Low Earth Orbit

Section I: Low Earth Orbit

“But the General Assembly can’t be happy that you’ve given the first concession to an old South African weapons manufacturer!”

Helmut shrugged. “Armscor has very little relation to its origins. It is just a name. When South Africa became Azania, the company moved its home offices to Australia, and then to Singapore. And now of course it has become very much more than an aerospace firm. It is a true transnational, one of the new tigers, with banks of its own, and controlling interest in about fifty of the old Fortune 500.”

“Fifty of them?” John said.

“Yes. And Armscor is one of the smallest of the transnationals, that is why we picked it. But it still has a bigger economy than any but the largest twenty countries. As the old multinationals coalesce into transnationals, you see, they really gather quite a bit of power, and they have influence in the General Assembly. When we give one a concession, some twenty or thirty countries profit by it, and get their opening on Mars. And for the rest of the countries, that serves as a precedent. And so pressure on us is reduced.”

—Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

Vanguard 2.0

by Carter Scholz

From the cupola, Sergei Sergeiivitch Ivashchenko looked down on Petersburg. It was night and the gloomy city sparkled. Around it curved the northern breast of the Earth, under a thin gauze of atmosphere.

Today would have been his father’s sixtieth birthday. Sergei père had been principal bassist for the St. Petersburg Symphony. He’d died 15 years ago, from multiple aggressive cancers. It happened to a lot of Russian men his age. He’d been a young teen at the time of Chernobyl, living in Kyiv. 

Vera, Sergei’s mother, was a beautiful young singer when she married his father. She promptly retired, at 23. Never a pleasant person, Vera grew more unpleasant as her looks faded. When his father got his diagnosis, she immediately filed for divorce, moved out, and took up with one of his colleagues in the woodwinds. She said, “I have to protect myself.” Sergei himself was 16, an only child.

Two months later his father was dead. Sergei filed for an extension on the apartment, and was turned down. He’d been playing the part of the rebellious punk nekulturny, which didn’t help. (His band was called Alyona Ivanovna, after Raskolnikov’s victim in Crime and Punishment.)

They sold his father’s instruments. Vera took most of the proceeds, but Sergei’s own share kept him going for a drunken while. He couch-surfed with friends for most of a year. He had scholarships and grants and no other options. So he straightened up, and blazed almost contemptuously through math, compsci, and astrodynamics. He had his kandidat nauk at 23. But there were no jobs, not in Russia, and competition in the EU and U.S. and India was fierce. 

So he switched tracks, took commercial astronaut training, and ended up in Uber’s NSLAM Division: Near Space Logistics and Asset Management. The work was menial—glorified trash collection and traffic management—but the pay was good, and he liked being off-Earth.

NSLAM employed about 20 astronauts, in shifts, to staff its two inflatable habitats. Apart from the Chinese and European space stations, theirs was the only ongoing human presence in orbital space. All told there were several hundred astronauts worldwide, working for nations or militaries or private industry, but few stayed in orbit.

Sergei was in the hab for three or four months at a time, then back on Earth for the same. Up here he sat in his cubby and remotely managed ion-thrust drones to deorbit space debris, or to refuel satellites. The drones would be out for weeks or months at a time on their various missions.

Once in a great while he left the hab in a spacecraft, to work on more complex projects. One such task, still ongoing, was dismantling the International Space Station. It was decommissioned in 2024 and sold to NSLAM in 2027. They were still salvaging parts—recycling some, selling some on eBay as memorabilia. He made a side income from that.

But crewed missions were rare, because they used so much fuel, and that was fine with Sergei. He liked being off-Earth but he didn’t like leaving the hab. There were too many ways to die in space. Debris, for one. NSLAM tracked one million objects one centimeter or larger. Smaller untracked objects numbered over a hundred million. And it was all moving up to 7 times as fast as a bullet, carrying 50 times the kinetic energy. A fleck of paint had put a divot the size of a golf ball in a Space Shuttle back in the day. The habs were made of dozens of layers of super-kevlar and foam, which flexed and absorbed small impacts, but they were still vulnerable to larger objects.

Then there were solar flares. There was usually sufficient warning, but unprotected astronauts had died. Even inside, he wasn’t crazy about the minimal shielding in the habs. During serious solar events, he’d seen flashes behind his closed eyelids. Often he felt like he was following his father to the same early grave.

Petersburg drifted out of view across the northern horizon as the hab orbited south. They’d be back in 90 minutes, but further west, as the Earth rotated under them.

Below, a meteor flashed over the blackness of the Baltic Sea. Nearer the Earth’s limb, over Finland, a green veil of aurora flickered. He’d see Izumi in Helsinki next week; his shift was almost done.

He swiveled and opened the cupola hatch. Cold LED light streamed in from the central shaft. He pushed gently to propel himself feet first down the shaft.

She’d hugged him goodbye, kissed him, and said:

Who will take care of your heart and soul?

He shrugged.

She pointed at him. You will. Promise me.

He’d promised, but he wasn’t sure he knew how. He could take care of himself, but that was mere survival. The self is not the soul. The soul is what you were as a child, until you learned to protect it, enclosing that fluttering, vulnerable moth in the fist of the self.

As he drifted past Boyle’s cubby he heard his name called. He grabbed a stanchion.

Sergei’s job title was orbital supervisor, which made him the most important person on the hab, responsible for the launch registry, collision avoidance alerts, and flight plans. But Boyle, the shift boss, was his superior. Competent enough, Boyle tended to see nothing beyond his position, so Sergei played his own to type: the stolid Ukie who kept to himself and loved his wode-ka. In truth Sergei hadn’t seen the Ukraine since his father moved them to Petersburg in 2010, and his drink was single malt. Talisker 18 Year, for preference.

What’s up, Geoff?

We’re going to have a visitor. A civilian.

Civilian? Why is he up?

He’s Gideon Pace.

Gideon Pace was Uber’s CEO. He was one of the world’s 10 or 20 newly minted trillionaires. The exact number changed daily with the markets, but they were still rare as unicorns, already persistent as myth. This tiny cohort controlled about 5 percent of the world’s wealth.

Uber ran a diverse portfolio of businesses on Earth. Package delivery, autonomous transport, data archived in DNA—all hugely profitable.

NSLAM was an indulgence, a pet project of Pace’s. He was a space nut who wanted a presence out here at any price. So far, Sergei knew, that presence had bled oceans of money, and not a few lives. But now governments were signing on to underwrite the core mission of cleaning up space debris—enough to have launched a second hab.

All four crew turned out to greet Pace and his pilot: Boyle, Sergei, Kiyoshi, and Sheila. Kiyoshi and Sheila had coupled a few weeks into the shift. Sergei liked Kiyoshi; he was a jazz fan, and had hipped Sergei to Kenny Barron. Sheila, the hab medic, was a petite Canadian blonde with chiseled features. She looked like Vera in her youth, which put Sergei off getting to know her. She’d cropped her hair close to keep it from floating in a halo around her head. Sergei himself shaved his; he hated their no-rinse shampoo.

Their visitor had a weasel’s face: dark straight hair in bangs, pinched cheeks, thin sloped nose, pointed dimpled chin, eyes slanting slightly upward. About Sergei’s age, but he looked younger. 

Fantastic! Fantastic! I’ve been in space before, but only suborbital. I had to see this for myself.

Welcome to NSLAM Hab One.

You must be Sergei. Chief Boyle tells me you’re the most experienced astronaut here.

He wasn’t looking quite at Sergei. Sergei guessed he was wearing augmented contacts with a headsup display, clocking Sergei’s vitals and recording everything.

Sergei dialed back his English to a cute and unthreatening level.

You gather data on me.

Of course.

Right now. In real time. What don’t you know already?

Ah, I see. Well … how you are. I don’t know that. How are you?

Sergei put on a blank look, but it didn’t approach the blankness of Pace’s.

Pace smiled thinly. It’s what humans do, Sergei.

How would you know? Sergei almost said, but didn’t. Pace’s headsup probably picked up the subvocalization; his smile twitched.

Boyle grabbed a stanchion. Let’s show you around.

I’ve got work, said Sergei.

Join us later, Sergei, said Pace. I brought some goodies from Earth.

He had indeed. The six of them gathered in what Boyle quaintly called the “mess hall,” a multifunction common space packed with gear on every surface—left, right, up, down. The “mess hall” housed some hydrator nozzles and a fold-down table with bungees and velcro to secure plates and feet. It was seldom used. They tended to dine separately.

Pace had brought Kobe beef tournedos in vacuum pouches and a bottle of wine. Sergei would have preferred fresh vegetables.

2013 Napa cabernet sauvignon, Pace said. Heitz Cellar, Martha’s Vineyard. A wine like this you don’t want to suck out of a bulb.

His pilot passed a case, and Pace drew out six glasses and an opener. As he applied the opener to the bottle he let the glasses float. Their cross-section was tear-shaped. 

An old NASA guy designed these glasses. The shape creates surface tension to hold the liquid in. Neat, huh?

Pace held one of the glasses while a trigger on the opener let compressed nitrogen into the bottle and forced wine out the spout. The wine sloshed but stayed put in the glass. He drifted glasses one by one to their recipients, lifted his own to his nose, let it twirl slowly while he inhaled. Sergei guessed he’d practiced all this in suborbital.

Enjoy. I want to thank you all for the incredible job you’re doing up here. NSLAM is now the most trusted actor in near-Earth space. It’s all because we stepped up to do something about the Kessler Effect, and you’ve all executed flawlessly.

Sergei wasn’t sure he believed in the Kessler Effect, that a cascade of debris could destroy satellites to produce more debris to destroy more, et cetera. Noisy disaster movies had been made about it, but if it was truly happening, it was proceeding so slowly that only spreadsheets detected it.

The oven chimed. They all bungeed in and began to eat. Sergei had to admit it was pretty good.

So let me tell you why I’m here. It’s not just to sightsee. I want Sergei to do me a favor.

Hm?

You know Vanguard 1?

No idea.

Launched by the U.S. in 1958. Still in orbit, though long defunct. It’s the oldest human thing in space.

And? 

I want it for my collection. I’d like you to steal it for me. He smiled at the others.

Why not use drone?

I don’t want to wait for a drone. I want to take it home with me tomorrow.

Sergei shrugged. Let me run numbers. He returned to his tournedos.

Pace was crazy, but that didn’t bother him. Everyone in the world was crazy, no exceptions. One managed one’s condition in more or less socially acceptable ways, according to one’s capacities and resources. He’d once blamed the situation on the overwhelming complexity of modernity, yadda yadda, but he’d come to believe the condition was ancient and fundamental.

His own way of coping involved these long months off-Earth. Pace’s, well, who could say. He knew Pace was a believer in the Singularity—the omega point at which machine intelligence was supposed to reach a critical mass and become self-sustaining and independent of humans. To Sergei that was bonus crazy. But Sergei had a parallel notion about what happened to money, when you put enough of it in one place. These guys were as separate from normal humanity, and as alien, as AIs were supposed to be. But they weren’t the intelligence: the money ran them.

The mission looked doable. A Hohmann Transfer would take a little over an hour to reach Vanguard’s orbit at its apogee. Changing orbital planes was, as always, the bitch; the delta-v budget for that alone was almost four kilometers per second each way. That’s why they almost never ran crewed missions like this.

Kestrel One was the only vehicle with enough thrust. It was scarily minimal, about three meters in diameter and four meters long. The forward half tapered to a blunt point. The rear half was for fuel. It would never have passed a design review at any national space agency. Among other shortcuts, it had no life support, relying on the astronaut’s spacesuit instead. Sergei figured the suit’s eight hours would be enough, but he’d take extra oxygen, in case. Kestrel was docked at the propellant depot orbiting behind them. He programmed it to dock with Port Two after fueling itself.

The tricky bit would be locating his tiny target once he got into its orbit. He had its orbital data, but in TLEs, two-line element sets. The format was archaic. Futile editorials periodically appeared in Orbital Debris News calling for an overhaul of the system, but it was too entrenched.

The TLEs were tailored to a general perturbation model that was accurate to a kilometer at best. He’d have to get in the neighborhood, scan with radar, then grab it. That’d take how long?

He wanted sunlight for that, so he adjusted his start time. Coming back, the two orbits weren’t so good for rendezvous. He’d have some stay time.

There were other, non-orbital considerations, but they weren’t really his. Kestrel would be picked up by ground radars, but the radars were almost all managed by NSLAM, and the company’s manifests were private. If anyone happened to ask what he’d been doing out there, which was unlikely, the company would make something up.

OK. What does this thing look like? How big?

I’ll show you. 

Pace popped the latches of a Pelican case. The released force spun the case in the air. Pace steadied himself against the wall and got hold of it. From die-cut black foam he drew a small metal sphere, then plucked six thin rods about half a meter long from the case and screwed them into the object’s threaded bushings. Finally he drew his hands away and let the small thing float between them. He tapped a vane and the model slowly spun, a silvery seedpod.

Very small.

Pace gazed past it and his eyes twitched. Six and a half inches in diameter, three and a half pounds. Khrushchev called it the grapefruit. It was the first of four Vanguards, sent mainly to test the launch vehicle. It’s the only one still in orbit, brave little guy. 

Why is this grapefruit so important to you?

You kidding? It’s historic.

How so?

Know anything about space law? Once upon a time, the sky was “free.” After aircraft came along, it was said that a nation “controlled” its “airspace.” Then satellites came along. They crossed all airspaces. There was no legal regime. The U.S. knew the Soviets would object to a military satellite, so they crafted Vanguard, a very public “scientific” mission with no military objectives. Except for establishing the precedent that space was beyond national boundaries. I want this little guy hanging in my office to remind me how elegant that strategy was.

There was a lot Sergei could have replied to that but he controlled himself, and said, I need to launch in 24 hours, when Vanguard is in best position relative to us.

Pace reached out and stopped the model’s slow spin. 

Take this with you. When you’ve got the real thing, insert this back into its orbit.

They were over Australia in daylight when Kiyoshi stuck his head in.

Dobroe utro, Sergei.

Ohayou gozaimasu, Yoshisan.

English was the lingua franca, but they’d each learned a few words of the other’s tongue as a formality, to show respect. It didn’t hurt that Sergei had already picked up some Japanese from Izumi.

Sheila and I need a flight plan to Hab Two. They’ve got some problem with their water recycler. We need to bring a spare.

Both of you?

Boyle says as long as I’m using fuel, Sheila should come along and give them a checkup. Here’s our launch window. 

Yoshi showed him a tablet.

OK, I’ll upload a flight plan.

Spasibo.

Douitashimashite.

Same time window as Sergei. Leaving Boyle and Pace and his pilot alone on the hab.

