Comments On The First President's Commission Meeting

02/11/04 00:00:00    

By Michael Mealling

The President's Commission on Moon, Mars and Beyond held its first public meeting yesterday. While there are no transcripts, the video archive is available. Here is some other coverage: Space.com, HobbySpace, Florida Today, Voice of America, etc.

I can usually tell what I'm going to write about when I find myself talking back to the TV. Three seemingly unrelated topics got me going: 'political sustainability', 'inspiring education as a goal', and the almost dismissive nature of the commercialization question during the press conference. The recurring theme of the meeting was how to ensure the vision is sustained through almost 10 election cycles. I'll quote the VOA article since it's the most succinct:

bq.

Mr. Tyson says history shows that huge national expenditures, whether for pyramids or cathedrals, Columbus' voyage to the Americas, or development of nuclear weapons, are sustained only if linked to economic return, defense, or praise of royalty or deity. He notes that the promise of scientific exploration has never driven major national programs and doubts that it would sustain interest in Mr. Bush's new space policy.

“While we need to make sure science and exploration are part of any discussion, in the end, learning from history, the public will have to be convinced of the truth of the space program in our lives, and that is the actual role it plays in driving our economic strength,” he said.

But a witness before the president's moon-Mars commission disagrees. “If all we do is talk about our own industrial base and how great this is for jobs, I don't think this mission gets furthered in any way,” he said.

Mark Bitterman is with the U.S. business promotion group the Chamber of Commerce. He believes the public is interested in space exploration for itself and cites the wide attention to the Mars rovers and the Hubble Space Telescope.

“There is a lot of excitement out there,” he said. “I think once the possibility of these new discoveries begins to become clear and they are discussed in the schools, kids get excited about it, that's what I think will really matter.”

Wrong. (Click the Read More link below to see why) Dr. Tyson is correct that large projects funded by national expenditures happen only because of greed, fear, king or god. But that assumes that our goal should be building cathedrals. Bazaars are much more sustainable. Of the four motivators Dr. Tyson cites, only the first builds sustainable economies and industries that can outlast presidents and congressmen. Fear only works while there is an enemy. King or god isn't relevant anymore and if it were it would only relevant to priests (sounds like NASA to me!).

And this is where Mr. Bitterman makes his mistake. It was typical of what happened during the Dot Com bubble. He mistakes hits/eyeballs with purchases. As companies like CMGI found, the typical Internet user is a a fickle thing. Sure, the Mars rovers are getting lots of hits. But so did Janet Jacksons bare chest. At least she has a prayer of monetizing that in the form of record sales. There is novelty with the current rovers. But what happens when there are twenty rovers and they're all returning the same pictures? Its the same thing that happened with Apollo: when the pictures started to look the same it became routine. Boring. That didn't mean it actually was boring or routine. Just that the viewer perceived it that way. It's the same reason men who are married to super models still have affairs.

So sustainability justified through web site hit rates is a dead end. Case in point: CMGI is currently trading at 2.74.

This brings me to the goal of inspiring kids to go into science, math and engineering fields. Here in Georgia there is a recurring question of how to move the state up in the ranks of high tech 'corridors' (the valley, northern Virginia, etc). This always generates platitudes like “we need a first rate education system!”, “we need mentoring!”, “we need technology showcases!”, etc. None of these works. They are symptoms of an underlying cause: the availability of equity, the ability to get silly rich while you're still young enough to enjoy it.

People emulate what they see as success. If you see someone in Atlanta driving a hot sports car or wearing really expensive clothes, the odds are that he/she is either a professional sports star or a rap musician. So when kids see that they learn early on that the easiest way to get the wheels or the threads is to do what they see. If you see a hot sports car in the valley the driver is most likely to be a technology entrepreneur. As a result, the number of students in math, science, engineering and business is much higher. The point is this: if you want to bring kids into math and science oriented fields you have to figure out how they can get rich doing it.

Lets put it another way. A friend teaches in an MBA program and as a result is often visited by dignitaries from other countries that are attempting to learn why America is so successful. In this particular case they were trying to understand their brain drain. Their best and brightest were going to school in America but they weren't bringing that education back home. My friend told them the basic solution was to make sure these students had the resources back home to make them and their families very rich, that the only motivator worth mentioning was wealth. One of the visiting dignitaries became incensed at this. He asserted that these students should come back home for the glory of the motherland and sacrifice themselves by teaching others for a government stipend. One of the other dignitaries then apologized to the MBA professor for the fact that his friend was stuck in the Napoleonic era.

Are we going to base the future education of our children and the viability of our economy on Napoleonic concepts of motivation? Our system, indeed, the American Dream itself, is based on the basic motivation of improving ones life through economic freedom.

If you want children to be motivated to go into high tech careers such as engineering and aerospace then you need to figure out how to get large numbers of current engineers into sports cars. Figure out how to make the aerospace industry look like the computer and Internet industries and we'll have large populations living on Mars in our lifetimes.

And that brings me to the last item. I realize that commercialization wasn't on this meetings agenda so I may be overly critical. But the fact that even one meeting went by without commercialization being the core agenda item means that we are still stuck in the Napoleonic era. Every meeting should have that at its core. When asked specifically about commercialization, Aldridge dismissed it as for a future meeting. Dr. Tyson elaborated by reiterating his point about the role of guaranteed mail delivery for early passenger aviation. But then he went on to say that the long term sustainability of the program shouldn't be dependent on an unproven and currently non-existent private, commercial space sector.

Given history, psychology and the system that we've built here in the United States that has made us the most powerful economic force in the world, I assert that the only way to ensure long term sustainability of the goal is through commercialization at the very core of this undertaking. To do anything else is Napoleonic and will continue to cause our space industry to be the economic equivalent of a third world country.