Concluding Thoughts

Section V: Concluding Thoughts

When we first arrived, and for twenty years after that, Mars was like Antarctica but even purer. We were outside the world, we didn’t even own things—some clothes, a lectern, and that was it! Now you know what I think, John. This arrangement resembles the prehistoric way to live, and it therefore feels right to us, because our brains recognize it from three millions of years practicing it. In essence our brains grew to their current configuration in response to the realities of that life. So as a result people grow powerfully attached to that kind of life, when they get the chance to live it. It allows you to concentrate your attention on the real work, which means everything that is done to stay alive, or make things, or satisfy one’s curiosity, or play. That is utopia, John, especially for primitives and scientists, which is to say everybody. So a scientific research station is actually a little model of prehistoric utopia, carved out of the transnational money economy by clever primates who want to live well.

—Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

The Luxury Problem: Space Exploration in the “Emergency Century”

Kim Stanley Robinson in conversation with Jim Bell

To get some broader perspective on the theme of space exploration in science fiction, we asked Jim Bell, our project collaborator, planetary scientist, ASU professor, and president of The Planetary Society, to interview the renowned science fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson about the future of human ambition in space, the proper place of optimism, and the power of stories to blaze a path for discovery and exploration. 

Jim Bell: In preparation for our conversation, I’ve taken some time to remind myself of some of the context and main themes from your Mars trilogy, especially Red Mars, which I confess I haven’t reread since devouring it when it came out 25 years ago. I was just starting out in planetary science back then, and your ideas were truly motivational.

But of course, things haven’t really worked out that way—not that the success or influence of your work was contingent on scientific or technological prescience. And so my goal in this interview is to get your take on how the last few decades of Mars exploration have unfolded, and what that might mean for the realization of the kind of human exploration endeavor that will hopefully unfold in the next few decades—not just on Mars, but throughout our solar system (and beyond). 

What has changed over the 25 years since you published Red Mars? I’ve often said that it seems like sending humans to Mars has always been 30 years away. Are we in exactly the same place regarding the human exploration of Mars that we were in when the novel first came out?

Kim Stanley Robinson: No, we’re not in the same place. We know a lot more details about Mars than we did in the late 1980s when I began my Mars trilogy, because of the robotic orbiters and landers. That said, they have mostly confirmed what people saw and deduced from the Viking missions. We have also discovered that perchlorates are in the surface sands, and this will be problematic for humans as they are toxic to us, if and when we land there. It is a new factor, a danger that we will have to cope with. 

We’ve also got better at manufacturing rockets, and especially their computers and guidance systems. This is important because landing on Mars is still and will always be a tricky operation, so we need reliable software and rockets to make the landing as safe as can be if humans are aboard. The success rate for Mars landings is still at around 50 percent, although recently things have been getting better, but not entirely. So it is still one of the more dangerous space operations we will ever have attempted.

Other than these, the changes have not been so many. Russia is still a great space power and worth collaborating with, if we could work that out politically. The other nations are still behind when it comes to space expertise and experience. Mars is still very difficult. There are still private aerospace companies that would be thrilled to take U.S. government contracts to build good space vehicles. NASA is still a force leading U.S. and international space efforts. SpaceX is new but will not be going to Mars on its own; it will collaborate with other entities, I predict. The costs are too great and the stakes are too high. This will be, as was always clear, an international, public-private collaboration. 

So while we know more about the challenges facing us, ultimately I would say not very much of fundamental importance to the humans-to-Mars project has changed in the last 25 years. 

I don’t believe there is historical inevitability in anything. And public interest has always been high, without the funding or the detailed engineering being adequate. So I think it could still be 30 years. But more likely 20, maybe.

JB: With the recent news that SpaceX is going to start sending robotic Red Dragon landers to Mars perhaps as early as 2020, I want to poke back at your statement that “SpaceX is new but will not be going to Mars on its own.” In one sense you are right—they are only partially funded from the personal wealth of Elon Musk, as a large part of their funding stream comes from NASA and its large commercial space contracts for launch and delivery services. But in another sense, they are motivated by a completely different business model than other aerospace companies, with the stated corporate goal of “enabling people to live on other planets.” What do you think about SpaceX’s motivation and potential? 

KSR: I like SpaceX as a company and a force in space exploration. I’ve visited their facility in Hawthorne, California and it was impressive to see serious aerospace manufacturing still going on in Southern California, which is important in itself. (My father worked in Southern California aerospace for his entire career.) To see flat sheets of aluminum turned into rocket bodies was simply amazing, and the precision work on the engines and all the rest of it was inspiring. I take it the Red Dragon might be some version of their proposed Falcon Heavy, which will be three Falcon 9s bolted together, raising the total of rocket engines on the craft to 27, and giving the U.S. a heavy lifter to match the Russian Energia and even our old Saturn lifters. Very nice to see, and important.

As to landing anything on Mars, they will have the same problems everyone else faces. It’s tricky, and the success rate has been only about 50 percent for real reasons, having to do with Mars’s gravity and atmosphere. So if they try to engineer a new method from scratch, they are likely to experience the same frequency of failures they have had in their attempts to land their boosters on barges at sea. This will be expensive and daunting, and maybe they will press on with the project in the face of reversals. 

But really, I think the Mars project should be bigger than any one company or one person’s dream. That angle, suspiciously like the old science fiction stories of a boy building a rocket to the Moon in his backyard, I think actually deflates public interest in Mars and space generally, by turning it from an exploration of the commons to just another rich person’s hobby, the equivalent of bungee jumping, except up instead of down. Who cares what the rich do to entertain themselves? That’s just a matter of celebrity culture—so maybe many people will care, who knows. But Mars is bigger than that, and I prefer to think of it as something like Antarctica or the ocean, a commons that everyone belongs to equally, so that exploring it should be like exploring Antarctica, a place of scientific interest and international cooperation, as well as adventure tourism. That would be the way to treat it. 

What that implies is adherence to the Outer Space Treaty, which we have signed, including planetary protection protocols, and therefore international cooperation in the project. Also public funding for research in the public interest. In that project, SpaceX could be one of the private contractors executing the hardware aspects, as the big aerospace companies have been all along with the various NASA missions. Those have always been public-private ventures, and I want Mars to be that too. And I expect it will be.

JB: You’ve written in Red Mars and elsewhere about complex topics that don’t often get considered in science fiction or exploration narratives, like ecology, social systems and settings, the future of international space policy, and the dynamics of individual human interactions in extreme—exploration or pioneering—circumstances. Based on that experience, and the evolution of your thinking over the past few decades, what are the challenges that we need to master to make Mars habitation work?