Sergei watched the hab dwindle against the ocean, positioned between Patagonia and the Antarctic Peninsula. He could see Pace’s vehicle, docked at Port One, surprisingly big, as big as the hab itself.

One kilometer out, he yawed and started the transfer burn. Thrust was about half a G. It felt good. How he would welcome gravity when he went down! And fresh air and blue skies. After four and a half minutes, he ended the burn as Kestrel passed over the Sahara.

He’d be over Petersburg in 15 minutes, this time in daylight. Summer was coming to the Northern Hemisphere. He’d relish the long days, the white nights, of Helsinki in July. Izumi and he had been together for almost two years, though he’d been in space most of that time. She was a few years older than him, had been married once, to a Finn. She worked in IT for a comprehensive school. She was also a singer, classical and cabaret. They’d met in Petersburg at a concert. Shostakovich string quartets. 

He didn’t know where it was going, the two of them, or where he was going, solo or not. He had a sometimes-piercing dread that one day soon she was going to lose patience with him. 

Hell, he was losing patience with himself. His smell in the spacesuit was rank. Water was too precious up here to use for washing, especially clothes. When they grew too foul, they were thrown out. He changed his socks and shorts about once a week, his shirt about once a month. They were past due. So was he. The self was too much with him.

He was now over Vladivostok. He’d gained almost 4,000 kilometers in altitude and the Earth was palpably smaller. South across the Sea of Japan was Kyoto, Izumi’s birthplace. She’d taken him there once, for a week. They visited Ryoanji temple one morning, arriving very early, before it opened, to avoid the tourists. It had rained in the night but the day was sunny, the road vacant. They hurried past an old woman on their way. Black birds stared at them from the roof of the locked gate. The old woman caught them up, and she looked to them in concern: What time is it? She was the gatekeeper, worried she was late.

Over the South Pacific, in darkness now, he burned to shift his orbital plane into Vanguard’s. Ten more minutes of welcome gravity, its force steadily increasing from half a G to over a G as the ship burned fuel and lost mass. When it ceased, he checked his bearings. He was now in Vanguard’s orbit.

But nothing was out there. Lots of nothing. More nothing, and more nothing. Then S-band radar bounced back from something about two kilometers ahead of him. He burned briefly into a lower orbit to phase up on it. At 100 meters’ separation, he burned back up to stationkeeping. There: a point of light drifting against the stars. After long, fussy minutes of edging up, he had it, closed the arm on it, and brought it into the bay. Mission time: 3 hours, 39 minutes.

It wasn’t tarnished or pitted, but the metal bore a slight patina, weathered by solar radiation and micrometeor abrasion. He cupped it in his gloved hand. It was that small. He felt a mild revulsion at the thought of handing this storied thing over to Pace.

But he secured it, then loaded the imposter into the bay and launched it. He checked his position against the hab’s, and ran both coordinates through the flight computer. He’d have to stay for 42 minutes until ship and hab were aligned. 

While he waited he played the second Shostakovich string quartet through his suit’s phones. It was what he’d been hearing when he first saw Izumi, two rows in front of him in the shadows of the concert hall. That elegant profile. He’d studied the shape of her left ear as she moved so slightly her head.

This quartet had been his father’s favorite. Sergei could see him seated at the north-facing window with his cello between his knees, practicing in the pale light, occasionally stopping to mark the score.

The final chords resounded, an angry but halfway resigned lament against the shortness of life, its futile complications, the thwarting of joy. 

Sergei checked the flight computer. It was time. He watched the countdown, then burned for two minutes as thrust climbed steadily to over two Gs. His heart labored. 

Another hour passed in silence as the ship followed its new trajectory to the lower hab orbit. The curvature of the Earth’s limb slowly flattened, and the Moon, half-full, rose above it. 

It stared at him and its glory pierced him. The intricate Sun-Moon-Earth system was best felt from here.

Something hit. 

Blyad!

The vehicle jolted. Or maybe it was him who jolted. He thought he’d heard the hit—a faint crack, something you might hear underwater.

For a moment the world was pure falling. A crowded emptiness. Millions of specks streaked through this vastness of orbit. Thoughts in a void of unmeaning. Subatomics in a space of forces. In that maelstrom, once in a great while, two specks collide: a neutron lodges in a nucleus, and changes its nature.

In the center of the window was a pock: an irregular, finely terraced crater about five centimeters across. Sunlight raked it into fine relief. The particle, whatever it was, had vaporized on impact. A little larger or a little faster and it would have continued straight through his visor.

He smelled the sharpness of fresh sweat over his stale miasma. At least he hadn’t shit himself.

The rest of the way back his eyes were on the radar. Not that he would see anything coming before it hit him. It was just magical thinking.

But as he approached the hab he did see something. Four bogeys, faint echoes, inconsistent returns, in parallel orbits.

Kiyoshi stopped by.

I heard. You okay?

Ah, yeah. You know. 

Kiyoshi did know. He’d almost run out of oxygen on an EVA. How are they on the other hab?

Kiyoshi frowned. Their water filter was fine. Sheila ran her tests. They’re all good.

Sergei shrugged.

Two pointless EVAs in one day. You could have been killed.

I’m fine. Arigatou gozaimasu.

Beregi sebya.

He thought that would be it. It wasn’t.

Sergei, my friend. May I come in?

In one hand Pace held two of the tear-shaped glasses. In the other was a bottle: Talisker 18 Year.

It wasn’t worth getting upset over, but it annoyed him. Pace didn’t need to parade his research.

I want to thank you. I heard you almost got centerpunched out there.

Sergei watched the glasses float while Pace scooped whiskey into them. Now he was almost angry. As far as he was concerned, it was over. What more did Pace want? He meant to keep his mouth shut, but he saw that sunlit pock in the glass again, heard that distant crack, felt himself jolt. He wanted to make Pace jolt.

You launched something while I was gone. You and Boyle. Four objects.

Pace looked at him with interest. Why yes. Yes we did. It was awesome.

Why send me away?

Pace regarded him carefully through the lenses of his headsup. What was he reading there? Sergei’s pulse, BP, skin temperature—what else was he tracking? Pace was like a windup toy that never ran down. It was tiring. Sergei didn’t want to be sitting here drinking with him. 

Well, I truly did want my Vanguard. But I also wanted my objects off the registry. If you were onboard, you would be the one to record them.

What are they?

Pace seemed to think about this.  

You know about the Outer Space Treaty. Bans nuclear weapons in outer space. I mean, this goddamn piece of paper is from 1967, but nations still take it seriously, or at least they have to seem to. But we’re a private company. That piece of paper means nothing to us.

United States company. Subject to U.S. jurisdiction.

Listen to the space lawyer! No no. They were launched into space by an LLC doing business in the Maldives—which is not a signatory to the treaty.

Maldives? Practically underwater.

We built a seawall and shored up our island.

Why not put objects into orbit direct from Earth? Why from space?

Maldives are still a UN member. They’d have to register my objects with the UN. The fucking UN! Isn’t that quaint?

They register your launch?

Sure, but that launch didn’t put the objects into orbit. Orbit was accomplished up here.

What are they?

Oh, so far, nothing. They’re platforms. 

Platforms for what?

Pace took a silence, looked troubled, but he was enjoying it. 

Let’s say that I worry about mankind. We had a close call with an asteroid a few years ago, you may remember. It’ll be back soon. We need assets out here to help us with that problem.

And so, you want to put on these platforms …

Nuclear weapons. What else has enough push for an asteroid?

Bad idea. Could end up with hundreds of small asteroids instead of one big one.

You know what would be a much worse idea? Doing nothing.

Why you?

Nobody else is doing it, that’s why.

Where you going to get nukes?

Oh, look, it doesn’t have to be nukes. Use giant lasers if you want, whatever. I’m offering these platforms to any nation that wants to contribute to the long-term survival of mankind. I’ve got interest at NASA and DoD.

No pushback?

NASA? They’ve already ceded Earth space. DoD? SecDef is ours, a former Uber VP. The Joint Chiefs are mostly on board, and for the whiners there’s always early retirement. I don’t need to own their weapons. They’d simply be under our management.

Hard to believe they give you control.

Pace tapped his glass into a slight spin. A small blob of whiskey escaped. He sucked it into his mouth, and swallowed. Smiled.

They let us manage their satellites. We’re a trusted actor. DoD would love a way to bypass the Outer Space Treaty. I offer us as a beard, that’s perfect for them. Get a few allies on board, even better.

At this point, Sergei knew it would be wise to shut up, finish his drink, say goodnight. He didn’t feel wise.

What is your long game?

Pace squinted at him. What makes you think I have a long game?

You are smart guy.

Sergei let the silence stretch. Pace was compelled to dominate a conversation, to fill up the social space. That went against the solitary, obsessive nature that Sergei recognized, but he saw how Pace had learned to deploy that nature tactically. Now he saw Pace shift out of the social space, back into his own mind. He squinted as he manipulated his headsup. It was like watching a lizard. 

You’ve read Max Weber? Pace said at last.

Some.

Pace’s eyes flickered as he quoted: “A state is a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force.”

So?

Here’s my long game: I want to redefine “human community” for the better. My method is to redefine who’s “legitimate.”

Yes? 

The nation-state as a form of political organization is recent. Treaty of Westphalia, 1648. There’s no reason it needs to persist. There are better alternatives.

Sergei gave him more silence. Pace shifted back into his public mode.

See, I’m big on dual use. Once these platforms are armed, they can also protect against dangers from below. I mean, look at the data. Nation-states have very bad metrics. You know that. So many wars, so many killed. So much property damage. We can do better. We will. We can build and manage the defense cloud.

Platforms are vulnerable.

I’m an optimist. These platforms are stealthy and maneuverable. Anyway, ASAT’s a non-starter, Kessler Effect and all, that’s unwritten but fundamental. It’s why we’re up here, am I right? Soon I’ll have memoranda of understanding with certain public and private actors, which will make any action against the platforms a lot more complicated. Let’s say that I foresee a regime in which it’s in everyone’s interest to leave them the hell alone.

Meanwhile they are traffic hazard.

Oh, they’ll be no trouble. The orbital elements are in your database. You have what you need to protect all our assets.

All our assets?

Pace held out his hands in a kind of embrace. 

Everything that’s up here under our management. To quote one of my heroes: They’re our assets now, and we’re not giving them back.

Why tell me? 

You’re smarter than you like to let on. There could be a place for you in our ground operations.

Sergei shrugged. Pace shook his head.

Hate to see expertise go to waste. Here’s my private email. Let me know if you’re interested.

That night, strapped in his sleeping bag after Pace and his pilot had departed the hab, Sergei thought it over.

In 2029, the asteroid Apophis had crossed Earth’s orbit. A scary close approach, closer than many geosynchronous satellites. The thing was 350 meters across. Not extinction-level, but many times Tunguska. A one-gigaton impact was nothing to sneeze at.

Sergei had been in space then, had watched it fly by. It brightened to third magnitude, moved through about 40 degrees of sky in an hour, faded, was gone. It was due back in 2036. Odds of impact were only a few in a million, but Sergei saw how useful that recent near miss and impending return could be to a system selling itself as asteroid defense. The nuclear option against asteroids made no sense, but politics made no sense. The meme of “protection” was more powerful than reason.

As to Pace’s longer game, he didn’t buy it for a couple of reasons. First, the U.S. would never hand over control of nukes. They’d invented them; they’d become the global hegemon with them, and more or less remained so because of them. But: that “more or less.” Pace was lying, but his lie had exposed a deeper truth that eroded Sergei’s faith that the U.S. was the U.S. of his imagination. 

Second, it made no strategic sense to station weapons in space. Launch costs were high, platforms vulnerable, delivery difficult. Earth-based systems were the better choice.

Unless the weapons were assembled in orbit. But why do that?

He remembered a job he’d done months ago, EVA, in person, servicing an orbital nanofactory which produced microscopic pellets—flecks of material embedded in zero-G-perfected beads of glass. Manifests identified the material as LiDT: lithium deuteride and tritium. Mildly radioactive. He’d been curious, but had forgotten about it once he was safely back.

Now he logged onto SIPRNet and searched classified scientific papers. Soon he found “Typical number of antiprotons necessary for fast ignition in LiDT.” Primary author: R. Fry, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The paper detailed the results of the first breakeven fusion reaction a few years back.

That was it, then. The Livermore Lab had worked on fusion since its founding, 80 years ago. Its founding purpose was nuclear weapons, and its Grail was a pure fusion weapon. This bomb could be small and light and still hugely destructive. Sergei was no nuclear scientist, but those pellets were clearly nuclear fuel. They were being produced in orbit; and so could bombs that used them.

What about delivery? Uber already had a thriving Earthside business in package delivery using small drones. Suppose you mounted a few dozen fusion bomblets on drones, packed those drones in a cheap capsule, dropped it from orbit, popped it open in the troposphere, where you could then MIRV the drones to individual targets. The only defense would be to destroy the capsule before it opened. If the capsule were small and stealthed, could it get through? He didn’t know. 

He could be wrong. Maybe they weren’t working on bombs. Maybe they wouldn’t succeed. Maybe it would take a long time. Maybe he should forget the whole thing.

Kiyoshi and Sheila’s alcove was near his. Sergei could hear the thumps and moans of their tangled bodies through the thin walls. He allowed himself to think of Izumi, of tracing his finger slowly along the arch of her foot, hearing the intake of her breath, taking her big toe in his mouth and hearing her gasp.

His heart and soul didn’t buy his maybes.

Two days later he was on the way back to Earth. They would touch down in Kazakhstan. Kiyoshi and Sheila were also ending their shifts, while Boyle stayed on. Sergei looked away from the couple, strapped in across from him, their hands intertwined.

It would make sense to take Pace’s offer. It had come wrapped in a veiled threat. Pace even had a point. Sergei had no sentiment for the nation-state. During World War II, Petersburg had been under siege for 900 days. Shostakovich had been there. The population went from 3.5 million to 600,000. In his lifetime, the endless Chechen wars. Was any of that right? 

Out the small window, sun slanted across a long wall of cumulonimbus over the coast of Venezuela. Somewhere below the clouds, American troops were liberating oilfields.

“The right thing.” Who could know what that was? Imagine all the damned souls who believed they had done the right thing. Who may in fact have done the right thing, and found themselves damned anyway.

And Sergei was ready, maybe, to finally stay below the clouds. To keep his feet on the ground, to have a normal life.

But that was mere survival. There was a Russian saying, vsyo normal’no, “everything is normal.” No matter how screwed up: “everything is normal.” Also that American saying: “the new normal.” Universal surveillance was the new normal. Resource wars were the new normal. Climate refugees by the millions were the new normal. And if Pace got his way, his executive monopoly of “legitimate” violence would be the new normal.

