Machiavellian strategy. NASA was just not going to get the budget to put humans in space in a big way. The biggest part of the funding would have to come from the military, who had a budget two orders of magnitude larger than NASA’s and much more clout when it came to getting project financing through Congress. How did he expect to get the Pentagon to finance a major human presence in space? Why would they do it? Pournelle came up with an answer: to defend the United States from Soviet nuclear missiles.

Hence the composition of the Citizens’ Advisory Council on National Space Policy — sci-fi writers for the ‘vision’; retired military people with the ear of the Pentagon; and aerospace industry people representing economic self-interest in as big a budget as possible for what was to become the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), better known as Star Wars.

The overt strategy was to sell the Reagan administration the idea that it was possible to erect a technological shield that would destroy incoming missiles and therefore render the US virtually invulnerable to nuclear attack. This was relatively easy. The administration was boosting military spending by huge amounts, the aerospace industry would eagerly use its clout to grab as much of the money as possible, the military loved fancy new hardware, the strategic fantasy was beguiling, and Reagan had difficulty distinguishing movies from reality — Star Wars, the George Lucas film, from Star Wars, the Strategic Defence Initiative.

Indeed, when Reagan announced the SDI in a State of the Union speech, it was Pournelle who wrote that section — to the point of having Reagan, not accustomed to mouthing metaphors drawn from theoretical physics, referring to it as a ‘quantum leap’.

The covert strategy was to use the Star Wars programme to trick the Pentagon into financing a major manned space programme out of the military budget. Pournelle and the sci-fi writers believed that in the real world any such system would have to be space-based — orbital lasers, anti-missile missiles already in orbit and so able to intercept ICBMs (ballistic missiles) in their boost-phase, orbital neutron-bombs, and so forth. All this would require orbital detection, command, and control systems — with human crews.

So the military would have to build permanently manned orbital space stations with dozens, scores, perhaps ultimately hundreds, of personnel. This in turn would require the military to fund the development of the Earth-to-orbit logistical systems to put them there and maintain them. And so, before they knew it, the Pentagon would have financed the infrastructure need to for a true golden age of space: space stations, more advanced ground to orbit transportation vehicles and heavy freight lifters, orbital ‘tugboats’ and ‘jeeps’, and orbital fuel dumps.

As any sci-fi writer knows, the biggest obstacle to space travel and exploration in terms of energy requirements and therefore of money is the first step — boosting materials, supplies, fuel and personnel off the Earth, out of its gravity well and into orbit. Once you had the infrastructure and personnel in orbit, the moon, Mars, even the outer planets, would be comparatively cheap to reach in terms of fuel, energy, and financing.

Technologically, this was science fiction. ‘You think you can trick the Pentagon into financing the infrastructure for a major manned civilian space programme out of the military budget?’ I exclaimed. Politically, or so it seemed to me when Pournelle explained it, this was fantasy. ‘It will never happen,’ I told him. ‘Neither you nor anyone else is going to outsmart the military when it comes to budgetary games with Congress. They’re the champions. They’ll eat you for breakfast. You won’t be able to use Pentagon financing to enhance the NASA budget for things like more shuttles or more advanced versions. The aerospace industry won’t care what the money is spent on as long as they get it. The military won’t end up subsidising the NASA budget, they’ll militarise the Shuttle programme and NASA will pay for it.’

That is more or less what happened. In its first few years of operation, the military appropriated entire Shuttle missions and parts of others. During the height of the SDI feeding frenzy, the aerospace industry feasted lavishly at the public trough thanks to the Pentagon’s clout with Congress, securing billions of dollars for anti-missile missiles that didn’t work, anti-missile lasers that didn’t shoot down anything, and on uncounted and perhaps uncountable crackpot ‘studies’.

During the height of the frenzy, I was at an aerospace industry party in Vandenburg, California, the planned ‘Spaceport West’ that was never to happen. The party was full of scientists and engineers discussing their proposals for SDI projects. I decided to tell what I thought would be a scientific joke. The ‘tachyon’ is a theoretical particle that would travel faster than light and therefore move backwards in time instead of forward. However, it has never been generated or detected. ‘Why don’t you build a tachyon beam weapon?’ I suggested, expecting laughs. ‘You detect incoming missiles, and zap them on the pad before they’re launched.’ There were no laughs. Two scientists got dreamy dollar-sign looks in their eyes instead. ‘Yes,’ said one of them, ‘we could probably get half a million to study that one.’ Things being what they were, it would not surprise me if they did.

Now, nearly two decades and over $40 billion later, there is still no missile defence system, though thanks to bureaucratic inertia, Pentagon budgetary clout, and aerospace industry economic realpolitik, SDI programmes are still puttering along at reduced levels of financing even though the Soviet Union has disappeared.

The four ageing Space Shuttles are the only means of transporting Americans to orbit. There has been no return to the Moon and no expedition to Mars. There is not a single manned American space station to go to when they get there. Most of NASA’s budget is being consumed to build one at a cost of at least $50 billion. But it will not be a gateway to the exploration of the solar system. It will be capable of housing no more than seven people — which the Russian Mir, built at less than a tenth of the cost, was capable of doing ten years ago.

Why, I asked one of the planners, is NASA doing this? Because, I was told, NASA (meaning the aerospace industry) wants ‘a capital-intensive space station’.

Soon after the break-up of the Soviet Union Pournelle and Niven declared on television that they had ‘destroyed the Evil Empire’ by forcing it into a space arms race it could not win, enfeebling it economically in the process. Maybe. But in the end Star Wars weakened the American manned space programme too. The Strategic Defence Initiative diminished its funding by siphoning off $40 billion that could have financed a Mars mission and a Moon base, but instead disappeared into the vacuum.

Worse still perhaps, it identified the American space programme with things military to the detriment of what Pournelle seriously set out to accomplish. His visionary goal was never reached or even approached. The golden age of space is further away than it was in 1969. And fewer people seem to care.