by John There's an old saying that the best is the enemy of the good enough. NASA, following in the family tradition of its older brother, the Pentagon, has spent twenty years proving the maxim. President Reagan's little $8 billion Space Station Freedom managed to misplace $5 billion last year, in its 18th year of bureaucratic life.

Despite the "faster, better, cheaper" mantra, the engineering bells-and-whistles mindset, coupled with government budgeting procedures, has caused most projects to bloat.

The gap between expectations and results then gets filled with "viewgraph engineering," more grandiose promises, coupled with requests for yet another one-time-only emergency handout.

NASA and its dependent contractors are not alone in overpromising and under-delivering. Space advocacy's track record is, if anything, worse ("L5 in '95," for example).

Volunteer enthusiasm couples with pent-up demand fed by NASA's failure to deliver on its promises to create the same dynamic. Ambitious projects are declared, discussed in a frenzy of chat-board activity - then, like so many amateur rockets, either fizzle or explode.

Entrepreneurial space companies, often drawn from the ranks of either advocates or frustrated veterans of NASA disappointments, have followed the same pattern: the initial draft of the business plan (if they're that realistic) calls for conquering the Solar System, producing two dozen products and making billionaires of their first round investors, all in five years.

To their credit, though, the entrepreneurs have been the first to learn the lesson of "foundations first." The die-off of many of the launch vehicle startups triggered an increase in professionalism and a decrease in grandiosity among their successors.

Many current space startups have much more business savvy and vastly more humble - and achievable - goals than their predecessors did. The lessons they learned in the unforgiving school of the marketplace are finally beginning to spread to their governmental and advocacy peers.

The space community had no monopoly on excess, to be sure. We've all been down that road. Overpromising was what the latter 1990s were about.

While space has had its own dynamic, driven by NASA's pervasive lack of realism, the entire Western economy was, if not, as the Texans say, "all hat and no cattle," at least running with a hat/cattle ratio that no sober banker (had there been any) would have approved.

That party's over. NASA must rebuild credibility with the public, with Congress and with its international partners, deliver on promises already made, and live within its budgetary means. Advocacy must do the same.

The NASA budget request is a courageous attempt to meet those critical requirements of credibility, frugality and infrastructure repair. The Space Launch Initiative was shaping up to generate a replacement for the Shuttle as disastrously out of step with fiscal and mission requirements as the original has been.

There is no good solution to the problems caused by unsafe, spectacularly expensive and antiquated transportation to a largely worthless destination. Sacking the SLI program while extending the life of the existing orbiters and developing a relatively cheap lifeboat capable of supporting a full crew complement on the International Space Station, is a good faith, "good enough" fix.

Hopefully, this approach, grounded in a blessed lack of vision, will spread through NASA's upper management. The agency's "NExT" initiative, despite some very positive elements, smacks too much of a re-creation of the process that diverted the bulk of its attention and resources into the Station and Shuttle, to precious little relative return.

More microgravity mega-engineering does not seem a reasonable response either to NASA's own priority of exploring life's origins, or to the public and commercial demand for affordable access to space.

Criticism of this sort of bureaucratic "beau geste" has been coming from interesting quarters. The Economist, the British news weekly, has long been fanatically hostile to human spaceflight. Yet its November 14 editorial marks a change in tone.

While still scathing ("It is true that science can be done in the space station. But science can also be done dressed in a clown suit atop a large Ferris wheel"), the editors go on to express sentiments that could have come from this column:

[F]or decades there has been a huge pent-up demand for flights into space. Although the private sector is finally making some progress towards this, NASA should have been there years ago. What is still needed is research and development on economical and safe space transport for the public at large. Space, like the Wild West, can be truly opened up by the private sector. NASA's central goal in human space flight should be to make that possible.

A broad consensus seems to be coalescing around this radical view. The Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry delivered its final report to the Administration this week. No visionary programs are called for: rather, the focus is on rebuilding infrastructure, improving basic research and removing trade barriers - the impediments to spacefaring identified in the previous issue of this column.

The Commission calls for a realignment of Federal efforts around these unglamorous but essential issues. The advocacy community as well should follow suit, to aid in this effort and to redeem itself from the overpromising/under-delivering space curse.

This past week marked the twentieth anniversary of a fringe organization whose beginnings were much less promising than those of the space groups', but whose influence, unlike that of our community, has become immense.

The Federalist Society began as a campus-based movement of conservative, statist law students in an era when the top law schools were largely liberal and biased against the exercise of imperial power. It was a fringe organization regarded with deep suspicion by mainstream students and faculty (as I recall from firsthand experience, having attended law school with co-founders of the organization in its second year of existence).

Yet its anniversary was noted prominently in the New York Times - as the commemorative celebration was attended by a Supreme Court Justice and the Attorney General. No cabinet-level official has ever attended a space-advocacy party, to the best of my knowledge.

What did the Federalist Society do right that the various space societies have not? Three things of utterly critical significance: it focused on training and promoting cadre, and on engaging in genuine, respectful debate with its opponents. Also, it did not squander its energy on personality-driven factional infighting or schismatic doctrinal squabbles. The space advocacy organizations should learn that lesson and radically revision themselves around those two positive projects.

The Federalist Society made the front pages because it spent twenty years recruiting bright students who were receptive to its message, training and indoctrinating them, and networking them with alumni and supporters in positions of influence. In less than a generation their strategy has given them policy dominance over the Federal agency of concern to them, the Justice Department.

Imagine if a space organization could have placed its members throughout the NASA hierarchy, claiming the Administrator and the Secretary of Defense as allies - we might actually have a Federal space effort accomplishing something other than intellectual and financial bankruptcy restructuring.

The other critical technique involves recruiting one's adversaries as marketing representatives. By providing a forum for liberal and libertarian opponents to hone their arguments through debate, the Federalist Society forced those opponents to accord it respect and legitimacy.

By putting their people on panels alongside respected mainstream opinion leaders, they declared themselves peers and serious players. When their opponents would go out marketing themselves, they would likely refer to having assailed their Federalist Society adversaries - again, marking the once-fringe organization as a legitimate peer of the prominent mainstream figure.

Space advocacy groups have consistently chosen to preach to the choir rather than to engage their critics. This choice ghettoizes us, prevents us from becoming truly proficient or convincing in delivering our message, denies us the opportunity to win over moderates who have only heard the opposition's case, and denies us the leverage of putting our adversaries to work marketing us.

There has been talk of engaging the environmental and religious communities, of opening a dialog with the technologically-skeptical "Party of Nah," but little concrete action. Our failure costs us influence.

NASA now has an opportunity to rebuild its financial, reputational and physical infrastructure. Only when this process is complete will it be able to move on to grander things.

By abandoning the impulse to build deep-space Egyptian pyramids in favor of more mundane and infinitely more useful Roman roads, the agency may actually accomplish its true goal of opening the space frontier. If the space advocacy groups similarly choose to abandon millennial fervor and narcissistic self-destruction in favor of recruiting, training and influence-building, they can provide the leadership of government and industry necessary for opening that frontier.

Critical to both efforts is accepting that, for now, building a spacefaring civilization does not involve grand theorizing, viewgraph engineering or marching gaily off to triumph. For now, revolutionary patience lies in inspiring the kids, paying the bills and building the roads. If we do those things right, the triumphs will surely come.

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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