Sergei shut his eyes as the faint whistle of reentry grew to a thunder and the capsule juddered. Soon they’d be at four Gs. Pure falling, again, but now into the burning force of the still-living planet’s atmosphere. Still living for how much longer?

Izumi had said to him once: You think a lot, but you follow your heart. He wasn’t sure he did, but he was glad she thought so, or at least that she said she did. He let the memory of that gladness echo in him. Maybe it was time to be sure. 

Who will take care of your heart and soul?

The self is not the soul. The soul is what you were as a child, until you learned to protect it, enclosing that fluttering, vulnerable moth in the fist of the self.

Outside, the heatshield roared and burned. A firedrake of plasma, the capsule passed over Helsinki, Petersburg, Moscow, specks in a crowded emptiness. He opened his eyes.

He saw that both his fists were clenched tight. Very slowly he allowed his hands to open.

Reflections on the “Dual Uses” of Space Innovation

by G. Pascal Zachary

Space has always been an important spawning ground for dual-use technologies and the associated issues raised by attempts at targeted innovation: that of unintended consequences, or the specter that many innovators do not get what they want—and, embarrassingly, sometimes get what they don’t want. Because space exploration is on its face directed at otherworldly terrain, emerging technologies in this domain are often justified by non-utilitarian or, more broadly, indirect reasons. In short, the joys of discovery and the delights of exploration for its own sake often dominate debates over the pursuit of both space travel and research into foundational technologies. The expansiveness and idealism of the rhetoric of space exploration means that technologies developed in pursuit of those lofty goals are open to a broad range of interpretations and applications, both military and civilian.

One example that embodies the classic tensions in emerging space technologies lies at the center of Carter Scholz’s illuminating short story, “Vanguard 2.0,” about a privately conceived and funded attempt to retrieve the original Vanguard satellite. First launched by the U.S. Navy in 1958, the satellite continues to orbit the Earth, though communication with it ended in 1964. In a fascinating conceit, Scholz imagines the original Vanguard device, which was famously described as “the grapefruit satellite” by then–Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, being grabbed from space and replaced by a functionally-equivalent replica—all done in secret and merely so a wealthy space entrepreneur can personally possess the landmark artifact.

This engineering achievement—of grabbing the Vanguard and replacing it with a replica that behaves in the same way—demands tour de force writing by Scholz. He delivers beautifully on his space gambit, providing a story that exploits contemporary fears over the potential for a sizeable asteroid to strike Earth and cause a catastrophe. Scholz bakes into “Vanguard 2.0” a good deal of consternation and complexity arising from planned or imagined efforts to protect the planet against killer asteroids. Since the technologies created for humanitarian insurance against rogue asteroids resemble space-based weapons, these weapons could be turned against terrestrial targets, unless strong controls against this possibility are adopted. 

The challenges of managing the “dual-use” aspects of civilian technologies are not unique to space. Civilian nuclear energy remains problematic because of the role of reactors in providing essential fuel for nuclear weapons. The intense monitoring of civilian nuclear energy programs around the globe, notably those sponsored by the governments of Iran and North Korea, has received wide attention. And the difficulty of maintaining such scrutiny over long periods is well known, not least because of errors made by the U.S. government in characterizing Iraq’s nuclear programs under Saddam Hussein. That weapons of mass destruction can arise from civilian science and engineering remains the chief reason for interest in the riddles of “dual use” today. Not only do nuclear weapons of mass destruction continue to shadow the future of humanity, but a new set of bioengineering tools, which enable researchers to design novel organisms or reengineer existing organisms in menacing ways, raise additional concerns as to how that technology could be used to harm rather than help, potentially threatening all life on the planet. 

As Robert Rosner, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago, observes in his preface to a 2016 study of dual-use technologies, commissioned by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, “the dual nature of technological advances—capable of elevating humanity and unleashing destruction on it—long predates the total war and scientific breakthroughs of the twentieth century.”^[1] But the capacity of today’s dual-use technologies, Rosner adds, “drastically” exceeds the scale of mayhem introduced by bygone innovations such as the machine gun or even the chemical weapons that scarred thousands of combatants during the First World War.

The “trickle-down” character of technological innovation can make constructing durable remedies more challenging. “What is high precision today,” notes Rosner, “is run-of-the-mill tomorrow.”^[2] He adds: “capabilities once considered rare and extraordinary, and thus conducive to control, evolve to become the ordinary, slipping outside any possibility of enforceable regulation.”^[3]

The most salient contemporary example of “trickle-down” centers around a set of digital technologies—computers, the internet, strong cryptography, decentralized networks, the “dark web,” and even cyber-war. With deep roots in civilian technology—from supercomputers that simulated nuclear explosions to simple computer and video games to email to online commerce—“cyberwar” owed its early successes to freelance code writers, often flatteringly termed “hackers” by fans and critics alike. The path from hacking to attacking is surprisingly direct and another example, perhaps the most dramatic, of both dual-use and unintended consequences. 

A bit of history can shed light on the special nature of space-led technological advance. Exploration of the skies, by government, arose in the context of competition between the U.S. and Soviet Union over technological supremacy. Allies during the Second World War, each country deserved much credit for defeating the totalitarian regimes of Germany and Japan. But after the war’s end in August 1945, the U.S. and Soviet Union fell out over how to manage the postwar peace. By 1948, these two “superpowers” were arch geopolitical rivals, and nuclear weapons were the focus of their intense techno-scientific competition. By the mid-1950s, jet planes and guided missiles were the object of various “races.” When the Soviets launched their simple satellite Sputnik in 1957, a new “space race” erupted that threatened to overwhelm all else. 

Perhaps because restraining the spread of nuclear weapons on terra firma proved impossible for crucial years, achieving a practical ban on space-based weapons proved far easier. Indeed, from the earliest years of U.S.-Soviet technological competition, space was the place where high-minded humanists could trumpet the grand potential that techno-science harbored for bettering humanity. Rather than militarize space, then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower sought to give a civilian face to space exploration. The bias towards peaceful uses of space meant that concerns over dual use were mainly about the application of civilian technologies to military problems. The Star Wars program championed by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s foundered not so much on the impracticality of space-based laser weapons, but rather on the deep and abiding commitment, however rhetorical, to keep space off-limits for state-controlled weapons of mass destruction.^[4]

In the race to put a man on the moon, many accepted as appealing and persuasive the dual-use distinction as justification for pursuing broad security and social aims at the same time. Wide support, domestically and internationally, existed for refusing to openly pursue military objectives in space. Instead, President John F. Kennedy and his successor Lyndon B. Johnson chose to elevate the generative aspects of human ingenuity over darker impulses. This approach was seductive. The political appeal of demilitarizing space undercut to some degree the costs of proliferating military technologies on land. 

Yet the distinction was always something of a fiction, because of the vagaries of unintended consequences. Who actually could be sure that working on civilian applications would not help militarists in the future? How could choosing to work only on civilian science and engineering provide moral cover if the fruits of this labor ended up benefiting military technologies anyway? And what military project might not ultimately help civilians, so that even earnest weapons designers might argue that, someday, their inventions and insights might also save or enrich lives? Wernher von Braun and his work at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency exemplified the uncomfortable overlap between military and civilian agendas at the dawn of the Space Age. Perhaps the ambivalence felt by the character Sergei in Scholz’s “Vanguard 2.0” reflects the creeping awareness that whether one’s labors are officially on the behalf of civilian or military technologies matters little. In a world of uncertainty and serendipity, technologies can leapfrog across any boundaries, especially those seen in retrospect as arbitrary. Hence Sergei’s willingness to entertain the offer to assist the space tycoon Pace. No wonder Sergei thinks “he could be wrong” for caring about the dual-use problem. No wonder he can easily slide from concern to wondering, “Maybe he should forget the whole thing.”

Even if the brittleness of the dual-use distinction invites policy-makers to ultimately question its value, the core concern about the societal impact of promoting space exploration and its foundational techno-scientific knowledge and tools remains. Indeed, questions over these societal impacts should trump worries about dual use. I do not mean to say that the dual-use distinction is spurious, only that: whether we discard or retain the distinction, a gnarly set of problems persist regarding how public funds for innovation in space can support public goods.

These problems orbit around a concept called “targeting.” For policy-makers, targeting seems an obvious solution to the challenge of getting what one wants from spending on innovation. Just say you want “X” and then achieve it. The Apollo project was the classic case of targeting and remains a lodestar for managers of the techno-science enterprise. The pervasiveness of the term “moonshot” is no accident. Setting forth a specific goal, such as explicitly reaching the Moon, is the very definition (and origin) of the “moonshot.” Highly specific, drawing on well-understood technologies and a limited range of unknowns, the Apollo targeters struck a comfortable balance between too difficult and too easy. In a calibration reminiscent of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, NASA identified the sweet spot of space targets—and all Americans were rewarded by the seminal achievement of putting men on the Moon. 

Yet targets are notoriously difficult to craft, and the process of targeting difficult to manage. Ultimately, the concept is deceptively complicated. Consider the “war on cancer,” which arose with a vengeance in the aftermath of the Moon landings, and came to be criticized for being overly broad and practically impossible to operationalize. Today, concerns over climate change cause many to imagine targets that might either cool the planet or help humans adapt to warming. Yet either approach runs into immediate complexities over what targets to specify and which intermediate targets—we might think of these as stepping stones—should be pursued and in what order.

To be sure, talking “targets” highlights for the public alternatives to technological determinism, the view that the laws of physics and the dictates of pragmatic engineers shape the outcomes of techno-scientific enterprises. Increasingly politicians, civil society, corporate leaders, and the media talk about technologies they want rather than settling for what Technology (with a capital T) can give them. In this sense, the democratization of technological possibilities has co-evolved with the decline in relevance of the dual-use distinction. The U.S. government once held hegemonic sway in nearly every techno-scientific domain except those areas, such as nuclear weapons or engineering bio-weapons or pandemics, where entrepreneurial freedom obviously isn’t permissible or perhaps even sustainable. Now the federal government’s hegemony is gone, and a new approach to targeting for the public good must be constructed.^[5] 

Mounting targets, under any calculus, is worth the effort if only because targets are clever means of holding scientists and engineers to account. Targets help policy-makers and citizens alike chart progress towards appealing outcomes. In the coming era of wider democratic pathways to space travel and space technologies, publicly-generated targets—and accountability trajectories—promise to garner wide support and even shape the new politics of public innovation. 

And yet many areas of potential improvement in the human condition, whether on planet Earth or in infinite space, do not seem to lend themselves to targeting. Targeting seems least effective, and most costly, when goals are broad and poorly defined. Fuzzy targets, in short, should inspire anxiety. Such laudable far-reaching targets as democratizing a country ruled by a tyrant, or improving American primary education, or preventing terrorists from using social media, are inherently flawed expressions of homo targetus.  These goals and others like them require pushing down multiple paths, incorporating many specific targets, which may exponentially increase costs, complexity and chances of failure. 

In his classic 1977 essay The Moon and the Ghetto,the economist Richard R. Nelson examined the paradox of the modern American state, which could put men on the Moon but not desegregate schools, improve education, find a cure for cancer, or better equip parents to raise successful children.^[6] Long a leading analyst of the political economy of publicly funded research, Nelson brings valuable humility to the search for methods that can raise the odds of achieving desirable civilian goals through the concerted efforts of scientists and engineers. Neither the internal tensions within the dual-use paradigm nor the seeming ethical benefits of freedom from military imperatives and constraints are decisive here. In his 2011 essay “The Moon and the Ghetto Revisited,” Nelson identifies a different culprit:

Clearly the difficulties that societies are having in dealing effectively with some of these problems are due to the constraints associated with significant differences among citizen groups in their interests and the values they hold. However, a central argument of my book was that in many cases the constraints were not so much political as a consequence of the fact that, given existing knowledge, there were no clear paths to a solution. The heart of the problem was that society lacked the know-how to deal with it effectively. 

I would argue that this remains the case today.^[7]

Nelson’s concern about the centrality of knowledge to the innovation enterprise brings us full circle. Perhaps the very reason why imaginative scenarios about the future of space travel—in form, circumstance, and value—appear so compelling and useful is because fiction works best in filling critical gaps in human knowledge. It is in the gaps of our knowledge that the imagination flowers and alternative narratives thrive. While engaging with future scenarios, innovators must remain alive to the challenge of closing knowledge gaps—and in ways that insure that the inevitable spillovers from civilian to military, or military to civilian, are part of the anticipatory governance afforded the innovation project. Unintended consequences need not be wholly unanticipated. Space is a place of extraordinary promise, where the best in human impulses and aspirations can commingle with emerging technologies as yet dimly understood. Better understood are the risks of ignoring the lessons of the experience of dual-use technologies, whether in the skies or on the Earth.^[8] 

Notes

^[1] Robert Rosner, “Preface,” in Governance of Dual-Use Technologies: Theory and Practice, ed. Elisa D. Harris (Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2016), 1. [back]

^[2] Rosner, “Preface,” 1. [back]

^[3] Rosner, “Preface,” 1-2. [back]

^[4] For Star Wars to actually be implemented—not simply rendered feasible in the lab—the U.S. government would have had to abandon the principles established in the 1967 Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space (colloquially, the “Outer Space Treaty”) brokered by the United Nations, as well as the 1972 Treaty on the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems (the “ABM Treaty”) with the Soviet Union. For more on the legal and diplomatic effects of these two treaties, see Chayes, Handler Chayes, and Spitzer, “Space Weapons: The Legal Context.” The legal constraints, as well as the force of public opinion, made the development of Star Wars as a viable operational system impractical for Reagan and his administration. For a more recent analysis of how dual-use technologies might undermine the existing space treaties’ scope and effectiveness, see Faith, “The Future of Space: Trouble on the Final Frontier.” [back]

^[5] For more on the revolt against elite control over techno-science throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, see “The Port Huron Statement” published in 1962 by the Students for a Democratic Society, as well as Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” and Hughes, “Counterculture and Momentum.” [back]

^[6] Richard R. Nelson, The Moon and the Ghetto (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977). [back]

^[7] Richard R. Nelson, “The Moon and the Ghetto Revisited,” Science and Public Policy 38, no. 9 (2011): 681. [back]

^[8] For more information on dual-use technology, see John A. Alic, Lewis M. Branscomb, Harvey Brooks, Ashton B. Carter, and Gerald L. Epstein, Beyond Spinoff; Jay Stowsky, “The Dual-Use Dilemma”; and White House National Economic Council, National Security Council, and Office of Science and Technology Policy, Second to None. Each of these publications appears as an entry in the bibliography for this collection. [back]

Mozart on the Kalahari

by Steven Barnes

It took Michael “Meek” Prouder half an hour to magtube from Claremont to the Coachella Valley desert, near the Nestlé Reservoir entertainment pier. In this oasis of hot dogs, pinwheel fireworks, and whirlygigs, he could lounge and marinate himself, soak up rays as he listened to the music radiating from the dam wall, and sink under the rhythmic roar of artificial waves crashing against the artificial shore. He could walk out into the desert away from the city lights, far enough to gather cactus flowers or, when the sun died and the stars peeked out, to set up his telescope and watch the little matchstick structures floating there in orbit, simultaneously out of reach and close enough to touch.