KSR: I think it would help to think of Mars as being like Antarctica, rather than like the “New World.” It would help focus our goals and the steps needed to achieve them. We need to send robotic landers with most of a base camp for humans landed in one area and ready to be activated and inhabited. We need to think of the people going there as scientists making a visit to a Site of Special Scientific Interest, as the British would call it. That they will study Mars and then return home, like astronauts to the Moon, but gone for five years rather than a month.  

This would take the magical thinking out of the process and reduce it to a set of achievable steps, with goals that are interesting and even spectacular, but not game-changing for civilization. There’s too much fantasy projection onto Mars and it obscures the project as it really exists. My work may have contributed to that, but I think a careful reading of my books will show they were always trying to make the case that Mars is no cure for Earth’s ills, just a kind of mirror, or an interesting experiment, even if a thought experiment only. 

JB: That’s an interesting perspective. What would be the effect on long-term human habitation of Mars if, contrary to your hopes, the “magical thinking” does end up ruling the day? Or perhaps other drivers push human exploration of Mars that might be focused on other nonscientific goals, like “flags and footsteps” national prestige? Do we all need to be on the same page—U.S., Russia, China, ESA, companies? If we’re not, do we risk destroying or delaying the effort?

KSR: It’s very easy to imagine a kind of “flags and footsteps” race to Mars being pursued by the spacefaring nations, now including China, and private companies like SpaceX. But here we’re talking about putting people on Mars, because the robots are already there. And the human landing project is very difficult and expensive. So in the end I think it may come to either a matter of international cooperation, or else a big country investing in the expenses and ignoring the risks to the astronauts involved. That’s what it would take.

 No matter how it happens, an inhabited Mars is no help to us in designing and enacting a sustainable civilization here on Earth. So it’s a derivative of success in other realms, and in effect a kind of luxury problem. If humanity achieves balance on Earth, people will end up on Mars as we are on Antarctica, and the general public may then lose interest. Maybe long after that, a local Martian civilization and culture might emerge—depends on how pregnancy goes on Mars, if at all. Or it might not. But all that is centuries off, and derivative to earlier and one might say much harder successes here. 

JB: You recently looked at the future of human expansion into the solar system in your novel 2312. Do you see such a trajectory as inevitable for our species, if we can survive the next few centuries, or as just one of many potential trajectories? If the former, what drives the inevitability? If the latter, what might represent the turning points—the places where a “gravity-assist” from an important event or discovery, for example—which might alter our exploration and settlement trajectory?

KSR: There is no inevitability in human history. I regard 2312 as utopian but also as an allegory for the situation on Earth today: the rich as spacers, the rest as the people left behind on Earth. So it needs to be read with both aspects of it in mind at once, to give it its full workout. 

Humanity may inhabit the solar system with scientific bases and later even permanent small cities for some. Depends on how we react to long-term habitation at different gravities than one G; right now we don’t really know what that will do, so it’s all speculative. In any case it all rests on the idea that we first create a sustainable civilization here on Earth. If we don’t do that, the solar system will remain empty or at most a kind of sideshow with some McMurdo-like scientific bases. But really, the solar system is irrelevant to human history. It’s interesting and beautiful, and possibly even useful, even if just as a research area, but it cannot help us in the long-term project of creating a sustainable civilization. Even “saving ourselves so we can become solar-system citizens” is a kind of crazy reason to propose for doing the right thing here. Why not do it for us now, or for the vast majority of the people who will be born and live their whole lives on Earth, like we will? That’s the real motivation. So the solar system is secondary, a derivative, so to speak, of our main project. 

So, we face a kind of emergency century or two, in bringing ourselves into balance with our biosphere. In that project, where the space project helps, good; where it doesn’t, it needs to be put off, as a possible project for people of the twenty-third century perhaps. If at that point we are doing the space project, it will be a sign of success, a marvelous thing.

JB: Your comment about needing to think about how we react to different gravity, which could equally apply to radiation, or other environmental challenges, makes me want to ask you about the “Mars vs. the Moon” debate. Do you think the Moon will play a substantial role in the future habitation of space, or merely a supporting role?

KSR: If we do much in the way of habitation of space, the Moon will be part of it, for sure. It’s close and easier to get to and back from. It has some gravity. The side not facing Earth will be great for astronomy. If people react well enough to the gravity, it’s easier to imagine domed or buried cities there doing better than Mars. And it makes a potential way station and proving ground. So I think the Moon will call to people and we’ll go there. But it is the same with the Moon as what I’ve been saying about Mars; it’s a luxury for a later time, in terms of usefulness to us.

JB: You’ve also thought and written quite a bit about potential economies and social structures of the future, here on Earth as well as among our possible future settlements in space. Of course, lots of others outside the literary world are thinking about such things as well. For example, you are well aware of the emerging space resource prospecting and mining communities, embodied by visionaries in companies like Planetary Resources, Deep Space Industries, and Shackleton Energy. There’s lots of debate about what kinds of economic models might work best in the upcoming new space frontier (and beyond). What kinds of economic models will we need to make a substantial and sustainable space future happen?

KSR: I’m not convinced there’s anything elsewhere in the solar system that we need, that we don’t have here on Earth already. It’s mostly common elements and volatiles out there. Between that fact and the gravity well we’re in, there won’t be space mining any time soon.

JB: I’m not saying you’re right or wrong, but I know a bunch of people who disagree with you, and they’re putting their money, and others’, on the line over it. There is a lot of hype about precious metals, to be sure, but arguably the most important resource, the one that really matters in the end, is water. This is the resource about which, in my experience, the only serious discussions are occurring. Because of its many uses—rocket fuel, breathing, drinking, shielding—it could make economic sense to build a space-based resource economy around prospecting for and mining water from the reservoirs out there, like near-Earth asteroids, outer main–belt asteroids, lunar poles, Martian poles, rather than having to launch it off Earth. The recent TV series The Expanse plays on this idea—too heavily, in my opinion, but it seems to be popular. Could you expand upon your thinking on this in a bit more detail? What do you think of the “asteroid miners” who are certainly technically capable, and in some cases well-funded, who are going after the water? 

KSR: But this is water used for space inhabitation itself. It will never be the case that we import water from space to Earth. So if you’re saying, if and when we inhabit the solar system, will we be using the water out there to fuel our projects and keep us alive, yes, of course. Because it would also be crazy to lift water up from Earth to space when it’s out there anyway.  

