Prometheus
Newsletter of the LFS
Over twenty years have now gone by since the first footprint marked the surface of the Moon. Twenty years since the heady days of a decade when America took up a political challenge on behalf of its President.
The space program was — or at least was perceived to be — the measure in the world’s eyes of America’s continuing fitness to defend and lead the non-communist world; a symbol of its standing in the Cold War. And, as in any war, once the goal of victory had been set the only thing that mattered was achieving it. Other considerations were swept aside, and cost was no object.
The war was won. There were triumphant victory celebrations. The world applauded. In the heyday of it all, immediately after the Apollo 11 success, a Special Task Group created by Richard Nixon to chart NASA’s future options came up with three alternative scenarios. First was a three-pronged program consisting of a fifty-man Earth-orbiting space station, a manned lunar base, and a Mars expedition by 1985.
This program would have required as mere incidentals the development of both a reusable shuttle to service the space station, and a deep-space tug to supply the lunar base. Second, a less grandiose scheme called for just the space station and its shuttle, with no lunar program and a delayed Mars mission. And third — the bleakest that seemed possible to contemplate in the light of the reception accorded to the lunar landing — just the space station and shuttle, with no Mars mission at all. But it was to be a huge shuttle, with a fully reusable booster powered by air-breathing jet engines as well as heavy-lift rockets, and an orbiter the size of a 727 airliner.
Heady days, indeed.
What actually happened is now history. The mood of the country had changed.
America, having placed and won its bet, cashed in its chips, lost interest, and went home. The proposals were slammed from coast to coast. NASA’s budget was so severely slashed that three of the remaining Apollo missions had to be scrapped. Eventually only the shuttle remained of all the things that had been dreamed of — and a severely cutdown version of it at that, probably saved only by a hastily contrived deal with the Air Force. The money for Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz project was granted, but grudgingly, and then only because both would use leftover Apollo hardware. In the next five years NASA’S staff declined by twenty-five percent.
A spectacular crash, of truly Wall Street 1929 proportions.
In fact, the similarity runs deeper than mere analogy.
To see why, let’s take a closer look at the phenomenon of the economic “crash”, or “depression”, and the things that bring one about.
There is a widely held notion that depressions are a part of a boom-bust business cycle which comes inevitably as part of the price one pays for a capitalist economy. I shall contend, however, that this is a Marxist propaganda myth embraced by belief systems that don’t, or don’t want to, understand how economics works.
In a market economy, where prices are set by supply and demand, interest rates provide an indicator of the investment climate and function as a natural regulator and stabilizer. Interest is simply a special name for a particular kind of price: the going rate for renting out surplus capital. It follows the same laws as any other price and, if allowed to find its own level, transmits information and exercises a stabilizing influence by adjusting the supply available from those competing to lend out capital to the demand of those wishing to borrow.
This isn’t to say that economic life doesn’t have its ups and downs, of course. But in the overall picture, ups are never occurring everywhere at the same time, and neither are downs. While some industries are in decline, letting people go and able to pay only marginal rates, others are expanding and competing for capital and labor, bidding up wage rates and paying higher prices to obtain the skills and resources that they need. The scene across the economic ocean is one of choppy waters, with the waves that fall in one place providing the momentum for others to rise elsewhere.
Such localized fluctuations are normal features of the business scene and are not to be confused with the general depression: the across-the-board slump that sets in when it turns out that the entire business community had made wrong decisions all at the same time. When the whole ocean goes down at once, it means that someone, somewhere, has pulled the plug.
Like a naturally evolving, complex ecology — which it is — a freely interacting market is a superposition of millions of feedback loops, compensating systems, and error-correcting mechanisms, all adding up to a system that is rugged, inherently self-stabilizing, and highly resilient to serious disruption from internal causes. Only external factors imposed upon the system as a whole can affect everything, everywhere adversely.
Similarly, when the whole business community makes wrong decisions at the same time, it’s because something outside has sent it the wrong signals.
