The first issue of this column addressed 2001's popular IBM commercial, the one in which Avery Brooks demanded, "Where are the flying cars? They promised us flying cars!" Everyone knew what he meant: through the 1960s we were broadly sure of what the future would look like. In its atlas, there were pages for "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "The Jetsons." Sunday supplements and government plans alike provided ethnographies and almanacs of that not-so-distant realm.

Then that known future vanished. Cultural change outstripped even engineering advances, first in the West and later worldwide. Old social certainties evaporated as the new culture went global. Cheap, instantaneous communications dealt mortal blows to the old, slow, isolated world of Thomas Friedman's "olive tree." Customization, recognized in the early 1970s as the key to "future shock," made consensus and shared experience obsolete. The heavy-engineering certainties of von Braun were overwhelmed by the accelerating pace of technological and social change.

We are caught in the turbulence of what Disney Fellow Danny Hillis calls a "phase transition" between two stable eras, the industrial past and a blank and unclaimed future. The struggle for that future has begun, for the right to own it, name it, reshape it to the whims of the victor. Three great powers vie for dominance: the state, the individual and the market. Terrorism is a front in that struggle, as is state erosion of civil rights, anti-globalization protest, and the fight to maintain the public domain. As in the Industrial Age, one small province of that future is space.

Recent dispatches from behind the lines of each of the powers may help us map the fronts, indicating where reinforcements might be sent to back our chosen side, maybe even to predict a winner, though it's doubtful that the struggle will ever truly end.

The state, having been virtually written off by Network Age pundits (myself including), has come roaring back since 9/11. It gained an edge over the market as the global economy sank. Its critical victories, though are being scored against the individual.

The war on terrorism is essentially a war against the individual, against what Thomas Friedman calls the "super-empowered angry young man" willing to die for the old certainties. Yet along with measures directly linked to attacking terrorism, the American response has included any number aimed at controlling the strategic center of power in the Network Age, free flows of information.

One battle, begun well before the current crisis, has seen fresh action. Back in 1998, export licensing for American space technology was transferred from the relatively market-friendly US Commerce Department to the national-security focused State Department. The move was prompted by concern among the organs of state security that an insurance company's investigation of the failure of a Chinese rocket to launch an American satellite had revealed strategically sensitive information.

Strategic weapons data? No: the key issue was know-how of Western engineering analysis. What's more, the Congressional report on the matter went on at length to clarify that discussion of public-domain basic engineering information with foreigners could readily be classified as a "munitions export" requiring a license. Or a million dollar fine and a federal jail term, in the alternative.

The laws weren't focused on China or other strategic adversaries: routine communications between an American company and its UK affiliate could be subjected to licensing requirements. They also applied to scientific space efforts, technically preventing a university research team from sharing scientific data with its own resident-alien graduate students. Previous Commerce Department regulations had broadly exempted the transfer of goods and data for scientific purposes.

The American satellite industry was crippled by the regulatory change: US imports of spacecraft and components surged from 19 percent the year before the change to 46 percent in 2001. American companies lost numerous deals when purchasers were unwilling to tolerate licensing delays or the outright prohibition of information exchange.

Yet it was the scientific community that pushed back aggressively against the assault on its fundamental principles. A university consortium was able to gain amendments to the arms-transfer regulations that restored a narrow carve-out for research. Now citizens of NATO countries and key allies can receive project data, and certain public domain information is no longer treated as the equivalent of machine guns.

The universities tried again, hoping to get the exempt-country list broadened to include all nations other than those identified by the State Department as sponsors of terrorism, and to restore the "public domain" definition originally enacted by the Reagan Administration.

Two weeks ago the empire struck back: John H. Marburger, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, responded to university concerns, dismissing them in two paragraphs. Despite the rejection-letter formula, two concepts stood out. Regarding foreign faculty and students, Marburger wrote that the "balance [between] the needs of universities and national security concerns" was fixed just where the government wanted it. The decision to criminalize routine project discussions within the university was a conscious choice by the organs of state security.

The second point stated that the current public domain definition was "consistent with the longstanding practice regarding implementation" of the State Department regulations. True enough, but the implication was that the Munitions List - yes, that's really the name of the regulation covering space technology - is the appropriate regulatory instrument, rather than the Commerce Department's Export Administration Regulations. State security has captured the high ground of space research, not in the name of terrorism prevention, but in the name simply of control.

Yet the individual spirit is alive and well in space efforts. This past weekend, I set aside work on an article on American policy impediments to private spaceflight to attend a party hosted by local science fiction writers Emily and Ernest Hogan. They promptly steered me into conversation with a friend of theirs, Chris Welborn. If John Marburger is the mouthpiece for the organs of state security, Chris could be the spokesmodel for the classic American virtues of independence, imagination and know-how.

Bored and frustrated, Chris left his engineering job with Big Aerospace to work for the Pima Air and Space Museum, restoring classic aircraft, a true labor of love. In his spare time, he and a small team are building a rocket engine of his design. He's financing the project from the proceeds of sales of his own model rockets to museum gift shops, where they're flying off the shelves and into the hands of kids who get to actually use the fundamentals of space technology. His core principle: "invent the technology you can afford." It's a small-scale effort, but brilliantly subversive in its synergies, a perfect example of the "revolutionary patience" that can get us back into space, to stay.

There are a lot of people out there like Chris, from the amateur rocketeers launching their own creations on weekends, up to such large-scale private efforts as Armadillo Aerospace and official X Prize contestants like XCOR. Dismissing them for falling short of Saturn V's and spacewalks would be a grave mistake. They've mastered a fundamental truth: we aren't going to get a spacefaring civilization by waiting around for the government to hand it to us. We'll only get it through our own efforts� and those involve "inventing the technology we can afford." It's the only way to get the price to fly below $20 million a seat.

The markets are beginning to catch on, and may be gearing up for their own assault on space. At current launch prices, demand is pretty much flat. Satellite launch is a no-growth industry, offering nothing to attract competitive investment dollars. But the entrepreneurial space companies, having finally found their "killer app" in space tourism, have the credible potential to reduce costs drastically while bootstrapping demand, a step at a time.

A new Futron Corp. study, commissioned by NASA and described in a recent Space.com article by Leonard David, indicates that space tourism has overcome the "giggle factor" and is ready to storm the heavens. There is a commercial battle plan to take the solar system. It leads from zero-G parabolic airplane rides to suborbital hops, then orbital flights, then new tourist destinations on orbit, and beyond.

Battles, big and small, are being waged for the for the future, for those lands encompassing the high frontier. These battles aren't being fought by draftees, but rather by volunteers willing to pay for their dreams of space. The price is the old market rate - their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor. But the high ground to be won is the universe, and the freedom to go out into the black, to map that infinite undiscovered country.

The Spacefaring Web is a biweekly column � 2002 by John Carter McKnight, an Advocate of the Space Frontier Foundation Views expressed herein are strictly the author's and do not necessarily represent Foundation policy. Contact the author at [email protected]

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