. 24/7 Space News .
Just Say No To Simple Answers

a universe of noise can make it hard to see answers let along the questions
by Michael Turner
Tokyo - Apr 28, 2003
In a recent op-ed for "The Space Review" Clark Lindsey invokes an old formula -- the power of numbers -- with a new spin. It's so new, in fact, that he feels he has to wake us up to how ridiculous we are being.

Imagine the following press release: "Citing the need to unify the nation as it once was, space advocacy groups announce a campaign to press the television industry to restore the variety show, offer at least three Westerns in prime time everyday, and reduce the number of news programs to two half-hour broadcasts each evening."

Swatting this ludicrous strawman from his path, he informs us, more in sorrow than in anger, that in modern-day America, "there is no possibility, short of an alien invasion, of convincing a majority of Americans to make space a high priority in their lives." Wake up, space activists: America is more diverse, less focused, now. The days of galvanizing man-on-the-street support for Apollo-like programs is long past.

In short, Lindsay says, we have to live with the reality of being a minority.

But all is not lost. Minorities -- even shrinking minorities -- can and do have an impact in democracies far beyond what their numbers would suggest. It might be enough to make up in fervor what we lack in majority clout. "What we really need," he says, "is a community of around one million intensely devoted enthusiasts.

Warming to his case, he cites the farm lobby. A tiny, and shrinking, percentage of the population, they are the tail that wags the dog of agricultural policy, in a self-reinforcing cycle of spending ever larger subsidies to gain ever more political support.

Lindsay points to the NRA. While gun ownership is widespread in the U.S., it's rather doubtful that your average gun-owner is much averse to legislation to limit the firepower now possible with small arms.

And yet, in the face of NRA pressure, modest firepower limitations die on the floor of Congress, harpooned by the die-hards.

Then you have your AIDS activists. Despite dire early predictions of a "breakout", the disease still infects only a few percent of the population. Yet AIDS commands a disproportionately large percentage of spending on prevention, on support services for sufferers, and on research into palliatives, vaccines and cures. Pressure works.

What does Clark Lindsey see as the conditions for such clout?

(1) "... exceed some minimum number of participants, which I�fm guessing is around a million."

(2) these million should "possess a very intense passion and single mindedness for their cause."

With these conditions met, harrassment of Congress would be far more effective, with one key goal being to "make space accessible to the public."

There isn't just "voting" by clogging politicians mailboxes, he points out. This One Million could "also provide a market on which startup space companies can build." This contingent can vote with their pocketbooks, and for companies, not just for politicians.

Proponents of cheaper access love their simplistic formulas: "SSTO", "big dumb boosters," "drop private sector barriers and let the market figure it out." Clark Lindsay has found his two simple *political* variables (without noting that they inherently conflict, that they are a recipe for factionalism): sheer numbers and fervor.

How will we get these variables within bootstrap range?

Simple: do good PR on upcoming events. Like an X-Prize win; the privately-funded lunar landings; the various "put your name on something in space" missions.

Get mindshare, market share follows. "One doesn�ft need to look far to find many examples of such communities each involving a few million people at most and a host of successful companies built around them. Some examples include ham radio, snowmobiling, horseback riding, sailing, and drag racing. Such communities ... generate billions of dollars for the businesses that serve them.

Let's see how simple all this *isn't*.

On the political front, two key ingredients are missing: legitimacy, and money. Let's look at legitimacy first, then at how money takes us back to legitimacy.

The farm vote matters in part because, as in almost all democracies, the electoral system is overbalanced toward rural constituencies. Rectifying this imbalance would require massive rearrangements of the current system, and it would gore more than a few other oxen.

Don't look for change any time soon. Food is also different from snowmobiles -- a degree of food self-sufficiency is considered a strategic asset. Japan, for example, supports its highly uncompetitive farming population in part because it is a resource-poor, isolated island nation, surrounded by neighbors with whom it has a long history of hostility. Money? Agribusiness in the U.S. is *big* business -- ever bigger, as farmland is steadily consolidated under fewer owners.