And the only power that commands a force capable of misdirecting the entire system of a nation is … government.
In other words, what brings about general economic depressions is not some inexorcizable demon residing deep in the workings of the market system, but intervention in those workings by governments, which are the only institutions that possess the force necessary to do so. And the more massive the scale of the intervention, the more severe the depression will be when it comes.
The implications of Apollo begin to take on a new significance in this light.
The way that governments create depressions is by first initiating inflationary booms, through the control they’ve acquired over the money supply. The ability to print money out of thin air means that assets of real worth can be acquired in exchange for currency of progressively diluted value, providing, in effect, an invisible form of taxation. Another way of avoiding political unpopularity by creating illusory prosperity is to expand credit, which has the same effects as increasing the money supply.
But such booms turn out to be temporary. The artificially created excesses of money and credit send the same signals to the investment community as real capital accumulated through earnings and savings, the result of which is to encourage malinvestment: the diversion of capital, labor, and other resources into providing goods for which no real demand exists. Eventually, malinvestments must liquidate. The prescription of continual credit expansion to postpone the reckoning has to be curtailed before it leads to hyper-inflation, and that’s when the “bust” half of the cycle sets in. Wasteful projects are abandoned or scaled down to be salvaged as best they can be; inefficient enterprises die; prices fall, especially those of capital goods relative to consumer prices; and interest rates rise.
The bust is a natural period of adjustment following the malinvestment resulting from the manipulations that created the boom. Both the boom and the bust are not features of the free-market system at all, but the results of interfering with it.
Probably the best thing that government could do to help once it has created a post-inflationary depression is stay out of it and let the market recover in its own way.
In actuality, however, the inevitable response is to apply remedies that are seemingly purpose-designed to make things worse and not better — which was what turned the 1929 depression into a decade-long slump.
When the bust hits, demands go up from every side for the government to “do something”, and a further round of intervention follows to put right what the previous round put wrong. And so the pattern for the future is set. As the patient gets sicker with every spoonful of medicine, the only response that the doctors can conceive is to increase the dose. The underlying premise that the treatment is in fact a cure and not the poison is never questioned.
No one would doubt — would they? — that John F. Kennedy’s announcement, on May 25, 1961, of the lunar-landing goal was first and foremost a politically motivated decision. Since Sputnik 1 in 1957, the Soviets had sent the first probe around the Moon, obtained the first views of the lunar farside, launched the first man, Gagarin, a month before Kennedy’s announcement. American prestige needed a big boost, and the experts had advised that the big boosters the Soviets already had would be sufficient to gain them every significant “first” this side of a manned lunar landing.
Hence, the American space industry became a political instrument, its business the nation’s earner of political prestige. Other goals were subordinate. This constituted intervention on a massive scale into the more natural evolutionary path that the postwar development of aerospace technology would otherwise have followed.
I’m not saying that government has no place in the space program. Defense is a legitimate function of government — in an ideal world we wouldn’t need it, maybe, but this is the real one, and we do — and clearly the fulfillment of that function in the modern world requires an active role in space. And traditionally, the U.S. Government has aided research into selected areas of scientific endeavor — for example through the setting up of NASA’s predecessor, NACA, in 1915, which produced excellent returns for the aviation industry for a modest outlay.
But to direct virtually the whole of the nation’s aerospace resources and effort, to channel all of its outwardly-directed energies and thinking for a whole decade into a single, politically inspired goal? …This goes beyond healthy involvement and becomes total domination, which if it sets in for long enough, carries the danger of stifling dissent and institutionalizing conformity to the point where nobody can conceive any other way of doing things.
The way to get a wagon train safely through the mountain is to send dozens of scouts ahead in all directions.
There might only be a single pass, but one of the scouts will find it and bring back the news.
This is the kind of multiple approach that produces the inherent ruggedness of natural evolutionary systems and free-market economies. But when the wagon master, a council of elders, or a fire-and-brimstone preacher, acting on a hunch, signs written in the stars, faith in the Lord, or whatever, decrees which direction shall be taken, without any scouts being sent out, it’s almost certain to be a wrong one.