So, mining the asteroids to live in the asteroids—it’s a very plausible science fiction story, it’s how it would be done. But it’s a tautological justification. If you say, “why go to the asteroids,” and the answer is, “so we can mine water to live in the asteroids,” it has no force as a justification. When people say “mining,” the implication is that we are extracting something that we want here on Earth and bringing it back to use. And that isn’t something space can do for us.

The exceptions might be energy generation in orbit, beamed down to Earth; and maybe helium-3; and maybe some rare earths. But none of these really pencil out in the capitalist economy. There would have to be a post-capitalist system and some kind of overriding need, which I doubt exists. So again, these are fantasy projections, I think, made by people who “want space” for noneconomic reasons—which is fine—and then try to justify the desire by way of a projective economic logic that doesn’t actually pencil out.

We don’t need space. We need sustainability in this biosphere. Space is a luxury problem and a luxury opportunity. It’s what we get to explore in some detail, in the centuries after we succeed in inventing permaculture here, if we do.

Again, it’s like Antarctica. We now inhabit and explore the Antarctic usefully in terms of scientific information gathering. Does anyone care? No, they do not. If and when we get into the solar system, it will be like that. One aspect of the interest in space right now is the fact that it’s the hardest thing we might be able to do as a civilization, given our current technology. That’s why people were interested in the North Pole in the nineteenth century, and then the South Pole, and why they were interested in the Moon in the 1960s. But in all these cases, once we did it, we lost interest. Those last Apollo missions getting canceled—that was a sign that we have to attend to. As an event it has a meaning. What were we really interested in there? Not the Moon. Just the getting there. And space may be the same, every object up there. We get to Mars, great; but then, big deal. Scientists at work. People may get interested in Europa or whatnot, or maybe not. We’ll see. But the signs are clear that we don’t have an intrinsic interest in places where lots of people can’t live. 

I don’t mean to sound pessimistic here. I just think that if we focus on our real needs and desires and understand them better, we’ll do a better job of achieving our goals. Here, what we really need is sustainability on Earth. So, space science that supports that is good; space science irrelevant to that is premature at best. It makes a kind of rubric for decisions. Also it’s important to be realistic about difficulties. We don’t know how humans will do off this planet over the long haul. Could be pregnancy won’t work on Mars. Could be everyone will get sick and need to get home to Earth for a kind of “sabbatical,” as in my 2312. We just don’t know. So admitting that is part of the work of focusing on what our project really is, and what we should do now.

JB: Finally, in the broadest sense, why do you write about space exploration? What role do you hope that your work will play in conversations about space?

KSR: I have been writing about humans in space for 40 years, but I haven’t often thought about why I have done that. I guess it began with a love for science fiction as a literature and story space, meaning I guess the future, and the future history of humanity in particular. That was assumed to include space, in the time when I began writing science fiction, and so my eye turned outward. What I saw that caught me immediately was the solar system, a marvelous collection of planets, moons, and asteroids that felt within reach and would be very exciting to explore as landscapes with exotic features. 

Story ideas came to me and it seemed true that the solar system was a great story space for me. Usually I wrote about a time that was post-exploration, more a matter of humanity in a settled solar system. This became a comfortable story space for me. And very soon in my career, the Viking landers and orbiters gave us Mars, and that became my focus for many years. I still believe in the Mars project, meaning a place of eventual human habitation and maybe terraforming, as a kind of extension of a viable permaculture invented and enacted on Earth.

In the course of my career, my studies led me to think that human travel to other solar systems, and humanity spreading out through the galaxy, was impossible and not going to happen. So that’s become part of my writing too; that the solar system is all we’ve got, but is good enough.

 I think now that space science is an Earth science, and getting things right on Earth is the main task for civilization. So my views have evolved over the course of my career.

The Practical Economics of Space

Clark A. Miller

Space, the final frontier. Star Trek has given us uncountable ideas about possible human futures in space, what we might find there, and how to behave properly once we’ve run into neighbors from nearby planets. What it has never given us is a clear, pragmatic sense of the economics of space: that is, in the simplest sense, how human activities in space will get paid for. 

Star Trek never discloses how much it cost to build the USS Enterprise—the starship, not the aircraft carrier. We never learn what kind of salary Captain Kirk earns, nor who pays the taxes to support Starfleet and their five-year mission “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.” It’s an interesting omission. 

Frontier societies always give rise to questions about their economics, whether we’re talking about the settlement of new lands or the invention of new technologies. How do you pay for the work that has to get done to build infrastructure, extend supply chains, extract resources, provide for the sustenance of new settlements, and ship the excesses home? How do you pay for the upfront research and development costs of innovation on the technological frontier?

But there’s also a deeper dimension to economics. We pay for things because we value them. We pay people because we value what they do for us. What—and who—will we value in the human future in space?

Currently, there are basically three mechanisms that finance human societies. The most important is markets. If something has value to someone, and she has enough money, she can purchase it, so long as she can find someone willing to make it or bring it to market at a price she can afford. Banks provide a market for aggregating money to allow people to make larger purchases—like cars and homes—that they would find difficult by themselves. The second mechanism is government. Governments collect taxes and then use the resulting money to purchase things that, for one reason or another, individuals and companies are not positioned to buy. National defense is a good example. The third is philanthropy: wealthy individuals donate money to causes they find compelling. There is a fourth, voluntary human labor, that often goes unrecognized or unrewarded but is extremely important, especially in supporting certain kinds of basic social infrastructure. More on that later.

One of the central reasons that many organizations, including NASA, are putting significant efforts into commercializing space is so that they can generate new and additional revenues to accelerate space exploration via markets. This seems like a good idea, in that government funding is always limited. NASA’s budget, for example, has been about $20 billion in recent years. Compared to the $20 trillion U.S. economy, this seems like small potatoes. $1 out of every $1,000 to fund space. Surely the market can do better. 

Another comparison tells a somewhat different story, however. The annual budget of the U.S. government is $4 trillion. By contrast, the largest company in the world, which at the moment happens to be Walmart, has annual revenues of a bit more than $400 billion. That’s 10 times smaller. 

No single business organization in the world can match anything like the spending power of the U.S. government. When the U.S. government decided that it needed to intervene in Iraq—whether one believes that was a good idea or not—it ultimately spent $2 trillion over a decade. That’s why private companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX actually make most of their money by selling to the U.S. government. And, of course, it’s the U.S. Department of Defense, not NASA, that spends the most money among federal agencies in space.