 The Disney Observation Platform, where the uber-wealthy could vacation above them all, free from gravity, gazing at the stars with no shrouding clouds to mask their glory, close enough to the Moon to taste the cheese. 

A hundred thousand dollars a day, and cheap at the price. 

If his arms were just a little longer. Just a little. If he only had the time. But when he looked in the mirror, at his discolored hands and stained eyes, he knew that time was something he couldn’t afford.  

Seventeen-year-old Meek Prouder was dying, and it was his own damned fault. He could see the damage, and feel it too, a constant itching like ants marching through his veins.  

He could soothe that itch by covering his mocha skin in sand, and soaking in the day’s heat. There, bathed in warmth, he could escape the constant reminder of what he had become. There, he could close his eyes against the bright light of day and dream he was on the DOP. He could … but then he wouldn’t feel the sunlight on his skin, get that tingle, that sense that something good might trickle into a wasted life. He could just soak it in. 

But that feeling vanished like desert dew when he caught the magtube back west, as if every mile drained something from him, something that was alive in the greenhouse, or in the desert, but that trickled out of him in school, or shambling around the neighborhood like a brown bear in purple shades. 

And by the time the tube settled onto its rails at Claremont station, all of that warmth had evaporated. 

“Hey, Meek,” said Mrs. Adabezi as he walked the last row of the trailer park. “Hey, Meek,” Mr. Zhao nodded, pouring filtered piss on the little picket-rowed vegetable garden. The old man meant no harm. None of them did. But Meek walked on, paying no attention, until he was home. 

“How was the desert, Michael?” Grandpa Tyrone asked, after a look and a sniff at the bouquet of pink and orange cactus flowers sprouting from a table vase. He smiled as he set a plate stacked high with quinoa pancakes in front of Meek. He was really too weak to cook Meek’s brunch, but when Meek had tried to do his own cooking after Grandma died, the look on his grandfather’s weathered face broke his heart. It was as if Meek was telling him that he was good for nothing these days. Meek couldn’t take that last thing from a man with so little left to give. 

While he ate he told Grandpa of the things he’d seen and the people he’d met out in Palm Springs. Grandpa tried to look attentive but his smiles were slow to rise, and he seemed fatigued and ashen, as if he had eaten a bad apple. Or maybe had some of the same stuff that was killing Meek. Grandpa seemed to think the same about Meek, and asked: “You feeling okay?” 

“Fine.” 

“Let’s go out to the greenhouse,” Grandpa said, and after dishes were cleared and desserts dished into trays Meek wheeled him out. And there, inside the plastic flaps of the tent in the little square of yard they rented from the Zhaos, they sat and spoke of the old days. Grandpa was ancient enough to remember when the magtube was just built, when the government used that eminent domain thing to build what nobody had wanted. 

“What you wanna do, boy?” he asked. 

Meek took another big bite of dwarf-peach cobbler and pointed up. “Get up there,” he said. The Moon was high above them, visible through the transparent roof as a big old pie he could just eat up. 

Grandpa gummed his cobbler, thoughtful. 

“They say people like us don’t go up there,” he said. “That we’re trapped. That robots are taking all the jobs, and folks hate us for being dole babies.” A twinge of pain crossed the old man’s face. Once he’d earned his living by the sweat of his brow, supported a wife and grandson. But the L.A. Quake had broken the city’s finances and much of the infrastructure, and the corporations that swooped in to provide and maintain services made … let’s just say different decisions than had the general electorate. 

Declining tax base and virtual classrooms had crumbled the state’s college system. Then they brought in the drone gardeners … and early retirement had been the best of Grandpa’s very poor options. Still, he found the optimism to add, “But I still believe that if you use your mind, you can go anywhere you want.” 

And he meant it. Grandpa was the only one who didn’t laugh at Meek’s dreams. The last time Meek’s girlfriend Sonja had come to the greenhouse, she’d ooohed and aaahed at the only such facility she’d ever seen, eaten free peaches and pears and nuzzled him with honeyed breath, but just rolled her eyes when he’d told her about the Moon. Space wasn’t for them. Hell, shouldn’t be for anybody, the way she saw it. What good was it, when there weren’t enough jobs right here on Earth? 

“All kinds of things came out of people trying to get to space,” he’d said. 

“You wanna tell me about satellites again?” Sonja laughed. “Maybe cell phones and microchips, like Mickey says?” She squeaked her voice like the mouse in the cartoon they’d watched in assembly: “We need Space! We need to get to Pluto, Pluto!” 

He remembered that animation, an attempt to convince them that tax subsidies were not wasted on the Disney Observation Platforms hovering around the globe.  “That stuff is real,” he said, her kisses cooling as he did. “We need dreams even more.” She’d looked at him slyly, smoothing his hand up along her leg. “What are you dreamin’ now, boy?” 

“That there’s a way out,” Meek said. “Up there.” 

“What?” Her hand froze where it was. “We shippin’ all the broke-asses up there? Ain’t enough spaceships, Meek. You trippin’. The Meek ain’t gonna inherit the Earth.” They’d argued. She’d left. And that was the end of Them. 

As he often did, Meek poured all his emotion into his plants, thinking of nothing outside the plastic walls until Grandpa wheeled out with a covered dish of mac and cheese and homegrown broccoli. The old man turned his head to watch what Meek was doing. “Whatchu up to, boy?” 

“I want this orchid to dance with this dwarf orange tree, Gramps. Would sell great at the street fair.” 

“Did at that, boy.” He peered more closely at Meek’s workbench, with the centrifuge and the pipettes and the little racks and stain-wipes. The label said MONSANTO GENE KIT UNIVERSITY EDITION. 

Grandpa squinted. “Where you get that stuff?” 

“Traded for it,” Meek mumbled. 

His grandfather’s face tightened in response. “You steal that, boy?” 

His face burned. “Traded for it.”  

“From someone who stole it for you,” said Grandpa, being no fool. “I know you. Don’t you try to lie to me now. You traded what?” 

“Stuff I made,” he said, hating himself. A lie was a lie, even when hiding behind a half-truth. 

His grandfather scowled, but then began to laugh. “Boy, you ain’t got the sense God gave a gopher, but damned if you don’t straight-up remind me of your daddy.” 

Meek’s daddy. He’d been out of work too, wanted something to do. Meek had only been five years old when his daddy and a few friends tried to rob the OPEC ambassador, and gone to jail forever.

“Let’s not talk about it,” Meek said, and turned on the little box that gave them their entertainment. Meek liked the Wizard of Aaahs science show, and watched its lectures and demonstrations whenever he could wrest the set away from Gramps. Grandpa liked the news. Together they scanned through the dozens of news channels until Meek saw something that he liked: an image of Clarke Station. The Clavius-based Biology Lab was dedicated to recombinant DNA research, where escaping microbes were a quarter-million miles of insulating vacuum away from Earth. 

And then an image of the luxurious DOP, visible only as a skeletal matchbox through his telescope.

“No way,” Meek whispered. 

“—and on the twentieth anniversary of the establishment of Luna base, we announce the American Space Society’s first annual Science Contest. Five lucky students will receive five-year college scholarships to Yale-Gates and an all-expenses paid trip to the Disney Observation Platform  ….”

It reverberated in his head like a gong. 

Trip to the DOP! 

The contestants would be selected from a pool of science lottery winners, schools being gifted with tickets according to some arcane formula, distribution of said tickets to be determined by each school. Winners would have six weeks to create a project related in some way to human exploration of the solar system. 

Six weeks. Then all winners in the western states would gather, and compete for one of the five scholarships.

In the halls of school the next day, he ghosted through classes he was failing anyway, damaged eyes hidden behind his shades, tainted hands concealed in gloves, fear and despair numbing him until he could barely hear what was said to him by the students and teachers. 

Trip to the DOP! 

The words echoed in his head in gym class, a soundtrack to the thuds and grunts on the football field, the constant companion of the pain in his knees strangely absent. He was numbing out, he reckoned. Nerve damage, another symptom of the toxins that would take his life. Oh, he could take the hits, but knew that deep down his bones were breaking a little more every day. He had maybe a year. Possibly two. Certainly no more. 

Young, desperate, invincible, he had made drugs for the Ballers to supplement the money Grandpa made at the Pomona Street Market, and he knew the chemicals he’d used had poisoned him. “Make more of it,” they said to him. “We can make you rich.” 

 But it wasn’t enough money to make a damned bit of difference in the long run, and with the time bomb ticking in his blood there wasn’t a long run. Nothing much mattered any more, except the last dream his heart dared to hold. 

Meek sleepwalked home, his brain abuzz. 

“What you thinking about, boy?” Grandpa seemed more shrunken than usual, his face greenish in the reflected light. “What you doing over there in the back where I can’t get no more? Just because I can’t get around don’t mean that I don’t know what you doin’ back there!”

A locked toolshed abutted the greenhouse, through a vertical slit cut in the plastic. Meek spoke the password to the lock on the shed’s door, and it swung open. This was where he did his magic, where he grew the plants that had earned him the fast money, the “friends,” the things he’d traded for the Monsanto kit. It was stealing, no matter what he said. He knew it, Grandpa knew it. This was why he did it: orchids and dwarf orange trees and crossbreeds with no names. This was his place, the greenhouse within the greenhouse, the only place in this world he felt at home. But maybe there was another world. If he wasn’t almost out of time. 

The work sink in his secret place was a simple thing of beaten metal and thin porcelain. A hobgoblin glared back at him from the mirror. Ghoul’s eyes. A ghost without a grave, the sclera tinged green as mold on rotting cheese. 

No one knew him. No one would miss him, once Grandpa was gone, which would be soon, he knew. Soon. 

And then Meek would be gone too, as if he had never lived at all. 

Exactly one week later, Tyrone Prouder didn’t wake up. When the county men came to take him away, Meek refused to let go of his cold hand, or let the paramedics carry his body out of the house. That was his job. Grandpa’s body felt as brittle and hollow as a bag of dried leaves. Because Meek was more man than boy he was allowed to stay in the house, although relations came sniffing around and told him that they’d had “arrangements” with Grandpa Prouder, “understandings” that they would own the house after his death. 

“We’ll take care of you,” Aunt Emma from Bakersfield said. 

“And you can believe that,” said “Minister” Folks from Kansas, a cousin or great-uncle or something. Meek didn’t know, and didn’t care. 

He spent more and more time in the greenhouse. When he wasn’t deep in his cuttings, he was in the desert soaking in the sun and searching for the little cactus flowers his grandpa loved. He’d bring them back to the trailer because the house was still clotted with family who seemed to think that “wake” meant “move on in.” 

They told him to move into his grandfather’s room, but he preferred to let his fat uncle sleep in the postered bed. He, Meek, would dream with the plants, in the moist, warm air rich with their exhalations, where he dropped off into slumber almost as soon as he closed his eyes. 

And in dream he was one of them, a member of the only tribe that had ever welcomed him. He had roots, not legs, tendrils that descended to the center of the Earth. And a stalk that was as tall as the Mitsubishi orbital tether, a Superkevlar beanstalk beyond fairy-tale imaginings.  

A stalk reaching all the way to the golden DOP floating above them. In his dream he was one of the prize winners who reveled with the rich in that floating castle, from which all of Earth seemed but profit and loss and lands for corporate conquest. 

His dreams shifted and pulsed with color and life, sliding through time and space. Now he danced weightless as a dandelion spore on the wind. Now light-stepped among ancient craters, now slept in cryo borne on laser light sails and speeding to the stars. 

That Meek did not hear the laughter of the boys and girls in the lunchroom.  

He would find a way out. With whatever remained of him, of his life. He would leave this dusty ground behind. 

Pomona High had been allotted three tickets for entrance to the DOP competition, to be won by performance on the AAAS assessment test series. For the first time in months, Meek studied. Hard, like Grandpa had always begged him to do. Barely slept, so deeply buried in his books was he. And to the surprise of everyone in assembly (himself exuberantly included) was called to the podium and awarded second place. 

In his dreams that night, chrysanthemums waltzed for joy. 

The science fair was held in L.A.’s rebuilt downtown in Sony Coliseum’s main auditorium, crowded top to bottom with little cubicles in which students from across the state bolted, stapled, and glued up their booths and displays. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. There was no end to the mini-electromag drives and remote-control rockets and home-cobbled radio telescopes. So when the gaunt giant with the wheelbarrow came through the room people looked and wondered what was new beside ho-ho-ho, what he was doing and if he might be the janitor. 

Meek’s eye was caught by the booth a few desks over, one of the few that held something more than circuits and metal and shining glass. Beneath a banner reading Kathleen Chang: Microgravity-Resistant Plant Experiment, the elfin contestant tended busily to her charges, black hair swinging as she turned between her tables. 

 Her emerald eyes caught his as she explained what she was doing: “I constructed and used a Rotating Wall Vessel to test the effects of null gravity on plant germination and embryo gestation ….” A busy little crowd had sprouted around her, but it seemed that she spoke just to him. For the moment their eyes met, he thought he was in microgravity himself. Wanted to weightlessly float to Kathleen’s tiny world of spinning centrifuges and magnetic fields in which the diminutive seeds and creatures were endlessly falling, falling, falling, and learn what she was doing and how she was doing it. 

He could have watched her all day. But between the oscilloscopes and the SETI micro-dishes he knew that he had to get to his space and get set up, or the day would get away from him. 

While he set up his folding cardboard panels, plants, and scrolling viewslates, the visitors crept by, pretending to care about other things, and watched, and laughed, but Meek silently put everything in its place and stood in his best clothes and his best smile, and waited. The announced big star, Raymond “Wizard of Aaahs” Culpepper, bounced onto the stage and said how proud he was of each and every one of them, and what an honor it was to be here, and how proud their schools must be of them. He was all angular wit and golden charm, enough charisma to flash-fry eggs and brilliant in the brief Q&A that followed. Then to riotous applause he sauntered off the stage, and began to circulate around the room. 

Meek felt like a love-sick girl. He had never seen anyone who had been to high orbit, let alone the Moon itself. But The Wizard had, and he was a thing of wonder. 

I’ve watched you every day, Meek would say after shaking the man’s hand. 