Or in the economic case, a malinvestment. The boom that Apollo ushered in was evident: the ready money, unlimited credit, and instant prosperity … And subsequently we saw the inevitable depression, when the malinvestment — eventually, as it had to — liquidated.
This isn’t to belittle the technical and human achievements of Apollo, which were magnificent. But the truth was that, political prestige aside, nobody really needed it.
The military had been making farfetched noises about national security needing a lunar outpost, but that was to attract attention and funds. Their true interest lay in long-range missiles, transatmospheric flight, and orbital observation. The foreseeable commercial potential at that stage was in communications, navigation, and earth-observation, again involving near-space. And despite the hype, the real scientific-information bonanzas of the sixties and seventies came from unmanned probes like Viking, Mariner, and Voyager for a tiny fraction of the costs of the manned flight program. As Arthur Clarke has suggested, the whole thing happened thirty years too soon.
What alternative pattern might we have seen unfolding, then, if Apollo hadn’t happened when it did, and in the way that it did?
Since the end of World War II, thinking and developments in advanced aerospace technology had been proceeding briskly but smoothly with the kind of divergence that characterizes a healthy evolutionary process. True, the U.S. had lagged in its development of big boosters, mainly because of the Air Force’s commitment to preserving its fleets of manned bombers as the core of the deterrent policy, which relegated ICBMs to second priority. The Soviets, with no viable long-range bomber force to worry about, had no such concern and forged ahead. It was this one fact that gave them their string of space firsts from Sputnik 1 through to the Gagarin flight.
But by 1955, the U.S. had a number of missiles under development with the potential of orbiting a satellite: there were the Air Force’s Atlas, Thor, and Titan, the Army’s Jupiter and Redstone, and the Navy’s Polaris. It had been persuasively argued that von Braun’s Army team at Huntsville, Alabama, could have put a payload in orbit by the end of 1955 using the Redstone if it hadn’t been for inter-service infighting and bureaucratic tangles — almost two years ahead of Sputnik.
As things were, by 1958 the Air Force was pushing for what seemed a natural extension to the series of rocket-plane flights that had culminated in the X-15, and built up an investment of experience and the team of crack pilots at Edwards AFB in California. The Air Force plans envisaged a successor designated the X-15B, which would have taken off like a rocket, gone into orbit, and landed like an airplane, carrying a crew of two — a familiar pattern, now being resurrected many years later. Another, more ambitious, project was the MOL — Manned Orbiting Laboratory, again with a two-man crew, proposed initially for spy missions and man-in-space research. And further, with a target date tentatively set as the late sixties, there was the “Dyna-soar”, a rocket launched flying machine — as opposed to a ballistic capsule — that would operate up to 400,000 feet at twenty one-times the speed of sound — the kind of thing only now being talked about again in the form of the space plane. And NASA, formed in 1958 to promote civilian development of space, would initially have pioneered the kinds of unmanned scientific missions that turned out to be so productive.
We can only speculate about what might have followed if plans such as these had been realized instead of sacrificed to the moon god, and their progeny permitted to be born. Once the MOL was up, it’s a safe bet that the Air Force would find good reasons for needing more of them. The Navy would want one because the Air Force has got one, and NASA would eventually want one, because the Air Force won’t allow civilians inside the MOL.
Then the Air Force will want a bigger one because the MOL is small and obsolete, and the Soviets are reported to be working on a better one.
If the Air Force had been allowed to mount its own manned program, it wouldn’t have needed the shuttle, and NASA could have gone with the ESA-Hermes-like craft that it ended up proposing before politics made it grow again. And the major contractors, undistracted by constantly elbowing for places at a bottomless public trough, would probably be thinking along lines that will lead to TAV-like commercial transports, across-the-Pacific-in-two-hours and the turnaround time of a 747, once more sounding very much like things we’re only beginning to hear talked about again today.