And then there are philanthropists. The richest is Bill Gates, with $85 billion. But that’s not an annual revenue stream. It’s all the money he’s got. So even he can’t even come close to matching a big company, let alone the U.S. government, for pure ability to finance future space expeditions.

Exploring the futures imagined in this book, it’s not hard to see how the outlines of a future space economy might emerge. There are two key elements. First, somebody needs to sell something. Second, whatever that product is, it needs to have value for people living on Earth. 

Until now, commercial activity in space has been dominated by communication satellites. Many companies, especially news and entertainment organizations, have been willing to pay other companies to put communication satellites into orbit. Those companies are willing to pay because their customers on Earth are willing to pay, in turn, for the services that media companies can deliver via satellites, like live news coverage or lots of inexpensive TV channels. Not much else justifies significant commercial activity in space just now. We can move electronic signals through near-Earth space quickly and for relatively low cost, compared to the value generated by DirecTV, CNN, or Verizon for their customers.

The stories in this collection point us in a few basic directions for the near-term future of space: tourism, mining, real estate, and environmental cleanup. Tourism has a coolness factor, as Steven Barnes’s story “Mozart on the Kalahari” reminds us. The possibility of traveling into space can inspire all different kinds of people. But the reality is that few people are likely to be in a position anytime soon to afford that kind of journey. You can take up a few people for free, as a publicity stunt, but pretty soon a company would need paying customers. Yet, outside the top few percent of the world’s wealthiest people, willingness and ability to pay drops off rapidly. The number of people who can afford more than the $5,000 to $10,000 of a relatively expensive vacation for a family of four is vanishingly small. Few can afford even high-end hotels planet-side, with their $1,000 per night price tags, let alone their space counterparts. So, you could build a space economy on tourism, but it would be small, at least initially, and it would depend on very rich people. Maybe you could build capital gradually, invest in lower-cost transport infrastructure, reduce your prices, and grow over time. It might work. It might not.

More people think the future of the space economy is in mining, as several of the stories suggest, including Eileen Gunn’s “Night Shift.” Gunn’s protagonist lives in Seattle but works with robots to capture and mine asteroids. Historically, mining has driven many frontier economies. They have serious problems: pollution, environmental degradation, exploitation of indigenous groups. How serious any of these challenges will turn out to be in the reality of space is an open question. At the beginning, people will argue that space is so vast that worries about pollution are fearmongering that puts the cart before the horse, but they often said the same thing about frontiers on Earth, too. 

In Low Earth Orbit, the rate of growth of orbital junk is already a problem for today’s spacecraft and satellites. It’s a sufficiently big problem, in fact, that Carter Scholz imagines Uber creating a space division to clean up space debris in “Vanguard 2.0.” I’m surprised he didn’t choose Waste Management, a company that’s already gobbling up garbage companies—and garbage—all across the Earth. I bet they’re already thinking about it. So, yes, environmental remediation could be a good space business—although it might be better not to cause the problems in the first place. And, like environmental cleanup on Earth, it might be a challenge to convince people to pay for it.

When we consider the commercialization of space, however, several of the stories remind us that all of these ideas—and every other one we’ve thought of to date—suffer from some rather severe handicaps. It’s really expensive to get stuff from Earth into space (like tourists or mining equipment). That’s why Barnes envisions poor people entering contests to try to get into space, Gunn’s story involves robotic space missions by nanobots which are tiny and thus cheaper to launch (and can build replicants of themselves, in place, in space, from resources already up there), why Ramez Naam writes of automated factories on the Moon making the materials and fuels to colonize space in “The Use of Things,” and why Myrna’s friends all work on Earth as they build the Martian city of the future in Karl Schroeder’s “The Baker of Mars.”

Likewise, everything in space is a long way away and thus requires a lot of time and energy to get to and to come back. For both Ashby, in “Death on Mars,” and Schroeder, getting people to Mars is a massive undertaking. Indeed, for NASA, getting just three small robotic rovers to Mars was a massive undertaking. It’s not an accident that Gunn’s nanobots and their AI teammates work in near-Earth space, where the time lags between remote systems and human controllers are short enough not to matter. Communication lags get significantly longer, the farther you go. 

The inhospitality of space environments also means that human beings in space require extensive life support systems that make their participation even more expensive and risky. Life support systems are costly. So are redundant safety systems to reduce risk. Both also add to the weight of the payload that must be taken from the Earth’s surface to orbit and thus require very high amounts of fuel and more expense. The human body itself must be also lifted out of the Earth’s gravity well.

Finally, as Schroeder reminds us in his story of the quest to invent real estate on Mars, the ownership of assets in space is entirely unclear. Who owns the surface of Mars? Who owns the metals or other materials in an asteroid? These are not idle questions for those seeking to commercialize space ventures, nor those seeking to finance space missions on the hopes of a future return on investment. They are questions of governance, specifically, of who governs and who has the right to allocate ownership rights in space. To this point in human history, ownership is a legal concept grounded in national law, and national territorial jurisdictions do not currently extend into space. Indeed, the 1967 Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies expressly prohibits its signatories, which include most spacefaring nations, from claiming sovereignty over territory in space. 

Still, law is a figment of the human imagination and a product of human institutions; thus, humans can change it. Existing nations may seek to extend their jurisdiction to authorize ownership in space through workarounds, as the U.S. has sought to do under a new 2015 law, by claiming ownership over “resources” without claiming ownership over places. Or nations may simply withdraw from the Outer Space Treaty and claim territory. Or humanity may invent new nations in space, or invent new concepts of governance, like Schroeder’s self-governing, blockchain-enabled commons. As Schroeder explores in his story, ownership is complicated in space. Early entrants into markets for space places and space resources may lose their shirts if ownership rules change. We might even fight wars over who owns what in the frontiers of space.

And, even if we can reach agreement on who owns the sky and how to mine it, no one has yet found any mineral or substance in space that doesn’t also exist on Earth or that has a sufficiently constrained supply on Earth and a sufficiently high demand to drive up costs high enough to justify space mining.

So how might space companies solve these problems? One approach is to make stuff in space and create a “local” space economy, meaning an economy in which people or organizations in space sell stuff to each other. That’s a great idea. In frontier economies, alongside the mine there was also always the general store, the saloon, and the blacksmith. The European Space Agency is already thinking about things like sending 3D printers to the Moon and making things there, so you wouldn’t have to pay the cost of launching them off Earth. Spacecraft and fuel would be especially valuable, as Ramez Naam points out in his story, and could then be sold to others in space. We might call this the bootstrapping or bottom-up model of space commercialization. 