I’ve studied every one of your books, he would tell the wonderful Wizard, who would clap him on the shoulder and say, you are a remarkable young man! We have experts who can heal you! Come with me …. 

And that gilded feeling lasted until the gaggle of judges arrived at his booth. The Wonderful Wizard of Aaahs was not among them. The other judges, stripped of stardust, studied his papers and plants, and prodded at the leaves, and talked to him with that slightly distant expression people have when you are merely the pause between the last one and the next one. 

His display said, “producing more bioavailable protein per cubic meter of soil” and “more oxygen conversion than any other Butterfly Palm,” and accompanied those grandiose claims with a long list of specifications. The men and the women looked at his numbers and checked his plants and sniffed their noses into the air, saying, “Your numbers are wrong, young man. It isn’t possible for you to have done this.” And they punched numbers on their comms and clucked sadly, as if they actually had shits to give. 

The kids around him didn’t laugh. He wished they had. Then he might have raged and broken something. Or someone. He felt the wetness drool from beneath his sunglasses, and, not wishing to be shamed, ran out of the hall and away from the contestants who might, in another, better world, have been friends and peers. 

He ran out into the alley, gawping and making goony-bird sounds in the early-evening gloom, trying not to throw up. Who are you? he whipped himself. Who are you to think there is an escape hatch? 

For others, perhaps, but not for his grandfather, or father, or him. Never for him. He would die and go into the ground without ever seeing stars that did not wink in contempt. Never feeling that divine sensation of floating free of a grasping Earth. And no one would care. 

Meek stripped off his gloves, tore off his shades, and sobbed out his dreams, only belatedly seeing the red glow in the night, smelling the sweet cigar smoke. He turned to see a man leaning against the walled shadows, watching him. 

Meek wiped his hand across his face, washing his cheeks with tears. The smoker watched, saying nothing. 

“What are you looking at, Mister?” Meek said, and knotted his fists into clubs. 

After a pause the man said, “I shouldn’t do this,” and hoisted his cigar emphatically. 

Dear God, he knew that voice. 

The smoking man tapped his cigar against the wall. “Shouldn’t do that, either.” He laughed. 

Meek trembled. Never had he been so close to stardust. 

“You had the protein and oxygen plants, right?” asked the Wizard. 

“I …” The Lord of Aaahs had noticed him? Meek sagged almost to his knees, then pushed himself back upright. “Yeah, that was me.” 

“How’d you do?” 

“Screwed up, man.” Meek’s voice dulled. “Had my numbers all wrong.” 

He looked up at the Wizard, trying to find some words, something that might have some power, but came up empty. It had taken all he had just to get him this far, and he could go no further. Time to slink back to Grandpa’s house, and the solitary cot between the rows. 

“What’s wrong with your eyes?” The Wizard asked. 

Meek flinched. He groped in the darkness, found his shades, and slipped them back on. Culpepper stepped closer. Meek felt transfixed. Trapped. Found out. Couldn’t move as Culpepper reached out and slipped off Meek’s shades, peered into his face like a man examining the map of an unknown country.

“I’m sick,” the boy said. 

“How do you feel?” Culpepper asked. 

The question didn’t make sense. He knew he was dying, and some part of him now yearned for oblivion. But … but …

He didn’t actually feel bad. Little appetite, yes, but … 

Culpepper asked Meek a few questions. The boy couldn’t remember answering them, so shocked was he to be having the conversation at all, but shook himself out of it when Culpepper took him by the hand and said, “Come with me,” and led him back into the hall. 

And to the crowd, which watched jostling and tittering and wondering what trouble had befallen his pitiful little cardboard kingdom. 

Culpepper called over the judges, and whispered to them. They looked at Meek’s numbers and his pages and to his plants again, and at the materials from which his project was constructed, and too late he realized that in his great fatigue he had left a piece of the box that said UNIVERSITY EDITION. 

“His grandfather was the groundskeeper at Schick-Mudd,” someone said. 

One of his classmates constructed her hand comm. “The serial number on that box matches a stolen gene kit.” 

The halls were roiled by a great disturbance, as the judges examined his equipment more carefully, and then another classmate at a neighboring booth called security. Panic descended like a red shroud. Meek turned and sprinted once again, past the pretty microgravity girl whose crowd gaped as he ran and ran, forgetting the Moon, forgetting the DOP, forgetting everything in his desperation to shed his broken dreams. Then the security guards caught him, and dragged him down like gravity as he screamed. 

“Michael Prouder,”the duty officer called, and Meek shifted his bulk from the shadowed corner of the holding cell. The other prisoners stared and moved away from him, afraid. The police didn’t seem to want to touch him. They wordlessly led him to the room where he imagined the public defender waited, some desperate night-school lawyer smelling of failure and bad coffee. 

But it wasn’t the public defender. 

It was The Wizard of Aaahs. 

“Look at me, Michael,” Culpepper said. Meek did not, staring down into his hands as if staring hard and long enough might help him vanish into the rivers and green valleys scriven thereon. 

“We took blood and urine samples when you came in, you know.” 

Yes, he knew. 

“Do you know why?” 

“The drugs,” Meek said, his own voice a dull roar. 

“The drugs. And we went to your house. The police found the things you’d stolen.” Culpepper’s voice was surprisingly gentle. 

Meek nodded. Half-truths were lies, and he was done with lies. 

“Why?” 

“Grandpa needed air,” Meek said, ashamed of how small his voice had become. “He was a smoker, like you. I could make it a little better for him.” 

“A little better,” the Wizard said. “So you stole the Monsanto kit. Who taught you how to use it?” 

“I learned,” he muttered. “M.I.T. online free school.” 

“You taught yourself using the free school? Your grades are …” Culpepper searched for a word. “You’re failing every class. You expect me to believe that?” 

“No,” Meek said. “I don’t expect shit. But it’s the truth.” 

The Wizard mulled that over. “The amount of increased food value was wrong,” he remarked. “The numbers were wrong.” 

Meek sighed. He knew. Everything in the world was wrong. Maybe that hadn’t always been true, but it was certainly true now. 

“The oxygen numbers were good, good enough to help your grandfather’s emphysema, but not better than what we already have. I’m sorry.” 

“Doesn’t matter,” Meek said. “Be dead soon. Just … just wanted to see space before I did.” 

Silence in that room, and dying dreams. If Meek had never spoken again, it would have been fine by him. He could be silent, as silent as a plant. He could just bury himself in the desert, and soak in the sun and … 

“When was the last time you ate?” 

“Not hungry,” Meek said. 

Culpepper pursed his lips. “How long have your eyes and hands been … like this?”

Meek looked at his hands. He didn’t think about it much, just covered it up with gloves and sunglasses. Mr. Cool. The light skin of his hands and the whites of his eyes were pale green.

“When was the last time you ate, Michael?” Culpepper asked again. 

“Day before yesterday.” 

“Spend a lot of time in the sun, don’t you?” 

Meek looked up. “Yeah, I guess.” 

“The desert?” 

It would be a long time before he saw the desert again. 

“And the beach,” he whispered. “I like the beach, too.” He loved it almost as much as the desert. But the ocean itself … he didn’t like its taste. It didn’t nurture him. 

Salt water was for tears.  

He wondered if he would ever cry again. 

“You created the little peach trees?” 

“Dwarfs,” Meek mumbled. “They’re called dwarfs.” 

Culpepper reached across the table, took Meek’s wrists. Meek was so surprised that he didn’t pull back. “How long have your palms, the whites of your eyes …” 

Been green? Long enough to know that he had poisoned himself, somehow. The mutagens, or the processing chemicals the Pomona Ballers needed him to use to extract essence from his plants. He had no one to blame but himself. Just hoped that something special, something good might happen, just once, before he stopped waking up. 

Culpepper drummed his fingers on the table then sat straight, as if he had come to a decision. “One of my philosophy teachers once said that if Mozart had been born a Kalahari Bushman, he’d have been known as the best drummer in his family.” 

Meek blinked. “What the hell does that mean?” 

“It means that great genius can be completely lost without the social context to nurture it. That can happen to an entire culture.” The Wizard leaned further forward, pushing at Meek’s space. “And sure as hell to a single boy. He used a stolen Monsanto gene kit to make dwarf fruit trees. Increase the oxygen production of one plant, the protein output of another.” He paused. “That’s not the part that most interests me. He thought he’s changed his plants. But they also changed him.” 

“The … plants?” Meek could barely breathe. 

“Yes. Something happened, Michael. Have you ever heard the term lateral gene transfer?” 

“Sure,” Meek scoffed. “Think I’m stupid?” 

“Not at all. Not even a bit. You bred those plants, but all organisms are more than their simple genetics. They are also symbiotes and parasites and their interactions with the natural environment, energy and material transfers. Something in those plants transferred to you and your grandfather. Whether through touch or ingestion, we just don’t know. Yet.” 

“Genetic change through ingestion?” 

The Wizard nodded. “Some organelles are thought to be microorganisms swallowed by prokaryotic cells, but got comfortable instead of digested.” He smiled.  “Developed a symbiotic relationship that got passed from generation to generation. According to the autopsy Tyrone Prouder should have been dead months ago. You kept him alive.” 

“That’s what I wanted. The plants …” an oddly bashful feeling flooded over him. Could he even say this to someone he didn’t know? He could barely talk about it with his Grandpa. And yet … there was something about this man …. 

“They talked to me.” 

“How?” 

“I dream about them.” 

Culpepper doodled on his notebook. “Do you remember the microgravity exhibit?” 

Meek nodded. 

“The truth is that we could be colonizing the asteroid belt, but humans who stay in space for more than a few years might not be able to come home.”  

Muscles atrophy. Negative calcium transport spins bones into glass. “Yeah, I heard that.” 

“Well, same things happen to plants that happen to animals. They don’t develop properly. That young Miss Chang … she bred vines with greater structural integrity, which can more easily resist the negative effects. It’s fascinating. Do you know the term ‘mycorrhizae’?” 

Hearing the challenge in his voice, Meek felt anger rise up, but also something else … pleasurable anticipation, like when someone hits a ball and it’s coming right to you and you can already feel the thunk in your glove. 

His mind opened, and he saw the answer as if the search page had opened in front of him. “Mycorrhizae are symbiotic relationships that form between plants and fungi.” 

“How does it work?” Culpepper leaned in, seemed almost to be holding his breath. 

Meek recited. “The fungi colonize a host plant’s root system. They … provide increased nutrient absorption or water.” 

“And do they get anything in return?” 

“Carbohydrates formed from photosynthesis.” 

“Highest marks,” Culpepper said. “Young Miss Chang used that principle to strengthen her plants. And that strength might well be a secret to resisting microgravity ….” His voice had become ruminative, and for a moment Meek saw someone new, the scientist beneath the showman. “But you did something that makes it even more potentially interesting.” 

Meek was riveted. “What’s that?” 

“If there is no way to compensate for microgravity, it may be necessary to modify human beings themselves for long-term colonization efforts. We’ve tried a number of animal approaches, without the success we want. But no one was able to do what you’ve done: the plant chloroplasts … well, they sort of talked to your mitochondria. Something happened within you that we’ve not been able to imitate with a billion-dollar lab. You actually photosynthesize, Michael. Not hugely, but enough that you crave sunlight and need less food. Something in your plants operated like a botanical nanocyte, carrying its genetic information into your cells. Amazing.” 

“I … just tinkered,” Meek whispered. 

“Tinkered.” Culpepper rolled the word around in his mouth. Shook his head in wonder. 

“Who won the contest?” Meek asked, voice breaking with hope.  

“Kid named Quentin Frost, from Eugene, Oregon. His experiment increased output of solar cells.” 

There it was. It was never going to happen for him, no matter what, he was—Culpepper studied him. “But there’s one thing more. Did you meet Kathleen Chang? The microgravity girl?” 

No, he hadn’t, and what did it matter? What did one loser have to say to another? 

“She couldn’t win, because she’s only got half the answer,” Culpepper said. “You have the other half. Someone like you could colonize the asteroid belt. Not people like me. But someone like you. You’re the future, Meek. And it’s possible that we are the past.” He paused, and then smiled. A good, warm smile. Like Grandpa’s. 

“So …” Meek said slowly. “No Disney Observation Platform …?” 

“No,” Culpepper grinned. “But have you ever heard of Clarke Station?” 

It was all a dream. His roots sinking to an impossible depth. His branches and leaves and tendrils extending an impossible reach. And the most beautiful dance he had ever known. Meek awoke in his cot, lying there among his verdant comrades, yawning and stretching and thinking of the wonderful fantasy he’d had. But it was a dream, even now sloughing away like sweet syrup.  

He’d had it before. Hoped he would never stop. It was too easy to forget the good things. 

He got up from the bed, trying to remember where he was. Who he was, what anything was. He should write the dreams down so he could remember them. Maybe he’d write a book. Someone might want to know about this, one day. 

When he reached, he dislodged the pen from its magnetic clip on the planter beside him. It spun into the air, bounced off the wall. He watched it bouncing between the rows of tomatoes and ferns, still not tired of the sight. He dressed without unsnapping his sleep cocoon, and then plucked the pen out of the air and pressed it to the paper of his leather-bound journal, the one that his grandfather had purchased and given to him for his birthday. Oh, Grandpa. If you could only see me now. See me in the observation room with the other tourists. 

He had not noticed, but Kathleen Chang had joined him in the observation room. She was even tinier than she’d appeared at the contest. Unlike the other passengers, she didn’t keep her distance. She smiled up at him. “Take off those sunglasses,” she commanded. 

“My eyes are green,” he said. 

“So are mine.” She smiled. The back of her hand brushed his.  

He slipped off his shades. So that’s the world, he thought, watching the Earth recede in infinitesimal stages. It isn’t all concrete and desert, I knew it wasn’t. It’s green. 

He shifted to watch the approach screen, the Moon growing every larger, a dream expanding to fill the space before him.Luna. Not dead after all. More alive every day. 

Like me. 

All either of us needed was the right dream.

Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Greg Bear for his encouragement and support in the development of “Mozart on the Kalahari.” He was a lifesaver. And additional thanks to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, for a lifetime of mentorship.

