For another: guest list restrictions will very likely be politicized. Even if not, NASA will be open to charges to that effect.

Finally, space tourism is a proven concept. Even if the industry (such as it is) sees a lull of a decade or more, people's desire to go won't disappear just because the means to fly might be unavailable for a while. The market will always be there, waiting. It doesn't need to be kept on government life-support.

In earlier commentary, I argued that NASA's initial resistance to hosting paying guests on ISS wasn't utterly idiotic. After all, there is great political symbolism in the program, and taking paying guests could raise some thorny issues.

Here, I suggest that, rather than rely on some combination of bureaucracy, PR strategizing, and selection based on ability to cover certain (or uncertain) costs, we make the process democratic in the most exemplary ways. If non-astronauts are to fly in space using the vehicles of democracies' space programs, they should be selected as citizens, by citizens, in a manner that reflects a desire to modernize and improve democracy itself.

Premature commercialization may take us down quite a different road.

There is no sign hoisted over NASA infrastructure saying, "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone." But it would be naive to assume that there aren't already criteria in place. Every potential customer raises new issues.

Were Lance Bass's past performances carefully scrutinized for profanity and sexual suggestiveness not long after his name came up, prompted by a call from Tom Delay's office? Maybe that's my imagination, but it's not exactly a stretch. A smart NASA staffer knows that you don't wait for Tom Delay to call. If David Bowie hasn't considered negotiations, it may only be because he knows better than to think he'd make the cut.

It hasn't been bad so far, I admit. It's hard to imagine a better choice than Dennis Tito -- an American, educated as an aerospace engineer, his wealth self-made in the financial services sector, and (luckily, in retrospect) in an unexceptionable manner, untainted by the excesses of the Bubble.

Mark Shuttleworth presented a slightly different picture: a South African, and a lucky beneficiary of a huge windfall from the Bubble, which was probably the history's biggest transfer of wealth from small investors -- most of them American -- to the undeserving. That's not Shuttleworth's fault, of course, but it's certainly not to his credit.

One can, however, argue that both Tito and Shuttleworth were true citizens -- the first from one of the world's longest-running democracies, the second from one of the world's youngest. And Shuttleworth, to be fair, kept very busy on ISS. Upon his return, he became something of an activist (even the best kind of troublemaker) on behalf of education in South Africa, and endowed an education fund with some of his Bubble winnings.

More interesting questions are raised by looking at one early Shuttle passenger: HRH Sultan ibn Salman Abdelaziz Al-Saud, a nephew of King Fahd. A space tourist predating Dennis Tito by over a decade? Well, maybe not, but he's worth a look. Especially since he's now Minister of Tourism for Saudi Arabia.

Salman al-Saud is described with diplomatic vagueness in lists of Shuttle payload specialists as being "on hand" in 1985 for the ARABSAT-A deployment; and as a "legitimate representative" of Arabsat, one of NASA's "paying customers." Digging deeper for credentials, you won't find much. He held the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, but that's pretty insignificant compared to the rank of Nephew to the King, in a country encompassing some 25% of the world's oil reserves. Higher education? The official biography tells us only that, after high school, he "...went on to study communications and aviation in the United States."

So he could fly aircraft. This doesn't make anyone a rocket scientist (just ask George Bush), and the Shuttle only masquerades as a pilotable craft anyway. Are we to believe that, of all Arabsat associates, Salman al-Saud was the most technically qualified to go up? Rumors that he mostly just got in the way are not easily substantiated. He may simply have been cold-shouldered by the more seasoned crewmembers. But it's not hard to believe that there's a grain of truth to this gossip.

Deriding Salman Al-Saud as a crypto-tourist doesn't do justice to political complexities, however. He has since been characterized even by spokesmen of the more liberal exile opposition groups as bringing some "dynamism" to Riyadh when compared to the notoriously debauched and corrupt Saudi royal family. For him, the Shuttle may have been a political stepping stone, a shrewd move in the footsteps of John Glenn. The Arab payload of STS 51G has political resonance today: Arabsat, a 22-nation consortium, has, in recent years, resisted pressure to curtail broadcasts critical of Arab governments.

If the relatively balanced Al Jazeera can continue broadcasting, it may only be because they now have a choice that only an Arabsat could have made possible. Arabsat eventually became the "camel's nose under the tent" for press freedoms in the heavily censored Arab world. And Salman al-Saud was there at the creation.

Salman al-Saud's ride on STS 51G had some important multiplier effects. And maybe that was the real point. Royal family members like Salman al-Saud may be Saudi Arabia's best hope of a relatively untroubled transition to a government with a free press, more respect for human rights, and a truly diversified economy. No doubt, U.S. policymakers worked with NASA Shuttle gatekeepers with precisely this thought in mind. Whether Salman al-Saud would be truly useful in orbit might have been a minor consideration. That 1985 flight orbited a royal, from a kingdom of subjects, but perhaps with a view toward a Saudi Arabia of real citizens in a real democracy, one day. (One day soon? We should shudder -- some 95% of Saudi males between the ages of 25 and 41 registered approval of the September 11th attacks.)

But don't forget, the customer also had money. Thank OPEC for that. Symbolism can cut any number of unexpected ways, and can keep cutting for a long time.