There are two challenges, however, in bootstrapping your way to a space economy. The first is that it will be slow. When markets grow in a bottom-up way, they start small and do not grow quickly in absolute size. Maybe that’s fine. But growing a space economy largely in space itself is unlikely to be a get-rich-quick scheme. 

The second challenge is that this model still requires an Earthly value to the activity. Someone must be willing to invest in the infrastructure to obtain space materials. Someone else must be willing to buy something from them at sufficiently high prices to pay for the spacecraft and fuel in question. Think about the city being built by the homesteaders in “The Baker of Mars.” It’s all speculation, based on the idea that people on Earth will want to buy real estate on Mars at prices high enough to compensate for the costs of building there. Or think about Gunn’s and Naam’s mining probes. The whole point is to secure materials that can be sold on Earth. At least at the outset, a space economy is not likely to pay for itself. Earthlings must ultimately pay for it. We’re the big market on the block.

Another approach to solving the space economy puzzle is to significantly reduce costs by upgrading autonomous systems and allowing robots to do most of the work. This has long worked for NASA, which has a strong space probe business and has sent many spacecraft into space that were piloted by scientists and engineers back on Earth. It’s still not cheap, however. And in the stories in this book, like Gunn’s and Naam’s, robots do far more than just travel from place to place. They also adapt to diverse realities of mining in space. That’s why Gunn imagines nanorobotic swarms. No current space mining technology fits that bill: existing robots are just not capable of autonomously sizing up an asteroid and mining it. And, at least according to the logic of her story, we can’t afford to put humans into space to do the sizing up and orientation for the robots. And nanobots will have limited intelligence. So, Gunn also gives the swarm a smart controller robot. Perhaps a bit too smart.

Given my experience with Siri on my phone, it’s going to be a while before we have an AI system that’s good enough to do what Gunn’s AI does. Siri does some pretty cool things. But she’s also pretty stupid in a lot of ways. Siri is not actually in my phone (or yours), either. She’s in a giant server farm somewhere, probably more than one. For very-near-Earth activities, the communications lag and finite data transfer rates between Earth-based server farms and space AI systems may be solvable problems. For activities that occur even a modest distance from Earth, however, we’re going to need to send the AI hardware into space. Remember HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey? That will mean significantly shrinking the weight, size, and energy requirements of the computational infrastructure required for high-level AI. Or we’re going to need to build and move very large AI spacecraft through space, which may be just as expensive as sending people in the first place. 

Using people to coordinate robots from Earth, as a few of the stories suggest might be possible, is going to run into similar problems of data bandwidth and communication speeds. And, as NASA’s experience with its Mars rovers suggests, this has been demonstrated successfully only for very controlled environments and plans. It’s not clear it would work without deep and exact knowledge of the circumstances of the mission.

And it gets even more complicated as the complexity of the communications task grows. How are Schroeder’s homesteaders in “The Baker of Mars” able to do what they do, sending high-quality visualizations and commands back and forth from Earth to Mars to sustain not just one data link but seemingly thousands? NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory estimates that we’ll need to grow data rates for planetary missions by a factor of 10 for each of the next several decades.^[1] But they don’t imagine anything like the immersive, virtual realities that enable the crowdsourced making of Martian infrastructure that Schroeder envisions, which, even time-delayed, would be extremely bandwidth-intensive.

Then, too, there’s the point that Naam makes in “The Use of Things.” Sure, we can potentially make money in space using robots and AI. But to what end, if there are no people there? If we want to travel into space, to settle it, then we need to put people up there. However it starts, the long-term objective of building a space economy is to support a future for people in space. Building a small commercial space industry and economy built on robots may be a stepping stone. But if it’s a stepping stone, then let’s think hard about the design of the space economy from day one, so that the world we create for people to step into in the future is one that people actually want to inhabit and, just as importantly, that people can thrive in. This adds an important complexity to the future space economy because it entails taxing that economy to create a plausible and thriving future for humanity in space, which will inevitably further slow and complicate the business of actually trying to run early, small-scale space businesses.

We might discover some micronutrient or extremely rare material that turns out to be critical to the future of life on Earth. And we might discover that the only place we can get more of it is in space. Or we might discover something in space so attractive—like the tulips of the Dutch Gilded Age—that Earthlings are willing to mortgage fortunes to obtain it. And so we might mount extremely profitable expeditions to go get some of it and bring it back to Earth. All that is possible. But it would hardly count as a space economy. It would merely be a mining expedition.

And I suppose it’s possible that we might ultimately build an economy for intelligent robots in space—or by then it might be more accurate to say that they’d build an economy in space for themselves—but what would be the point, exactly, in human terms?

Markets have become quite unhinged in recent years from consideration of their purpose. Like technology, we’ve largely come to treat them in technical terms, as instruments for achieving various goals, such as efficiently allocating capital. Markets, or so economists tell us, allow people to trade something that they have in surplus (time, labor, apples, etc.) in exchange for something that someone else has in surplus (money, rocks, good ideas, etc.). In their simplest form, this allows people with too many blueberries to trade with people with too many strawberries so that everyone can enjoy both. Pretty soon, along comes a middleman, a trader, who trades with both so they don’t have to always find each other to do their exchange. Over long periods of time, trade allows the creation of sophisticated markets and industries that allow people to buy services, like travel to space, that would have been impossible without sophisticated markets. 

But it’s always worth remembering that the reason for markets—and for money—is to allow people to trade for things that they can’t make or achieve for themselves, so that they can make their lives better. The purpose of markets is to create opportunities for enhanced human thriving. Money is not an end, it’s a means. 

So why should people go into space? I can imagine four reasons. 

The first is to make money or to gain power. If we can build tourist or mining industries in space, it might make someone filthy rich. Or maybe they’ll get powerful: a trillionaire who controls nuclear weapons in space and can threaten governments to get his way, like Scholz offers up in “Vanguard 2.0.” Great. End of story. Does anyone else besides the trillionaire care? That’s a reason for the rest of us not to want people to go into space.

The second reason for people to go to space is that it might provide some security to the human species. A local catastrophe here on Earth would be a deep problem for humanity. This is the theory underlying Elon Musk’s vision for settling Mars. The wrong asteroid in the wrong place, a failure to control our carbon emissions … a thriving humanity in space would provide a safety net for the species to continue, no matter what happened on Earth.