AIDS is a disease that is feared far out of proportion to its actual communicability. However, that fear matters.

A key piece of sufferer-support legislation -- the "Ryan White" bill -- was named after a young boy who contracted HIV through a now-vanishingly- rare route of transmission: transfusion. As a hemophiliac, he represented a tinier percentage of the population than any other segment identified as being at risk for AIDS. These numbers don't matter, politically, because AIDS is about death, and we all fear death.

Moreover, it's a rare American who doesn't know someone who has died from this disease. Hence, the spending is also justified in terms of "compassion"

- - a shared burden, validating our shared humanity.

Money? Look to the pharmaceutical companies, which ended up hand-in-glove with many AIDS activist organizations. They took more than their share of heat, but ultimately, they were helped.

The NRA has considerable clout stemming not only from numbers far vaster than Lindsey's numerical target (some 30% of U.S. households own one or more guns), and the fervor of some gun owners.

It enjoys legitimacy through constitutional protections of the right to keep and bear arms.

Money? Guns aren't cheap -- the trade in consumer firearms is a big, established industry.

Respect for the rule of law, a natural disinclination to tinker with a working political system, dread of some threat that we believe could could strike us all a shared sense of compassion for other suffering citizens, a concern for national self-sufficiency -- all of these are sources of political legitimacy in democracies.

And politicians know it.

Politicians also know that the power of fervor doesn't always add up to more votes beyond the true believer contingent. Harassment of the visitors to abortion clinics, blockading clinics, even bombing them, has probably swayed more on-the-fence voters toward a tolerance for abortion, even as many of these same voters personally decry the practice.

Letters, telegrams, e-mail, phone calls -- yes, you can stage denial-of-service attacks on the offices of elected representatives. However, beyond a certain point, these tactics fail, even backfire.

Politicians work out "multipliers" for contact from constituents -- how many votes a letter is thought to represent. Get every space enthusiast sending space-development support missives to their congressman, and that multiplier simply shrinks to 1, when the politician figures out what's going on. The cannier pols will note that it's very easy to get additional e-mail addresses these days, and might fudge the factor down to 0.9. You just get to be an entry in their spam filter, in the end.

Finally, money matters. An established industry has a lot more political clout than any pie-in-the-sky industry. The few entrepreneurial space companies that now survive mostly depend, one way or another, on government spending, subcontracted to aerospace firms that can afford to employ Beltway lobbyists. Guess what sort of space program that sort of lobbying results in?

Certainly, a million people will have a lot of buying power, but buying power is cherished because it offers choice. Ultimately, "public" access to space will remain a choice for the few.

Even if the ticket price drops to $20,000, Lindsay is talking about three quarters of a million millionaires, plus some hopeful hangers-on and idealists.

While the *real* public might reasonably support the removal of barriers to private space access, will they support it the way a mountain town might support access to USDA-managed forests for snowmobilers? After all, a burgeoning recreation industry might enable the townspeople to afford their own snowmobiles. Not so for space access. Thus, private enterprise can run afoul of another source of political legitimacy: equality. Fun-rides for the rich are not a constitutional right. They will be supported only if they create enough jobs for those who can't afford to go. And that remains to be seen.

Given a vote, most people will see potassium permanganate as something that could fall into the hands of terrorists, not as a strategic substance for helping their rocketeer-wannabe child to learn about one of the tourist industries of the future.

Lindsay offers old, head-scrambling political rotgut in a new-wave-label wine bottle. Just say no.

Let's get on the wagon and stay there. "Insanity" someone once said, "consists in repeating what hasn't worked." The pressure-group approach has been tried, and its successes have been modest at best, and with a cost in burnout.

Events like an X-Prize win will stir a carnival atmosphere for a while, but true marketeers know that the key to success is in trends, not fads.