Past Empires and the Future of Colonization in Low Earth Orbit 

by William K. Storey

Science fiction stories that envision the future exploration and colonization of space are often grounded in domestic debates about the proper ordering of public and private interests. In Stephen Baxter’s Titan, published in 1997, a right-wing, fundamentalist Christian takeover of the United States undermines NASA’s efforts to locate life in our solar system, plainly a cautionary tale about the “culture wars.” And the long-lived Star Wars series began its life in the mid-1970s, shortly after the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, when political analysts wondered about the future of liberty in a world where China and the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union seemed to be robust and menacing. The stories in this volume are grounded in contemporary skepticism about politics as well as concern about public-private partnerships and for the future of Earth’s environment. These plausible fictions about the colonization of space resonate with U.S. and world history, in that they extend ideas about technology, business, and migration that are deeply rooted in our consciousness—including our fears. I like how the stories articulate just how bad things can get when government services go into freefall and corporations are allowed to run amok, dark possibilities that will certainly concern NASA and members of the public as they visualize a future for the space program. As Sheila Jasanoff observes in her book about science and democracy, Designs on Nature, public skepticism about science and modern politics has produced newfound anxiety about the capacity of the modern nation-state to provide order in the midst of new technological challenges.^[1]

Escaping to Space: Privatization, Inequality, and Pessimism 

As the line between corporate influence and public policy continues to blur, there are strong reasons to explore, in science fiction, what it would be like for capitalists to be in charge of space exploration. The most provocative thing about “Vanguard 2.0” by Carter Scholz is how it imagines a future for Low Earth Orbit that would be dominated by grasping high-tech capitalists. The propulsive capitalist in Scholz’s story, Gideon Pace, fueled by Kobe beef and California cabernet, is on a mission to collect a historical artifact, the Vanguard satellite, still orbiting the Earth after decades of neglect. Those of us who are historically conscious are horrified at the thought of a private entrepreneur collecting historical artifacts for himself, rather than sharing them with the public. When Pace grasps the satellite, the author makes a larger point: “Know anything about space law?” Pace asks Sergei. He continues, “Once upon a time the sky was ‘free’” and “space was beyond national boundaries. I want this little guy hanging in my office to remind me how elegant that strategy was.” This warning—about how new technologies influence the trajectory of the new laws—is consistent with most understandings from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). Technologies pose benefits and risks that societies regulate, in such a way that the law may be said to co-evolve with technologies. Automobiles became safer—with seat belts, airbags, and mandatory seat-belt laws surrounding them—even as the safer cars became faster and more agile. And the development of nuclear weapons ushered in an era of international rulemaking through treaties.

Sadly, the future domination of Low Earth Orbit by grasping capitalists is all too easy to imagine. We are already seeing national space programs like NASA scaling back, while private entrepreneurs like Richard Branson scheme about the future of private space travel and of modifications to the Earth’s atmosphere. With privatization comes perils, as Scholz warns us. The story is useful for NASA and its publics, in that Scholz articulates a dystopian scenario that is easy to imagine in the absence of NASA. In his view (and mine) space is a commons for humanity that ought to be developed by public organizations, not by uncultured corporate buccaneers.

Dystopian themes provide the background for “Mozart on the Kalahari,” an unusual and suspenseful story by Steven Barnes. The story’s main character, a teenager named Meek, yearns to travel in space, in part to escape a land that has become dreadful. The “L.A. Quake” has apparently ravaged things quite badly, to the point where city services have been turned over to greedy corporations. The corporations employ robots, while ordinary people struggle to find decent jobs. But Grandfather Prouder’s optimism pushes Meek forward: “I still believe that if you use your mind, you can go anywhere you want.” This sounds like a bit of a cliché, but in fact, as the story progresses, we learn that Meek’s grandfather is right. Meek enters a national science competition. Under scrutiny, the validity of his project appears less and less likely—his calculations are wrong and he is revealed to be stealing things and using drugs. Yet after Meek flees the contest in shame, the observations of Culpepper, the M.C. of the competition, bring to notice Meek’s ability to photosynthesize. The story raises a fascinating question. Science fiction writers have created many cyborg characters—technologically modified humans—ranging from Darth Vader in Star Wars to the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Technically speaking, a cyborg can be any technologically dependent human. Some have argued that even people with pacemakers or cochlear implants can be considered to be cyborgs. Be that as it may, STS scholars have been fascinated with cyborgs. Do cyborgs have the same rights and responsibilities as non-cyborgs? Do cyborgs highlight, better than anything else, the interdependency of people and technology? Does an Olympic “blade runner” compete following the same rules? In this story, we do not have a human-technology cyborg, but something else, a kind of plant-dependent human. The story’s penultimate scene is more reminiscent of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book I, when Daphne escapes the unwanted advances of Apollo, the sun god, by becoming transformed into a tree. Here is the key moment of the poem, in the translation by Samuel Garth and John Dryden:

A filmy rind about her body grows;

Her hair to leaves, her arms extend to boughs:

The nymph is all into a lawrel gone;

The smoothness of her skin remains alone.^[2]

The transformation of Daphne into the laurel tree freezes her, but the hybrid plant-dreamer, Meek, has more potential for the future. 

The story raises multiple future possibilities. Will plant-people be able to have progeny? Will their intelligence or strength be enhanced or diminished? Will Meek and Kathleen be able to remain independent, especially if they become superior, in some ways, to people? Will governments and corporations take control of them, their progeny, even their DNA? So many questions are left open by this story.

Both stories contrast a bleak future on Earth and the possibilities of exploring in Low Earth Orbit. With things going badly on Earth, I wondered how anything was being produced or paid for by these large corporations that are said to be running things. I also wondered how a government or corporation could raise enough revenue to support a space program, given the state of things. In fact, both stories point up the difference between our own era in U.S. history, with its budget-conscious, polarized government, and the era of the space program’s founding, when U.S. citizens in the midst of the Cold War felt confidence in the state’s ability to solve problems by spending taxpayer resources on major technological projects—even if those projects may have eroded democratic practices in favor of technocracy, as Walter McDougall argues in his classic history of the early space program, The Heavens and the Earth.^[3] The stories by Scholz and Barnes highlight our own era’s pessimism, in which collective optimism has been replaced by skepticism of authority, be it state or corporate. The choices of the authors reflect today’s national consciousness.

Colonization and Governance in History and in Low Earth Orbit

The U.S. has never been entirely comfortable with colonizing or dominating other societies. While it did dominate other societies since its origins in the ill-treatment of Native Americans, the U.S. aspires in the direction of egalitarianism. The enslavement of Africans was countered by abolitionists. The wars with Mexico and Spain produced demonstrations of conscience, like Henry David Thoreau’s, and biting satire, like Mark Twain’s. The Vietnam War tore the country apart. The skepticism of some U.S. citizens about Manifest Destiny has to do with our origins in an anticolonial revolt as well as the egalitarianism of our political culture, a tendency that was first described by Alexis de Tocqueville, who published Democracy in America in 1835.^[4] The stories by Barnes and Scholz chart a course for space colonization, focusing on Low Earth Orbit. As a historian of colonization, I am struck by the presence of a number of historical issues in these stories. These choices reflect the times that we live in and the aspirations that we have, rather than being problems that are somehow inherent in the stories.

One key element of colonization has always been migration, from Neolithic times to the present. Migration depends on a number of different factors—“push” factors and “pull” factors—as well as individual and group calculations about opportunity costs. How bad is it at home? How challenging is the process of migration? How good is the new area of settlement? On the subject of migration, both of our stories suggest a bleak future. One author is solving the problem of migration by imagining human characters who begin to take on the characteristics of plants. The other shows the domineering presence of a rogue capitalist, working with technically trained satellite operators. Ultimately it appears that very few Earthlings will participate in this migration because the opportunity costs appear to be astronomically high. The Gideon Paces of the world may be able to afford movement in space, but the billions of laid-off grandfathers at home will wither and die. If the future of humanity is to depend on the colonization of space, then we either need to develop the technologies to sustain mass travel and migration, or we had better pay closer attention to the ruination of our own planet and societies. NASA can figure in solutions to both problems, which are closely connected.

Domestic transformations such as these are often related to the conquest and colonization of new territories, as Jane Burbank and Fred Cooper maintain in Empires in World History.^[5] Imperial conquests, though based in the desire for domination, enrich the home countries with new commodities, ideas, and migrants. Empires bring resistance, too, and in the case of the British, French, and U.S. Empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the credibility of cherished domestic freedoms was called into question. Even so, in world history, imperial governance has been the most widespread and stable form of governance, ranging from the empires of Rome and Han China to the European empires of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Modern nation-states are only a recent development and they, too, have been susceptible to engaging in their own empire-building. The stories in this anthology suggest the emergence of a significant corporate role in governance, but from a historical standpoint this is not new. There are many examples of colonial domination by companies, such as the British East India Company, founded in 1600. For a century and a half, it was mainly concerned with securing its trading posts, but during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it came to govern much of India. The Dutch East India Company established European settlement in Southern Africa in 1652, laying the groundwork for many subsequent racial problems. In both places, direct rule from home was thought to be prohibitively costly, but company rule was gradually found to be less than public-spirited. The British East India Company famously lost its mandate in the wake of the 1857 rebellion of its own soldiers, while the Dutch East India Company was replaced in Southern Africa by direct British rule during the Napoleonic Wars.

Today these company-states might be called public-private partnerships. Entrepreneurs from the companies sought to undermine indigenous people and rulers who resisted their inroads. The companies created their own governments in overseas territories, with the sanction of their home governments through charters. The home governments, in turn, reaped the benefits of having friendly governments in overseas territories, while administration by chartered companies helped home governments to avoid the costs of administration. Unfortunately for those who advocate such public-private partnerships today, the history of colonialism contains famous examples of ways that such arrangements have tended to produce clashes between public values and private actions. The companies were set up to make money, not only for the shareholders, but also for their home countries. Making money came first, the common good came second. Chartered companies tended to become controversial when they started to become costly in terms of money and good will.

The British East India Company began with trading posts in India’s port cities. As the company became rich and influential over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it expanded its territory to a great extent. The idea that underlaid the company’s expansion was mercantilism. Raw, unrefined produce would be bought in India, then shipped to Britain, where manufacturers turned it into goods that could be sold at home or even sold in India. The model worked to some extent, but there were problems inherent in this public-private partnership. Such arrangements would work best as monopolies, which were naturally resisted by competing merchants, as John Darwin points out in his magisterial survey, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain. Darwin also explains that at home, imports were bought with gold and silver, which then flowed back to India and into the pockets of company traders—in other words, the company profited not only at the expense of Indian competitors, but also at the expense of British consumers.^[6] Company policies became unpopular in India, too. Cotton exports led to the decline of indigenous cloth manufacturing. Opium cultivation by Indian landlords tended to throw peasants off their customary lands and reduce them to rural proletarians. Even Niall Ferguson, a historian who is sympathetic to Britain’s imperial projects, points out in his book Empire that tension between the East India Company’s profit-seeking leaders, on the one hand, and Indian princes and peoples on the other, had produced a state of near-perpetual warfare on the subcontinent.^[7] The company’s propensity to annex territory and to antagonize Indians led to the great rebellion of 1857, the abolition of the company, and direct rule from Britain.

In fact, public-private partnerships in the form of chartered colonial companies helped to produce some of the worst cases of misrule in modern history. The most notorious example took place in the late nineteenth-century Congo. The constitutional monarch of Belgium, King Leopold II, became interested in trade in the Congo Basin. In the 1870s, he bought large financial positions in several companies that traded in Congo, but he failed to persuade the Belgian parliament to create a formal colony there. Under pressure from the British, French, and Germans, who were formalizing their own colonial boundaries in Africa, Leopold founded his own colony, the Congo Independent State. Leopold claimed that his private colony had a humanitarian mission, yet the colony, which was recognized by all the European powers, became a horror-show of colonial exploitation. To fill Leopold’s pockets, many of the people of the Congo were sent out as gang laborers to collect rubber and other raw materials. Failure to meet company goals resulted in torture, maiming, and killing. The best-known history of imperialism in the Congo, Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild, quotes a Swedish missionary who recorded the following song from desperate Congolese people: “We are tired of living under this tyranny. / We cannot endure that our women and children are taken away / And dealt with by the white savages. / We shall make war …. / We know that we shall die, but we want to die. / We want to die.”^[8] When the brutality of Leopold’s public-private partnership was exposed by journalists, the Belgian government was shamed into taking over the colony and ruling it directly from Brussels.

Leopold’s actions in the Congo were much worse than any of those described in this anthology. In their stories, Barnes and Scholz do successfully raise the issue of the problems associated with public-private partnerships, most particularly those involving the development of key technologies. Under company rule or imperial rule, the technologies most closely associated with colonization develop in close conjunction with new power relations. In British India, as Daniel Headrick has written in The Tentacles of Progress, the introduction of railroads enhanced imperial control, while opening opportunities for both imperialist and indigenous businesses.^[9] In South Africa, the introduction of technologies for mining and processing minerals such as diamonds and gold increased the demand for migrant labor and its regulation through racial segregation. In A History of South Africa, Leonard Thompson argues that in the late nineteenth century, the coming together of racism and capitalism was thought by many intellectuals to be generating the rapid acceleration of imperialism, a timely warning for a NASA volume about future colonization that is being produced in a year when it is still necessary for some to say that “Black Lives Matter.”^[10] 

It should be noted that in some cases, exploration can lead to imperial dominance, which in turn sometimes leads to colonization and sometimes does not. Plans for colonization were occasionally thought out well in advance, as they appear to have been thought out by Gideon Pace in Scholz’s story, “Vanguard 2.0.” The colonization of New England and New Zealand by farmers was partly planned, while Australia was initially intended to be settled by convicts. In all cases of colonial settlement, though, colonists were attracted by unplanned discoveries, such as gold in California, Australia, and South Africa. In many cases, though, settlement never occurred. Disease environments were sometimes hostile to Europeans, as was the case in West Africa, while a combination of climate, disease, and lack of available land made India unattractive for colonial settlement. Colonization follows domination only when the opportunities outweigh the costs. When opportunities are too costly, more purely extractive imperialism may be preferable. Plans for the future exploration (or domination) of space will face similar limits, whether or not the projects are run by private or public institutions. Natural circumstances will shape the characteristics of dominion. And much will be left unplanned. 

Rethinking Governance in a Spacefaring Age

Whether planned or not, one of the key characteristics of imperial history is the evolving coproduction of technology, colonization, and power. This process is nicely articulated by Scholz in “Vanguard 2.0.” The Earth is in a downward spiral. “Universal surveillance was the new normal. Resource wars were the new normal. Climate refugees by the millions were the new normal.” The story’s main protagonist, Sergei, imagines that the villain, Gideon Pace, may be working on developing nuclear fusion weapons, manufactured in space from pellets of lithium deuteride and tritium. Pace brags about how his partners now play a role in the U.S. Department of Defense, while he also wants to redefine the state. He chillingly quotes Max Weber, who wrote that the “state is a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force,”^[11] while speculating how he will reinvent the state, moving it forward from antiquated notions about nationhood.