Related to this, we might just become a little too crowded here on our home planet. Quite possibly, we’re already there. Too many people, too little space, too few resources, too much waste. Relieving the pressure might be a good idea. Allowing people to spread out a little, get a bit further away from their neighbors, live a little more like they want to live without the constant pressure of the civilizing gaze of their fellow inhabitants of Earth—frontiers have always been good for that.

Finally, and to my mind the most compelling, we may wish to journey into space to continue to diversify the human experience. Saturn is out there. Let’s go find out what it’s like to live amidst its rings. As Chirag says in Vandana Singh’s “Shikasta”: “We look for life on other worlds because we want to deepen what we mean by human, what we mean by Earthling.”

What kinds of experiences will people have in space? It’s no picnic to build a city on Mars via virtual-reality immersion. But what would it actually be like to grow up on the Red Planet? Indeed, what would it be like to grow up even in a habitat in Low Earth Orbit? How would space change us, as we change space? If we’re going to go to the trouble of creating a space economy, the goal should be to make it possible for humans to grow and change and thrive in space as they have on Earth. To make space into a place where people can build a life, a community, a future. Where they can experience new realities, write new stories, invent new literatures and genres of art, create new human possibilities. To that end, the commercialization of space may be necessary, in that the creation of a functioning space economy finances the other structures of human society as they take root, grow, and evolve in diverse new ways. 

Why do people go to space, now, in the dawn of the twenty-first century? 

Because we send them—we, collectively. Today’s space missions are public endeavors. They have public purpose, public value, and public meaning, and occur at the public expense. They’re led by commanders and staffed by employees of the world’s biggest governments. They’re not boring, exactly. But they’re not exactly exciting, either, in the sort of deep-down passionate version of excitement that drives Meek in “Mozart on the Kalahari.” Why were we all so excited when Christa McAuliffe went into space? Because she wasn’t an astronaut. She was an ordinary person headed for a place that ordinary people didn’t go. 

Star Trek and its successors, Next Generation and Voyager, all have their great moments, their drama, their amazing stories about people in extraordinary settings. But the focus is on the journey, on ever-forward movement to new frontiers. All the ordinary people live on planets, and all the markets (the few we ever see) are on planets, too. 

Deep Space Nine is different. People live in space. Ordinary people. They are born, laugh, play, cry, work, get sick, and die in space. They thrive, in their good and bad moments. And there are markets in Deep Space Nine: shops and merchants and weapons dealers. And there is a bar, a place for people to gather in community, to celebrate, and to fight. There is a bar in the first Star Wars movie, too. Despite its well-deserved reputation as a “wretched hive of scum and villainy,” the bar in Mos Eisley is a dynamic, engaging place where music plays and people and aliens gather, eat meals, make deals, and resolve disputes, face to face. Is that an accident? All of the versions of the Enterprise have bars in them. So does Voyager. Some of the few people who aren’t Starfleet personnel run them. The most exciting and dramatic stuff doesn’t always happen there. But some of the most meaningful and most fun does. We’re supposed to think it’s because of the drink.

This is all a bit stereotyped, of course. It’s Hollywood after all. But there’s also some truth to it. We go to the bar after work because it’s not work. It’s a chance to let our hair down, to spend time meeting new people, hanging out with our friends. It’s a commercial establishment, part of our economy of exchange, but also an emotional touchstone, a hub at the center of the web of human relationships. Myrna’s diner in “The Baker of Mars” is an example of how, even in the far future, a countertop becomes a gathering place. Find people, and you will almost always find somewhere like Myrna’s, where those who are too lazy or too busy or too lonely to make their own food come to eat. And you will find people like Myrna, or Quark from Deep Space Nine, entrepreneurs who are all too happy to provide the material and financial glue that holds human communities together through their willingness to make markets.

But the making of money is only a tiny part of what’s happening. People go to the bar because it creates social value, for each of them, individually. Not social value in the sense of “it’s good for us.” We’re not more ethical or more just or less poor when we’ve been to the bar. But social value nonetheless. The patrons of Cheers aren’t always happy. But they share their lives and connect their stories. And that makes them part of a community. We plug into our humanity in bars. We do elsewhere, too. Often in other kinds of commercial establishments.

Why should we commercialize space? Because if space has commercial establishments, then it will mean that people are doing more in space than just going on missions. They’ll be living, working, making money, spending money, taking their kids to the park (wherever that park is, whatever it looks like, and whatever kids do at that park to have fun), and buying coffee from Myrna.

Too few of our realistic space stories—the ones that motivate our space agencies and our space companies—imagine the human future in space in more than mission-centric terms. The people in these stories remain instruments of attempts to further the exploration of space and the exploitation of its resources. They’re not really there on their own terms. Space remains too vast, too alien, too far in time and distance to support thriving human communities, even in Low Earth Orbit. 

The stories in this book reflect this tension. Space is a hard and lonely place when you’re just there to do a job. Naam’s story, with its proclamation that humans are the point of space travel, epitomizes this. It ends with an astronaut, alone, on a solo mission, having a near-death experience, rescued by robots because they’ve been programmed to think that his is the only valuable life, deliberating with himself about whether he’s an expense that space missions can afford. He is the reason for creating a space economy, yet he’s a massive drain on resources that could be used much more efficiently to accomplish the instrumental goals of the task at hand.

Sergei’s girlfriend on Earth, in “Vanguard 2.0”, asks him, “Who will take care of your heart and soul [when you go into space]?” It’s a tough question. Sergei shrugs. Then he goes off to work, cleaning up space. And then his work turns into a stupid request from a trillionaire who has way too much money to go and find an artifact out of history—which turns out to be a ruse to get Sergei out of the way so that the trillionaire could deploy the space nukes and prepare to take over the world. The soul isn’t in space for Sergei or Pace or any of the others in the story. Indeed, it’s not clear that Pace has a soul. For Sergei, his soul is with Izumi. He hopes. In the end, he goes home to find her and himself, abandoning the freeing isolation of space for the messiness of Earth and all its tangled humanity.

And the further one goes, the more challenging it seems to become to envision human thriving. In Madeline Ashby’s story, a small band of astronauts are on a mission to prepare Mars for colonization. Risk is everywhere. Lots can go wrong. Stress is endemic. No one has much privacy, either from each other or from their overseers back home. They are hardened professionals, carefully selected and groomed for their positions, yet nevertheless hard-pressed at every turn. 