If we are to have passengers on publicly-funded flights, and guests in publicly-funded orbital facilities, the challenge is to lend the spectacle some true public meaning. The shadow-play of international relations is lost on much of the public. How many Americans have even a hazy memory of a Saudi prince on the Shuttle? And joyrides for other wealthy passengers will invite only contempt in the long run. Dennis Tito, with his support for a program of citizens in space, seems to realize this. Lance Bass, still hopeful, seems to have woken up more recently to the idea of deserving publicly-funded spaceflight as a privilege, even if he would still foot much of the bill for his passage. However, true public meaning will only come with true public passengers. But how should they be selected?

The one serious attempt so far at a U.S. citizens-in-space program -- teachers in space -- fell prey to the intimidation of the Challenger disaster. It is still a well-regarded idea in America. And perhaps one day we'll see it. Maybe the ideal teacher would be one climbs Himalayan peaks on his summer vacations, and who has seen fellow adventurer's deaths first-hand. After Christa McAuliffe, no program for citizens in space can ever again neglect that it's also a program for citizens at risk. The key notion here, however is that of education. (After all, the risk that comes with adventure is a given, or should be.) But then the question is: why teachers? What was the appeal?

If teachers-in-space was an attempt to put flesh on conceptual bones, the key notional ingredient may well be in what education -- especially public education -- represents in American democracy. It's not just economic opportunity, and meritocracy. Nor is it just the intrinsic value of knowledge for its own sake. Either of those motivations can be harnessed to a Confucian Conservative Opportunity Society, i.e., to the kind of undemocratic cultural stasis that characterizes so much of Chinese history. What education really means for democracy has more to do with the desirability of a well-informed electorate.

Space travel speaks to mankind's highest aspirations, we are told. Let me suggest that among these aspirations, one of the most important is this: for democracy to become more than what Churchill called it, more than "the worst of all political systems, except for all the other that have been tried from time to time". Von Braun's rockets struck Churchill's country from a political snakepit where a democracy, the Weimar Republic, had died. Churchill knew whereof he spoke.

Democracy should be more than just a shaky, muddling-through state of affairs, vulnerable to destabilizing economic forces, forces that space development itself may eventually unleash. Democracy has to somehow outgrow the ease with which the people themselves can be easily corrupted (as the U.S. constitutional framers themselves took pains to point out.)

Universal education offers hope: of a truly informed government by the people. This is a much harder, longer, more difficult and more dangerous journey than going to the Moon. We still aren't there yet.

Democracy's most serious problem is that it suffers from what economists call "the free-rider problem." An informed electorate is far preferable to knee-jerk mass reaction, but very little in the current system provides individual voters with incentives to understand what they are voting for. Quite the contrary -- "let others do the hard thinking," seems to be the feeling, "I have better things to do."

And politicians increasingly exploit that free-rider weakness. The current U.S. administration is the most focus-group-driven government in history, well beyond anything we saw with the notoriously poll-obsessed Clinton crowd. Focus groups skim the surface of people's political consciousness. They are little more than laboratory simulations of knee-jerk voter reactions, and are conducted in a style that avoids consideration and debate for precisely that reason. A focus group setting might predict a broad positive consensus from Americans about the manned space program, but it wouldn't tell Americans anything they don't already know about it -- which, for most of them, is precious little.

In recent years, there have been some significant experiments with an alternative: deliberative polling. This is a focus group with a difference: the emphasis is on avoiding impulsive formation of opinions, on reconsideration of opinions, on avoiding premature polarizations in debate. The experiments have shown that people can and do change their minds when they study all sides of an issue together. Deliberative polling brings something like the jury style of deliberation to democracy's free-rider problem: nobody gets out without using their brain. Some of the better work on the idea has been done by James Fishkin at the University of Texas in Austin.

Deliberative polling might be applied to the problem of selecting "citizen space explorers." In the process, it might do more than yield better candidates than NASA could ever turn up. It could also solve the problems of political legitimacy in passenger selection, a process which is still uncertain, opaque, uncodified; a process that will remain forever open to charges of partisan or propagandistic slant even if it happened to be a model of neutrality and objectivity. Deliberative polling might also quell the questions raised by space tourism as we have seen it so far, with its initial self-selection from among the very wealthy.

After seeing some number of citizen space explorers selected in a deliberative style, the American public might wake to the realization that a new form of democracy (really, a form true to the oldest Greek polis democracy, but updated for our age) might be brought to bear not just on some merely symbolic problems of the space program, but also on problems of much greater significance on Earth.

Finally, consider what a truly democratic space citizen selection process would do for America's image abroad. The American system is still widely admired in most countries, even among critics of its foreign policy. Amazingly, it even has admirers among many victims of those foreign policies, especially among dissident intellectuals imprisoned for years by repressive governments previously supported by the US., in Indonesia, Kenya, South Korea, the Phillipines. Citizens in space, selected by citizens, would be a program that tells the world: "The system you admired was alive because of Americans who understand it, and we're still here. We change. We get better. We honor citizenship and choice and opportunity and, yes, careful thought as well. And we combine those ingredients whenever possible, to make new, better democratic institutions." Who among us, looking at the world today, would say that America doesn't need that now, more than ever?

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