European colonizers rethought governance, too, and presented the people of the Americas, Africa, and Asia with a range of choices. They could accept European domination or resist it, in ways large and small. Association and assimilation were options, too, that provided new ways to organize resistance. It is significant to note that key figures of resistance, such as Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, were attorneys with a traditional British education, who nonetheless remained comfortable in their home traditions. In contemplating a future for the colonization of space, NASA will be keen to address issues of equality, as it is a bedrock value in the political culture of the United States. In previous centuries, colonization tended to amplify inequality, not equality, in two significant ways. On the one hand, the initial stages of colonization were led by hierarchical organizations, either businesses or armed services. This historical example has often been followed by science fiction authors: it is no coincidence that the name of Star Trek’s Captain James Kirk bears some resemblance to the British Empire’s famous naval officer and explorer, Captain James Cook. The armed services get the job of exploration done but they are hardly theaters of equality. The captain’s authority is complete, a situation attributable to the necessities of navigation as well as tradition. This authority has a special, public-spirited nature. As Greg Dening writes in his account of a famous mutiny, Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language, there is a special authority that comes with an officer’s commission from the king’s government: “The Commission, direct from the Crown, in some way displaced the person commissioned, leaving much more room for a sense of public altruism and its rhetoric.”^[12] The challenge to future space exploration will be to make certain that the martial values associated with initial exploration do not become the permanent values of colonial settlements, which should instead adopt the values of the broader public.

The future of the nation and the world are linked, in these stories, to decisions about colonization. “Vanguard 2.0” ends with Sergei reentering the Earth’s atmosphere, wondering about a future in which the Earth and space are dominated by the likes of Pace. By contrast, Barnes ends his story, “Mozart on the Kalahari,” on a more optimistic note. Culpepper, a mysterious scout for talent, reviews the flawed science project of the main character, Meek, as well as the project of another student, the “microgravity girl” Kathleen. Culpepper sees the potential behind the flaws and makes Meek and Kathleen part of a future project to colonize Low Earth Orbit. The new biomedical technology that gives Meek the capacity for photosynthesis also raises prospects for a better future.

The stories describe future space travel as a form of escape from a dysfunctional Earth. This sort of plotline reveals a degree of pessimism about the present world and its ills, yet it resonates with U.S. history itself, which, at its bedrock, is a story of migration and colonization. The New England colonies were founded by Protestant dissenters who left home believing that their High-Church Anglican countrymen were on a direct pathway to Hell. The colonization of New England involved social and technical challenges, such as farming in new, adverse circumstances, yet in the midst of those challenges, settlers were able to articulate new visions, in the Mayflower Compact, or in John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill,” that brought together old English values with the environment of the New World. By contrast, in Virginia, the initial project of colonization was undertaken by grasping businessmen, keen to find gold and grow tobacco. Decades of boom and bust, together with slavery and starvation, were eventually stabilized by control from London and by the establishment of a somewhat representative government. Even the grim world envisioned by the likes of Gideon Pace has the possibility to yield to political and technological stability, at least according to the familiar narratives of U.S. history.

If NASA has a role in the future colonization of Low Earth Orbit, it is not only to promote and develop technologies; it is to articulate a vision of what that colonization might look like. The stakes are high. One can only hope that the Earth’s health will be greater than the authors of these stories suggest. The enterprise of colonization has often shaped the values and identities of the home country, intensifying ideas about national identity. Nationalism and colonization are inextricably linked. For example, it is hard to imagine a national identity for the United States without the concept of a “frontier,” the expanding zone of U.S. influence in the West that was once characterized as the country’s “manifest destiny.” The colonization of the western U.S. shaped our country profoundly, and the choices we make about the “final frontier” of space may well define us in the coming century. 

Notes

^[1] Sheila Jasanoff, Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). [back]

^[2] Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Samuel Garth, John Dryden, et al., The Internet Classics Archive, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009, http://classics.mit.edu/Ovid/metam.html. [back]

^[3] Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, 1988). [back]

^[4] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (London: Saunders and Otley, 1835; New York: Harper Perennial, 2006). [back]

^[5] Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). [back]

^[6] John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London: Bloomsbury, 2012),20-22. [back]

^[7] Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 50. [back]

^[8] Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 172-173. [back]

^[9] Daniel Headrick, The Tentacles of Power: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). [back]

^[10] Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa, 4th ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). [back]

^[11] Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 78. [back]

^[12] Greg Dening, Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power, and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 21. [back]

Expanding Our Solution Space: How We Can Build an Inclusive Future

by Deji Bryce Olukotun

In early 2016, a 14-year-old email scam resurfaced about an astronaut from Nigeria who was lost in space. The premise of the scam, which had been updated for Facebook, was that the astronaut had been left behind on a secret Soviet space station during the Cold War, and his family needed money to bring him back to Earth. The scam was popular enough to circulate on the site BoingBoing as yet another example of the silly stuff the internet coughs up.

But that same year, Nigeria announced that it would send a real-life astronaut into space by the year 2030. Speaking from the capital of Abuja, minister of science and technology Ogbonnaya Onu said Nigeria would join the growing league of spacefaring nations, which now includes India, China, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Russia, South Africa, the United States, and the 22 member states of the European Space Agency. The list seems to grow every day—Nigeria’s nearby neighbor in West Africa, Ghana, also announced a program in 2012 to expand into space. The idea of Africans walking on the Moon can sound absurd in light of the fact that many, if not most, images of Africa portray its wild animals and its poverty, and not its space-age technology. It’s partly why I named my first novel Nigerians in Space, and it’s also why the email scam above continues to circulate on the internet. 

The absurdity of Africans in space may just stem from our own prejudices. Nigeria is the largest economy in Africa, with an estimated gross domestic product of $486 billion, according to the World Bank, and Ghana is a prosperous democracy. By comparison, the United States is the largest economy in North America; Germany and Russia in Europe; and China in Asia—and we don’t scoff at their ambitions in space exploration. In fact, we expect them to launch spacecraft that probe the distant reaches of our solar system.  

Inclusion can mean many things in space. Countries with space programs handle diversity in different ways, and some may attempt to include as many people from their societies as possible, such as women and religious, ethnic, or sexual minorities. For example, the Russian space program could continue the Soviet tradition of launching women cosmonauts in Soyuz rockets. Then there is inclusion on the planetary scale, which means giving people from all regions and nations of the world equitable access to outer space. An example of this might be the crews that operate on the International Space Station as it orbits about 400 kilometers above the Earth. Even that is an exclusive club—only 15 countries signed its foundational agreement, and astronauts from 18 countries have visited the station. Sixty-three percent of the astronauts were from the U.S., 20 percent from Russia, and about 4 percent from Japan.^[1] 

There is ample evidence of the benefits of inclusion, such as improvements in innovation, creativity, and resilience.^[2] But for our purposes, inclusion means giving more people access to the benefits of space. Inclusion can expand the range of solutions available to the complex problems inherent in space activity, and also advance notions of fairness and equity. In other words, the more inclusive the spacefaring community, the more challenges we can solve. But it’s also the right thing to do.

The Silicon Valley Space Race

Questions of representation become more complicated when you realize that the future of space exploration will likely soon involve dozens of private companies, each with its own understanding of inclusion. Private companies run by businesspeople from Silicon Valley are beginning to upset the traditional dominance of space contracting that has been enjoyed by consortia such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin’s joint venture, the United Launch Alliance. While private industry has always played a role in the development of space programs, we’ve entered a new era in which space projects are led by billionaires such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson. These initiatives are far from vanity projects, and mark the beginning of a concerted scramble for profit off-planet. Elon Musk is supporting SpaceX and Jeff Bezos has put his financial muscle behind Blue Origin. These companies are striving to lower the cost of launches by developing reusable rockets and experimenting with new sources of fuel, one of the most expensive aspects of launching cargo and satellites into space. SpaceX, for example, won a $1.4 billion contract from the U.S. government in 2016. 

The problem is that Silicon Valley has a terrible track record of inclusion—only about 1 percent of the technology team at Facebook are black Americans, 3 percent Hispanic, and 17 percent women, according to Fortune.^[3] As these tech titans aim their rockets at the Moon, or Mars, or wherever they can make money, it’s plausible this new form of exploration will only exacerbate existing inequities. Even entrepreneurs seeking to expand access to space are catering to these divisions, like Richard Branson and his $250,000 tickets to orbit on Virgin Galactic. 

Moreover, as author Cory Doctorow has observed, technology—and certainly space technology—can exacerbate inequality, leading to instability and collapse.^[4] “As rich people get richer,” Doctorow writes, “their wealth translates into political influence, and their ideas—especially their terrible ideas—take on outsized importance.” It’s possible that the private space ventures led by Bezos, Musk, and Branson may bring excellent innovations, but they may also inculcate “terrible ideas” as well through their individual influence, with little accountability. Doctorow posits that “without a free, fair and open network with which to rally and marshal the forces of justice, the battle is lost before it’s even joined.” It’s unclear at present whether such a “free, fair and open network” exists with respect to space. NASA shares as much license-free data as it can in the interest of science, except where such technology could be used for military purposes (more on that later). But Blue Origin, SpaceX, or Virgin Galactic don’t necessarily share their innovations through a “free, fair and open network”—even when they receive government contracts.

The shifting ground rules of commercialization may only accelerate these inequalities, as the U.S. Congress has subtly begun chipping away at the United Nations Space Treaty of 1967 and the U.N. Moon Agreement, which together forbid ownership of space resources. In 2015, U.S. lawmakers opened space for business and asteroid mining with the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act. The law aims to open up outer space to market forces. Congress is betting that the American space industry can beat the rest of the world to lucrative new markets in a scramble for space. And other countries are equally interested—Luxembourg is encouraging private space companies to register there to take advantage of the country’s new space commercialization law ensuring that “that private operators working in space can be confident about their rights to the resources they extract in outer space.”^[5]

Creating an Inclusive Bureaucracy

The cost savings promised by SpaceX, Blue Origin, and other new space ventures may lower the barriers to entry considerably, but international agencies still have a major role to play in space technology. One way to foster inclusion in space is to promote it inside country-level space programs. The first American astronauts were white and the program deliberately excluded women and African Americans as astronauts, but the country has made great strides in including more marginalized voices. Charles Bolden served as administrator of NASA throughout the Obama administration. Moreover, there have been many black astronauts, including Bolden himself, Mae Jemison, and Ronald McNair. Worldwide, there have been more than 60 women astronauts from 13 countries,^[6] with many more waiting in the wings. And yet this represents a minute percentage of the whole. Of the 560 astronauts trained to participate in a human space flight program around the world, almost 500 astronauts were men, and the majority of those astronauts were white.

It’s possible to promote inclusion by aggressively hiring, training, and promoting marginalized people to become not just astronauts, but bureaucrats, too. NASA does this through its Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity, which can field complaints of discrimination and offer solutions. As former administrator Charles Bolden outlined in NASA’s Diversity and Inclusion Statement: 

Every hiring and recruitment initiative the Agency undertakes must ensure that we are striving to bring onboard talent from the widest possible range of sources. This means recruiting at institutions that we may not have recruited from before and partnering with community and professional organizations that can help us establish a NASA workplace that is fully reflective of the Nation’s diversity.^[7]

Astronauts are important as symbols and public figures, but space agencies also need administrators from diverse backgrounds. They need to hire and promote more people like Bolden, who conducted the less glamorous work of managing a gigantic bureaucracy. That’s how programs can bake in inclusion from the outset to celebrate people who have been historically excluded. 

Private space companies would benefit from incorporating this approach early on. Instead of taking their usual approach of starting a company, scaling it, and then taking a look at inclusion after a public outcry, they can begin now, and NASA’s Diversity and Inclusion Statement is an excellent starting point. NASA should even require that private space agencies that win NASA contracts—which now include companies like SpaceX—include a credible diversity plan. The plan should address inclusion at all positions of the company, including upper management.

Should Emerging Economies Have Space Programs?

Improving inclusion within national space programs is just one part of the puzzle. Another essential aspect to a more inclusive future is the international exploration of space, and enabling more countries to join the party. That’s not easy. Space exploration is expensive and demands tremendous financial power. Developing countries face basic problems related to infrastructure, health, and poverty. India and Nigeria have extraordinary wealth—and boast their own billionaires and growing middle classes. At the same time, about 30 percent of the population in India lives in extreme poverty,^[8] compared to over 60 percent of the population in Nigeria,^[9] according to the most recent censuses. This is why Gil Scott-Heron’s poem “Whitey on the Moon” continues to resonate today. In the piece, Scott-Heron contrasts the needs of poor people in America with the fact that the country spent billions of dollars to reach the Moon: “I can’t pay no doctor’s bills, but whitey’s on the moon.”^[10] 

Scott-Heron published his poem the year after Neil Armstrong touched down on the Sea of Tranquility. The U.S. was embroiled in Vietnam, and people were skeptical of the value of spending so much money on the space program. To overcome skeptics in the 1960s, NASA’s missions were supported by one of the most sophisticated publicity programs the world had ever seen. In Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program, authors David Meerman Scott and Richard Jurek detail the complex apparatus NASA developed to promote the space program.^[11] This was not just propaganda. NASA employed a staff of 35, plus 35 contract employees in its Public Affairs office, who carefully reported the Apollo missions with an emphasis on facts. The team included many former journalists and fed news clips, audio interviews, and short films to the media that could be quoted or republished at no charge. When NASA’s staff ran out of resources, government contractors happily filled the gap by producing briefings and scale models that could be used by television anchors like Walter Cronkite.

Space programs in developing countries face equally harsh public backlash for spending money when there are critical needs to address. One reason is that these countries have a track record of corruption with major development projects such as railroads, dams, and bridges that involve large sums of money. Turner T. Isoun founded the Nigerian space program as the country’s minister of science and technology. In his 2013 memoir Why Run before Learning to Walk?, he explains the deep skepticism he faced when trying to establish the program under former President Olusegun Obasanjo. As he writes: 

Sometimes, in Nigeria, poverty is treated like a malaria infection, you can simply inject a drug and the disease goes away and you can simply inject cash and poverty will go away. Of course neither problem is really solved this simplistically. Rather, it is likely that the solutions to both problems may be found in science and technology and most likely in high technology combinations.^[12] 

Isoun argues that Nigeria needs to “shift the scope” of its “solution space” in order to confront a wide variety of problems—an argument that NASA itself makes every day on its website in a section called “Benefits to You.”^[13] “The skeptics … often ask me,” Isoun goes on, “‘What is the return on Nigerian investment in space technology?’ I always tell them that the most significant return on our investment is the recovery of Nigeria’s, indeed Black Africa’s self-confidence in its capacity and capability in science and technology and innovation, and this cannot be measured in Nigerian naira, Kenya shillings, or U.S. dollars.”^[14]

In specifically noting that “black Africans” have been excluded from space exploration, Isoun is making the point that there is a symbolic return on investment in space initiatives for Nigerians, beyond their economic impact. Investing in space technology can remove limitations, and free the imaginations of African scientists. In Nelson Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, the Nobel laureate expressed his shock at meeting black airline pilots in Ethiopia: “How could a black man fly an airplane?” But he quickly added, “A moment later I caught myself: I had fallen into the apartheid mindset, thinking that Africans were inferior and that flying was a white man’s job. I sat back in my seat and chided myself for such thoughts.”^[15] Mandela’s story is instructive: ingrained stereotypes can prevent even the most enlightened thinker from believing that marginalized peoples can embrace space technology.