To survive, to complete the mission, and to provide data for future voyages, the crew are tied into active and passive monitoring networks. Every aspect of their days and nights is subject to careful analysis to test whether humans can survive in small groups for years or decades, packed into tiny spacecraft. Their monitors are shrinks, focused on keeping them healthy, attuned to the tasks at hand, adequately coping with the isolation of the voyage and the irritations of their neighbors. And the Mars colonists who will follow them are enhanced. “Lifehacks,” Ashby calls them. “All the members of the Ganesha crew had augmentations to make their life on Mars more productive and less painful.” So, too, the eventual spacefarers of “Mozart on the Kalahari”: human-plant symbiants designed to survive long-haul missions, far beyond the comforts of Earth. Lifehacks, augmentation, symbiosis: euphemisms for bodily genetic modifications, multispecies chimera, and neuro-cognitive upgrades given to crews of space missions to adapt their bodies to the unforgiving environments and experiences of space. The basic message: to tackle space is to be transformed. To be made an instrument capable of surviving there.

Yet the stories in this book all retain a human spirit that resists the transformation of people into mere cogs in the machinery of space exploration and exploitation. It’s one of the great strengths of science fiction. It reminds us that all kinds of people inhabit the future, not just those with a job to do. And that the futures we create for people must inevitably encompass the full richness of their lives as humans, far more than their ability to do that job. With typical human resilience, the people in these stories build community. They make meaning together.

The characters in these stories have lives and livelihoods, wants and desires, loves and hates. They fight with each other, and they fight with others. Technology doesn’t do unto them. They do unto each other using technologies. They innovate. They make. They make lives—and worlds—out of the stuff that scientists and engineers invent, the stuff they have lying around, and the stuff they can think up.

In science fiction, we can see into the worlds they’re making and ask what those worlds mean for real people. Is that a world worth living in? Is that a world that we should bring into being? We’re not being sold an advertisement. This is not an iPhone or an Apple Watch, magically transporting us into some awesome new lifestyle where everyone is fit, happy, and sublime. We’ve become too wary of the seductive power of narrative to believe in an uncomplicated utopia. Good science fiction tells it like it really is.

People who worry about the macroeconomics of space are right. All the numbers will ultimately have to add up. And that’s what makes the public sector so important. More than any other entity, the public sector can pour money into space exploration and colonization until it’s up and running on its own account. To match NASA’s $20 billion annual budget, one time, with an equivalent amount of private-sector investment, given typical bank loan expectations, you’d have to be able to generate an annual revenue stream of close to $4 billion per year. What exactly are you selling? Who’s buying? Where’s the value? And NASA gets to spend that $20 billion year after year after year. It’s a pittance in the scope of the U.S. federal budget.

Schroeder doesn’t say in “The Baker of Mars” how the giant colony ships that will carry people from Earth to Mars are being financed—or by whom. Nor does Elon Musk in his 2017 article in New Space, “Making Humans a Multi-Planetary Species,” describing his proposed effort to build a civilization on the Red Planet.^[2] Nominally, in Schroeder’s story, Myrna’s friends are going to get paid off by the people who buy Martian real estate. But who would want to buy such real estate, even if we could agree on a theory and practice of ownership? And why? Musk has the same problem. He envisions a $200 billion corporate project to create a city of a million people, if he can reduce the costs to get people there by a factor of 5 million from the cost of sending people to the Moon via the Apollo missions. Even at that price, however, where will the return on investment come from? There’s just something that doesn’t quite add up yet about the macroeconomy of settling Mars.

But the titular baker herself, Myrna, makes an enormous amount of sense. She creates value. She has a niche. She feeds Martian homesteaders who are drugged out on virtual reality interfaces, learning their rhythms and the Martian day-night cycle so as to have hot food ready, despite the differences in rotation speed between Earth and Mars, at just the right time. When her friends and customers forget to come eat, she delivers, selling other sundries, too. She carries messages for them, hosts their meetings, and solves their problems. She makes markets, wherever markets need making.

If the Mars colonization effort is a public project, then Myrna is its private partner.

Public-private partnerships and the commercialization of space are often seen as opportunities to carry out public projects using the efficiency and capability of the private sector. When the United States decided to build the atomic bomb, it quickly hired some of the biggest companies in the country to manage the actual sites of production. DuPont built the X-10 pile. Stone and Webster built the Y-12 uranium separation plant. Soon after the war, K-25 became the largest industrial plant on the planet.

But if you visit the museums of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and walk its streets, you’ll quickly learn that there were other private partners. The atomic campus of Oak Ridge wasn’t just a project. It was a town. And that town had commercial establishments. It had groceries, barbershops, restaurants, and movie theaters. It had Myrnas making the human world turn.

Myrna’s world—as bleak as it might seem—is one worth living in, it seems to me. If we are going to commercialize space, we should do so for people like Myrna. We should want people who bake bread for others, who take pride in doing so, and who make a living in the process. We should want people who create spaces for communal meals, deliver food to those who are too wrapped up in their own affairs to remember to eat, and create the microeconomies necessary for these things to happen.

To bloom in space, humanity will require the grounding “soil” of the local coffee shop, the local bar—but as the stories in this collection suggest, we’re going to have to work hard to create space economies that have commercial establishments in them. To create commercial establishments, you have to create all kinds of things: the kind of people who need commercial establishments, the kind of people that run them, and the material and financial markets that support both. That will not be easy. It will require visions of the future and of people’s lives and roles in those futures that differ markedly from those being pedaled in the current imaginings of space policy and the commercialization of space.

But Myrna is more than just an entrepreneur. She’s that pesky reminder that the future is for everyone: that we owe it to everyone to imagine them as part of the futures we envision, to imagine them as fully human, and to remember that their humanness is found in community. The diversity and health of the kind of enterprises that people like Myrna run seems to me a plausible indicator of the diversity and health of community—its thriving, if you will. She is an integral part of the community’s soul. If there’s a pub, or a diner, and people flock to it for the chance to catch up with their friends, to sing and dance, to share their sorrows and stresses—just to be a little less lonely and strung out—isn’t that a good thing?

Creating a human future in space where people live, work, and play, have families, raise their kids, run businesses, write novels and poetry, celebrate their gods, and dance amidst the stars—where they thrive—seems like a goal worthy of human striving and human enterprise. We will need Myrna and many others just like her—social entrepreneurs of the best kind—to make that happen. Let’s make sure we write them, and all of humanity, into our future plans.

