Of course the most popular example from this era is Christopher Columbus. One can hardly escape him in perusing pro-space publications and websites. His life-long struggle to obtain official funding, his final success at the court of Queen Isabella, and his history-altering discovery of the New World have an obvious appeal to Space Cadets.

Lots of us clearly hope to be the Columbus of the 21st century and be mentioned in future history books alongside the famous navigator from Genoa. We sometimes even cite Isabella of Castile as a role model that modern leaders like George W. Bush should emulate.

The problem with this model is that it is based on a false heroic image of Columbus created by the writers of high-school history texts. The real Columbus was a classic obsessive crank scientist whose ideas were preposterous even by the lax standards of the 1490s. He shouldn't have been given a moment's attention by any responsible government.

His basic idea that the ships of 1492 could sail from the Canary Islands to Asia and return safely was based on classic crank reasoning. Columbus developed this notion in his youth and spent years sifting through old books, selecting whatever claims supported his delusion and rejecting those that didn't.

By throwing together the smallest published estimates of the size of the Earth, the largest published estimates of the width of Eurasia, and a statement by Marco Polo that Japan was 1500 miles east of the China Coast, Columbus managed to put the Spice Islands about the same distance west of Spain that Cuba is in reality.

It is known that this eccentric geography was examined by three different panels of experts in the first recorded example of scientific peer review. Details of their reports have not survived, but it is clear that they were highly critical.

Similar learned opinions seem to have been responsible for the failure of Columbus and/or his brother to obtain financial support at the courts of England, France, and Portugal.

It was sheer dumb luck that two new continents existed at the point where Columbus expected to find Asia. In fact, Columbus remained a fanatical advocate of his crank Earth model to the end of his life, and even forced crewmen on one of his later expeditions to swear in writing that they had visited Malaya instead of Honduras. By then almost everyone else realized that his discovery was a new continent - and a fluke accident.

Why did Queen Isabella of Castile finally agree to support this quack project? Space Cadets say that it was a far-seeing decision by a visionary leader. Academic historians say that it was one of those random personal whims that medieval autocrats often indulged in.

Columbus idolaters claim that he was a brilliant and charismatic salesman in the Wernher von Braun pattern. Romantics like to think that Isabella had a weakness for handsome sailors.

My own view is that the first voyage of Columbus was an extension of the queen's earlier policies of expelling all Muslims and Jews from Spain. (The last shiploads of Jews actually left harbor the day before Columbus did.) Many of the circumstances suggest that Columbus and his men and even his ships were selected with the expectation that they would never return after sailing 3000 miles down-wind:

So I think that Queen Isabella was astonished and disappointed when Columbus and about 2/3 of his men unexpectedly returned alive from their impossible mission with loud demands for back pay.

And what about the results? The modern Americans who make up most of the pro-space movement naturally are huge fans of Columbus. Their nation and much of modern Western culture are direct results of the "Columbian Revolution".

The USA even has a national holiday named after Columbus, during which we argue about whether Columbus was an Italian, a Jew, or a Spaniard and debate whether the Phoenicians, Romans, Norse, Basques, or Welsh got here before him.

But the people who lived at the time would probably have a different view. 30% of the men who sailed with Columbus never returned. 90% of the Indians died as a result of forward-contamination. Back-contamination saddled Europe, Asia, and Africa with the scourge of syphilis. Columbus died prematurely in poverty, his health ruined by the Caribbean climate.

Most importantly, the new modern Spain that Queen Isabella worked so hard to build was destroyed by the discovery of America. Ambitious middle-class youth left to become conquistadores.

The river of cheap gold and silver flowing in from mines worked by slaves caused rapid price inflation that wrecked the embryo capitalist economy of Spain. The crown was enabled to borrow even more money from optimistic bankers blinded by wagonloads of doubloons leaving the docks of Seville.

All this money was wasted by later Spanish monarchs on a doomed attempt to conquer all of Europe with armies of expensive mercenaries. Most of the American treasure ended up in the coins of the rising Protestant trading nations.

By 1588 the Spanish government was so broke that the head admiral of the Spanish Armada had to pay for most of the fleet's supplies out of his own pocket. The defeat of the Armada by England led Spain into a 400-year economic and cultural decline.

So if we could bring back Isabella of Castile today, I think she would bitterly regret her decision to fund Christopher Columbus. And I think she would recognize many of today's space advocates as the intellectual heirs of the deluded crank who stood before her over 500 years ago.

They often show the same mixture of technical incompetence, slanted data, fanatical devotion to the cause, and brilliant salesmanship that led Columbus and Spain to disaster.

Jeffrey F. Bell is Adjunct Professor of Planetology at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. All opinions expressed in this article are his own and not those of the University.

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