When the crowds melt away, there will be more supporters, certainly. However, in politics, there is as much danger in numbers as safety, maybe more; and repeated experience should tell space activists to be wary of mass-movement rhetoric.

What, then, is the real way forward? A wise corporate executive once said he had cultivated a very useful habit: "When you see a lot of people believing one thing, even if it doesn't work, the best thing is to assume the opposite, then work back to what makes sense where necessary."

And so I ask:

  • What about *smaller* numbers, rather than masses?
  • What about cutting loose the starry-eyed dreamers, rather than roping them into letter-writing campaigns?
  • What about objective questioning, rather than fervor?
  • What about diversity, rather than unity?
  • What about neither enterprise nor government, but volunteerism?
  • What about quiet, small-group activity, rather than mass, unified publicity? (Or, where publicity is appropriate, "narrowcasting" to interested audiences?)
I'm not going to give you my answers to these questions, because that would defeat their purpose: that you work out your own answers, on your own.

There is a human tendency to seek simple answers to singular questions, to explain singular phenomena as a result of changes in single (or in very few) variables.

Clark Lindsay has fallen prey to this tendency.

Real life is more complex, and the causes of singular events are often more complex than those of commonplace events. If broader space access happens, it will be a very singular human event indeed. It will be enabled by many complex factors, including new technology, new ways of organizing, changes in legislation, changes in market conditions, and changes in the global political order.

Pick your own goal, and work out the complex preconditions for success. Refine the goal, or choose a new one, if the preconditions appear impossible at present. When you know what you want to work toward, don't listen to any mass- movement leaders. Put your spade to the ground, and don't stop. If you see any success at all, gaining the followers you need will be less of a problem than fending off the followers you don't need.

Lindsay's One Million will only happen when there are one million people having the time of their lives working on their own personal space dreams. Just go do it. Wait for Congress to come to you -- "locate in my district, I'll cut you some tax breaks." Wait for the people to come to you. In the meantime, just do the real work, however you can.

This article was originally published at a tesponse to The million man and woman march to space by Clark S. Lindsey Monday, March 24, 2003

Related Links
SpaceDaily
Search SpaceDaily
Subscribe To SpaceDaily Express

Adieu Concorde
Scottsdale - Apr 17, 2003
Air France and British Airways announced last week that they will retire the Concorde supersonic jetliner. Hopefully, both NASA and the "build it and they will come" rocket boys are paying close attention, asks John Carter McKnight



Thanks for being here;
We need your help. The SpaceDaily news network continues to grow but revenues have never been harder to maintain.

With the rise of Ad Blockers, and Facebook - our traditional revenue sources via quality network advertising continues to decline. And unlike so many other news sites, we don't have a paywall - with those annoying usernames and passwords.

Our news coverage takes time and effort to publish 365 days a year.

If you find our news sites informative and useful then please consider becoming a regular supporter or for now make a one off contribution.
SpaceDaily Contributor
$5 Billed Once


credit card or paypal
SpaceDaily Monthly Supporter
$5 Billed Monthly


paypal only














The content herein, unless otherwise known to be public domain, are Copyright 1995-2016 - Space Media Network. All websites are published in Australia and are solely subject to Australian law and governed by Fair Use principals for news reporting and research purposes. AFP, UPI and IANS news wire stories are copyright Agence France-Presse, United Press International and Indo-Asia News Service. ESA news reports are copyright European Space Agency. All NASA sourced material is public domain. Additional copyrights may apply in whole or part to other bona fide parties. Advertising does not imply endorsement, agreement or approval of any opinions, statements or information provided by Space Media Network on any Web page published or hosted by Space Media Network. Privacy Statement All images and articles appearing on Space Media Network have been edited or digitally altered in some way. Any requests to remove copyright material will be acted upon in a timely and appropriate manner. Any attempt to extort money from Space Media Network will be ignored and reported to Australian Law Enforcement Agencies as a potential case of financial fraud involving the use of a telephonic carriage device or postal service.