Notes

^[1] “Deep Space Communications,” Office of the Chief Scientist and Chief Technologist, NASA, https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/research/research-topics-list/communications-computing-software/deep-space-communications. [back]

^[2] Elon Musk, “Making Humans an Interplanetary Species,” New Space 5, no. 2 (2017). [back]

High Hedonistic and Low Fatalistic

by Linda T. Elkins-Tanton

Snowman in Oryx and Crake. Case in Neuromancer. Theon Greyjoy in Game of Thrones, for goodness’ sake. Why is it so easy to write about disaster, and so hard to write about hope? 

Hopeful and optimistic stories can seem like fairy tales, and talking about them can be squirmily uncomfortable, as if one suddenly found oneself hawking snake oil. Writing about darkness and death can carry such realness, such gravitas. The Center for Science and the Imagination’s anthology Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future began to address the need for visions of the future that are intellectually and emotionally credible without reveling in catastrophe, and we’ve continued that work in this volume. We’re not doling out saccharine promises and we’re not covering the old stained sofa with chintz. We are trying to offer new, ambitious but achievable visions of a near future.

There are many possible futures for our society, for humankind, and for the Earth. We need compelling examples of futures we actually want, to inspire us in how to move forward. Humans in space is a part of all the good futures we are likely to be able to attain. In the long run, the arc of civilization and our irrepressible curiosity will inevitably impel us to explore the solar system and the stars beyond. But first we have to believe such futures are possible. And to act upon our hopes, we need to believe that, individually, we can make a difference. 

To make that individual connection possible, we need futures that are not just abstract, zoomed-out images of white guys from Central Casting saving the world for everyone else. We need images of people like us taking action to realize those futures. To build a future for everyone, we need to include everyone: we need heroes that reflect the full diversity of human experience. 

We need female protagonists who are not reduced to sex objects. More characters like Dr. Louise Banks, Amy Adams’ character from the film Arrival, who repeatedly ignores hierarchy and peer pressure to make the right decisions. We need strong protagonists of color, of all gender and sexual identities, drawn from all walks of life and communities of faith. We need every kind of person to be able to envision themselves in the future. 

In this way, the question of representation is really about participation: inviting everyone to imagine themselves in these futures. This parallels one of my gripes about the way science is often taught in high school and college, as a series of facts that needs to be memorized. If everything is already known (look at the thickness of that book! What else could be left unknown?), then what place in science is there for the student? If science was taught as a series of questions—which is truly what it is—then finding the next unanswered question would be easy, and there would be openings for anyone who is interested to participate.

This is a passion in my life, a set of concepts that have swept over all I do and colored every meeting and conversation. Drive education through the questions of the learner. Invite every person to participate in every endeavor. Recently I taught a class about Charles Darwin and the voyage of the Beagle. The students were fascinated by the fact that Darwin was not a great student, no genius, and had been brought along on the trip as a gentleman companion for the captain, so the captain would have someone to talk to. (That didn’t work out well—Darwin was incapacitated with seasickness almost the entire time he was on board.) 

Darwin had a great skill, though, and that was observation. He looked carefully at his world and he thought about it. Several students in the class were so inspired by this idea that they emailed me about it afterward. They could do that! They could use Darwin as an inspiration in their own lives, and look more closely at our amazing, mysterious universe in order to think more deeply about it. 

I would like every person on Earth to feel they have the capacity to think of something new and wonderful, that they have the agency to make a positive difference in their world, and that they have the knowledge to make progress solving open questions and problems. What could we accomplish if a larger proportion of us thought clearly about, and worked to create a positive future for, our species? 

That big question begs a more immediate one: how do we teach these skills? Surely not by enforcing passive listening and valuing only memorization and formulaic execution of exercises that are already well understood. We need to practice the skills of exploration in the classroom. We need to present open questions and practice answering them.

To make a difference you don’t needinherent genius. You need practice and drive and grit, not genetics. Being a strong leader requires, in the words of the psychological profile, “high hedonistic and low fatalistic.”^[1] Low fatalistic is the confidence that one’s actions can change the future—that the future is determined by our choices. High hedonistic describes those who believe in “the pursuit of happiness” and, in some cases, the drive to find ways to make things better. If there is no hope, there is no purpose in movement. And the greatest work is done with the energy that comes from hope and belief in the impact the work will have.

At Arizona State University, we try to teach and model these lessons. We could teach science and engineering, planets and stars and earthquakes and volcanoes, all day long, year in and year out, but without team-building, a vision for the future, and leadership, that knowledge is emptier and drier. Scientists are commonly taught that these competencies are “soft skills,” intrinsically less important than technical field expertise, and that our emotional response to our work is irrelevant (and even embarrassing). But every endeavor depends on human interaction, on trust, generosity, shared stories, and optimism. If we know how to work together better, ask and answer bigger questions, and build a positive future story, our efforts will go so much further. So we run workshops on teams and negotiation and interviews. We talk about implicit bias and equity. We work toward greater justice in the classroom and among our colleagues.

For years I have been convinced that civil behavior in teams—listening to each other’s ideas, conscious invitation to quiet members of the team to speak, and mannerly disagreement—makes for a good working environment, better research, and better outcomes. But these behaviors are not often spoken about or valued in academia and other research environments. 

My commitment to these ideas has recently been validated by NASA’s decision to approve a project that has been deeply informed by them. In January 2017, our NASA mission concept, Psyche, was selected for flight, after five years of preparation. The Psyche mission will explore a unique metal asteroid orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter, promising to give us unique insights into the building blocks of our solar system. One of the reasons we were selected is the high functioning of our team. Teams that listen to each other and treat each other as respected experts are more likely to discover and solve the flaws that might otherwise put a mission at risk. They are more likely to attract and keep the best talent. And they are much more likely to be, and stay, diverse. As a reward for our team culture and what it has enabled us to accomplish, we are now on our way to sending a robotic spacecraft to visit a metal world—the first metal body humankind has ever explored.

The future will always be a story, so we need stories that give everyone a voice. Our beliefs about what will happen next shape the way we behave now. The future we envision creates the present we are in. Let’s envision better.

Notes

^[1] Uta Sailer, Patricia Rosenberg, Ali Al Nima, Amelie Gamble, Tommy Gärling, Trevor Archer, and Danilo Garcia, “A Happier and Less Sinister Past, a More Hedonistic and Less Fatalistic Present and a More Structured Future: Time Perspective and Well-Being,” PeerJ 2, no. e303 (2014). [back]