Taken out of context, it may read as if Turner Isoun is suggesting that Nigeria build its own space program from scratch. But that isn’t the case. He was arguing that Nigeria should do something even if it lags behind in other areas, because exposure to space technology, with proper training, could lead to local innovations that would benefit Nigerians. These thoughts are echoed by Harvard scholar Calestous Juma, who has stated that African countries don’t need to focus all their energies on conducting basic research, and can instead embrace existing technology to add a uniquely African flavor.^[16] In his view, this requires strong education and building out infrastructure to absorb knowledge and spur innovation. Turner Isoun agrees: “The critical lesson here is that Nigerians do not need to master obsolete science and technology before going straight to cutting edge science and technology.”^[17]

Each country will have its own unique approach, and it’s not always clear what the inflection point is for when they should enter the space age. In India, for example, the program developed in parallel with the race to acquire nuclear weapons in its regional rivalry with Pakistan. One of the Indian Space Research Organisation’s leading scientists, Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam, even went on to become the country’s eleventh President. He candidly supported nuclear weapons research. The Korean Space Program enjoys a strong bilateral partnership with the United States. Other space programs focus on what they can contribute to our understanding of the cosmos. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, launched a mission to gather samples from the asteroid Itokawa in 2005, gathering crucial scientific data.^[18] Egypt, Indonesia, Ethiopia, and Malaysia have all announced plans to develop or expand their own space programs—and the list appears to be growing.

China’s Space Diplomacy

China has increasingly positioned itself to enable developing countries to benefit from outer space in a remarkable new form of space diplomacy. The country has signed numerous bilateral agreements with countries, including Nigeria, Venezuela, and Indonesia, to launch communications and observation satellites, according to a report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.^[19] These satellites are often designed and built by Chinese scientists, with significant knowledge sharing and training for people from the partner countries. 

Satellites are arguably the quickest and most proven path for countries to reap benefits from space technology, as they can open up entire swaths of countries to the digital age. Nigeria, for example, partnered with China and the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom to free its economy from dependence on expensive commercial communications satellites that it did not control. China has also joined several multilateral organizations that promote knowledge sharing and the joint use of satellite constellations for science and disaster reduction. These agreements have happened as the country has expanded its own capabilities in space exploration, such as developing the first quantum satellite.^[20] Importantly, China is developing a space station that should launch in the next decade, and it may open it up to use by countries with which it has established partnerships.^[21]

One reason for China developing its own space station is its own national ambition—another is that China is excluded from using the International Space Station for fear that it will steal technology that could be used to improve its military. The U.S. was a driving force behind this prohibition, and U.S. efforts at collaboration and soft diplomacy with China were blocked in an omnibus bill in 2011 supported by former Congressman Frank Wolf.^[22] (In what might be considered a conflict of interest, or least an abuse of power, the House spending committee that advanced the bill required that any meetings with China on space report to itself.) NASA has managed to meet with China in multilateral contexts and arrange limited meetings with scientists, but the bill stood as a roadblock to collaboration as recently as 2015.

China’s rapidly improving capabilities in space do not threaten the exclusion of the U.S., but they do complicate the dynamics of the playing field. NASA remains the world’s most powerful and best funded space agency and has numerous bilateral and multilateral agreements, including many that are driven purely in the interest of science and the peaceful exploration of space. Since the Nixon era, the U.S. has extended a welcoming hand to countries to jointly explore space. But any developing nation looking for help or financing for their space programs to launch satellites into space, or explore some other technology, would likely at least sit down with China. In closing a channel of diplomacy with China, the U.S. may have undermined the possibility of collaboration on such development projects. 

But it’s worth being cautious about China’s intentions in space with developing countries as well. The country’s behavior in Africa on major development projects is not without controversy. For example, China has funded a number of state capitol buildings and has built large-scale infrastructure projects, including dams, highways, and railroads. Instead of creating local jobs, China tends to import its own construction firms and labor force, and there have been instances of workplace exploitation of African workers by Chinese management.^[23] Resentment at these policies has even resulted in violent protests and xenophobic backlashes against the Chinese in countries like Kenya. We don’t know if China’s collaborations in space may be equally extractive.

Perhaps China’s space diplomacy and the lure of its new space station will encourage NASA, through competition, to expand its partnerships with other countries interested in space exploration. NASA may do well to copy China’s model through partnerships, training, providing grants, encouraging financial transparency, and explaining the benefits of the technology. Otherwise, they may find that countries decline an invitation to join the International Space Station and travel to China’s space station instead.

Imagining an Inclusive Future: The Popular Imagination

As suggested by the description of the intangible return on investment in space technology by the founder of Nigeria’s space program, there’s another essential aspect of fostering inclusion in space: influencing our vision of the future as expressed in the popular imagination. Space programs have been intertwined with entertainment since their outset. Werner von Braun, the founder of the U.S. space program, wrote a science fiction novel about Mars, and Neil Armstrong read Jules Verne while promoting the Apollo missions, as authors Scott and Jurek have noted. Professor John E. Bowit has described how the Soviet program was inspired by painters such as Ivan Kliun, Aleksandr Labas, Ivan Kudriashev, and Kazimir Malevich. 

The grand visions of traveling to the Moon—or beyond—were imagined not in a lab but by creative artists. In many cases, the scientists themselves consumed this entertainment to inspire their own work. That’s why it’s crucial for entertainment to include diverse voices, whether in literature, art, film, or whatever comes next.

Science fiction entertainment doesn’t have to just mirror the status quo, and its more hopeful predictions of humanity’s future can help break existing barriers of racial discrimination. Gene Roddenberry cast African American Nichelle Nichols and Japanese American George Takei in the original Star Trek series, which Martin Luther King, Jr. enjoyed watching with his family. The Reverend even advised Nichols to remain on the show because she was serving as a role model for African Americans.^[24]

However, even if actors from marginalized groups grab leading roles in movies, there is an enormous apparatus behind each entertainment product—the producers, directors, and agents—who are not representative of a diverse society. The bankable star Will Smith may land a multimillion-dollar contract for himself and his son in a science fiction epic like After Earth, but that doesn’t mean the people working behind the scenes are diverse. Entertainment needs administrators like Charles Bolden, too. 

That’s not to say that entertainment has denied the achievements of marginalized communities entirely. Recent scholarship has celebrated women pioneers of the space program, such as Nathalia Holt’s Rise of the Rocket Girls (2016) and Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures (2016), which focused on African American mathematicians and engineers at NASA.^[25] The latter book was turned into a popular and award-winning film.

Existing movements such as Afrofuturism can offer eye-opening examples of how our creative culture can meaningfully contribute to a new vision of our space programs. Loosely marked by a passion for technology and innovation, as well as mysticism rooted in African American and African culture, Afrofuturism encompasses a wide variety of creative explorations across numerous fields—music, art, film, and literature—over nearly a half-century in black culture. Narratives often feature black protagonists, and the aesthetic can draw upon design elements sourced from the rich traditions of the diaspora. Afrofuturism democratizes storytelling by allowing people to share their own narratives in which they have an important role.

Today, numerous stories are being told that could be considered Afrofuturism, such as Ta-Nehisi Coates’ retelling of the Black Panther comic book series, Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon, and the video game Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan, by Cameroon-based studio Kiro’o Games. My own sequel to Nigerians in Space, the novel After the Flare, imagines a future in which Nigeria must collaborate with India to save the world. In these stories, we can envision space programs in which Africans—or Indians, Native Americans, or anyone—participate fully and equally in our exploration of the cosmos.

When Facebook and SpaceX Rockets Become the Future

Many of the issues discussed so far—including private space contractors and space-age technologies that impact the developing world—came dramatically to a head in August 2016. Then, two giants of the tech industry—Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook—combined forces on what would have been a historic mission. Facebook bought the services of a $200 million Israeli communications satellite that would enable the social networking company to beam broadband internet to rural areas of Africa that were not connected. This satellite was to be launched via SpaceX’s latest development, the Falcon 9 rocket.

Facebook’s ambitions in this regard were not without controversy. In 2015, the country rolled out its Internet.org project in India, promising free internet, but only offering a hand-picked limited number of apps, prompting a major uproar in civil society and government authorities to issue regulations protecting net neutrality. So it was unclear what kind of internet Facebook would have been providing on the satellite. Nonetheless, the Falcon 9 rocket exploded during a launch test, destroying the satellite with it.^[26]

Here, Facebook, one of the largest companies in the world, was marshalling its own resources to connect a dramatically underserved population by launching a rocket developed by the private tech industry. It should have been a sobering wake-up call to governments on the continent to expand their own ambitions in space. If successful, the mission might have brought more users in Africa into the internet age, but it could also have opened the door to further African dependence on the space technology of other countries and on an international company with its own profit motives. Mark Zuckerberg has vowed to press on in any case, now shifting the focus to flying high-altitude drones to serve a similar function of providing the internet to rural areas.

A lot can happen in 15 years. In the year 2033, Nigerians may find it amusing that people once laughed at the thought of an African in space. We may be standing on the doorstep of a future in which all nations participate in the exploration of outer space and enjoy its wonder. Or we may see global inequality projected into Low Earth Orbit, and find the gap between the haves and have-nots widening as a battle for dominion over the sky rages between space powers, private space companies, and countries focused wholly on terrestrial matters. Humanity’s future in space will be shaped by the decisions we make—we can start by creating a more inclusive vision of that shared adventure. 

Notes

^[1] “List of International Space Station Visitors,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_International_Space_Station_visitors. [back]

^[2] Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Melinda Marshall, and Laura Sherbin. “How Diversity Can Drive Innovation,” Harvard Business Review, December 2013, https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-diversity-can-drive-innovation. [back]

^[3] Valentina Zarya, “3 Ways Facebook Is Trying to Diversify Its Workforce,” Fortune, January 19, 2017,http://fortune.com/2017/01/20/facebook-workforce-diversity-data-driven. [back]

^[4] Cory Doctorow, “Technology Is Making the World More Unequal. Only Technology Can Fix This,” The Guardian, May 31, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/may/31/technology-is-making-the-world-more-unequal-only-technology-can-fix-this-cory-doctorow. [back]

^[5] Luxembourg Ministry of the Economy, “Luxembourg’s New Space Law Guarantees Private Companies the Right to Resources Harvested in Outer Space in Accordance with International Law,” Portal of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, November 11, 2016, http://www.gouvernement.lu/6481433/11-presentation-spaceresources. [back]

^[6] “List of Female Astronauts,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_astronauts. [back]

^[7] Charles Bolden, “NASA Policy Statement on Diversity and Inclusion,” NASA, June 8, 2010, https://odeo.hq.nasa.gov/documents/Diversity_Inclusion_Policy_Statement.pdf. [back]

^[8] Ritika Katyal, “India Census Exposes Extent of Poverty,” CNN World, August 2, 2015, http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/02/asia/india-poor-census-secc. [back]

^[9] “Nigerians Living in Poverty Rise to Nearly 61%,” BBC News, February 13, 2012, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-17015873. [back]

^[10] For a full, free online version of the text of “Whitey’s on the Moon,” see https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/05/gil-scott-herons-poem-whitey-on-the-moon/239622. [back]

^[11] David Meerman Scott and Richard Jurek, Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014). [back]

^[12] Turner T. Isoun and Miriam J. Isoun, Why Run before Learning to Walk? (Ibadan, Nigeria: BookBuilders Editions Africa, 2013). [back]

^[13] See https://www.nasa.gov/topics/benefits/index.html. [back]

^[14] Isoun and Isoun, Why Run before Learning to Walk? [back]

^[15] Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1994). [back]

^[16] Calestous Juma, “Technology Will Drive Scientific Progress in Africa Not the Other Way Round,” Quartz, August 15, 2016,https://qz.com/757766/technology-will-drive-scientific-progress-in-africa-not-the-other-way-round. [back]

^[17] Isoun and Isoun, Why Run before Learning to Walk? [back]

^[18] Dante S. Lauretta, “The Seven-Year Mission to Fetch 60 Grams of Asteroid,” Scientific American 315 (2016). [back]

^[19] Kevin Pollpeter, Eric Anderson, Jordan Wilson, and Fan Yang, “China Dream, Space Dream: China’s Progress in Space Technologies and Implications for the United States,” U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, March 2, 2015, https://www.uscc.gov/Research/china-dream-space-dream-chinas-progress-space-technologies-and-implications-united-states. [back]

^[20] Tim Fernholz, “China’s New Quantum Satellite Will Try to Teleport Data outside the Bounds of Space and Time,” Quartz, August 20, 2016, https://qz.com/760804/chinas-new-quantum-satellite-will-try-to-teleport-data-outside-the-bounds-of-space-and-time-and-create-an-unbreakable-code. [back]

^[21] Andrew Jones, “A Comprehensive Guide to China’s Space Activities in 2016,” GB Times, July 1, 2016, http://gbtimes.com/comprehensive-guide-chinas-space-activities-2016. [back]

^[22] Zach Rosenberg, “This Congressman Kept the U.S. and China from Exploring Space Together,” Foreign Policy, December 17, 2013,http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/12/17/this-congressman-kept-the-u-s-and-china-from-exploring-space-together. [back]

^[23] “Nigeria: Workers of Chinese Company Protest Mass Dismissals, Deaths, Injuries Attributed to Poor Work Conditions and Alleged Discrimination; Company Responds,” Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, 2015,https://business-humanrights.org/en/nigeria-workers-of-chinese-company-protest-mass-dismissals-deaths-injuries-attributed-to-poor-work-conditions-and-alleged-discrimination-company-responds. [back]

^[24] Michael Martin, “Star Trek’s Uhura Reflects On MLK Encounter,” Tell Me More, National Public Radio,http://www.npr.org/2011/01/17/132942461/Star-Treks-Uhura-Reflects-On-MLK-Encounter. [back]

^[25] Nathalia Holt, Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2016); Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race (New York: William Morrow, 2016). [back]

^[26] Russell Brandom, “Today’s SpaceX Explosion Is a Major Setback for Facebook’s Free Internet Ambitions,” The Verge, September 1, 2016, http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/1/12750872/spacex-explosion-facebook-satellite-internet-org-zuckerberg. [back]