The picture this suggests is one of vigorous activity in near-Earth space, centered around a variety of orbiting stations and the vessels to supply them, extending through in the seventies and providing a natural jumping-off point for the moon and beyond.
If the Soviets want to respond by bankrupting Siberia to send a hare with a Red Star there first, well let them. The Western tortoise will overhaul it soon enough, as soon as the time is right. Since there is no Holy Grail to focus effort and channel imagination, the conceivers and designers of different projects are free to pursue different solutions to their varying needs, resulting in a proliferation of vehicles large and small, manned and unmanned, reusable and expendable.
Such a pattern would have continued the curve of improving performance for aerospace vehicles that had been climbing fairly smoothly since the beginning of the century, instead of introducing a huge discontinuity that only a massive, forcibly public-funded venture could hope to bridge.
And this is what effectively locked the private sector out. I don’t mean the giant contractors, whose interests lay as much at the political end of the spectrum as those of the Pentagon or the huge bureaucracy that NASA became, but the independent entrepreneurs whose image is traditionally synonymous with American enterprise. By the end of the fifties, with the rough ground broken by the bulldozers of postwar defense-funded ventures, perhaps the time was about right for letting loose the kind of talent and ingenuity that brought the price of a barrel of oil down from four dollars to thirty-five cents, produced the Model-T Ford and in more recent times the home computer. But in the climate of massive diversion of the industry’s supporting infrastructure and the cream of its expertise into a thirty-billion-dollar, single-purpose spectacular, such possibilities were literally unable to get off the ground.
There were some private ventures despite all the obstacles, such as SSI of Houston who launched the Conestoga rocket, Starstruck Inc. with its Dolphin, and PALS with the Phoenix, and more recently Amroc with its hybrid rocket motor. But such initiatives were systematically frustrated by NASA pricing practices that took advantage of forced public subsidy and effectively wrote off development overheads.
Another obstacle to private development has been a reluctance of investors to put up front-money in the face of skeptical expert reactions to such claims as that of MMI’s “Space Van” that would orbit payloads for six hundred dollars per pound instead of thousands of dollars that have come to be regarded as normal. But let’s remember that the only experts available for would-be investors to seek advice from have all gained their experience and their world-view inside the same elephantine bureaucracy, where the rewards come not for doing things simply and cheaply, but for managing the most prestigious departments and the biggest budgets.
Worked for Honeywell in the sixties, when computers that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars — when money was money — were less powerful than ones we buy in supermarkets today for our children. The same experts who scoff at the idea of six hundred dollars-per-pound into orbit would also have laughed at the idea of an Apple, a Commodore, or an IBM PC.
In the computer business, perhaps the last remaining area of genuine free-market opportunity, we take dazzling leaps in performance and plummeting costs for granted. But when it comes to space, we have built acceptance of the inescapability of Gargantuan budgets, political entanglement, and mammoth project management systems into our mindset of unconscious presumptions.
So much for the economic aspect of the post-Apollo depression. But at the deeper level there is a further irony that has to do with losing sight of the basic values of the way of life that Apollo came to symbolize.
America was founded on the principles of liberalism — in the original sense of the word, before it became a victim of contemporary doublespeak — which asserted the sovereignty of the individual, recognized basic rights and freedoms, and relegated the task of the state to the purely passive function of protecting them. Under such a system anyone is entitled to own property and trade it freely, to think and say what he likes, and to live his life in his own way to a degree consistent with the right of others to do the same, without it’s being forcibly subordinated to plans formulated for him by anyone else or by the state.
It’s easy now, thirty years after McCarthy and the hysteria over the “missile gap,” to see that Sputnik 1 did not signify a great overtaking of the Western way of life by the Soviet socialist utopia. Eisenhower saw it too and tried to downplay things to their proper proportions, but he miscalculated the reaction of the media, the public, and the world at large. It isn’t really all that surprising that a totalitarian ruling elite, with the resources of a nation at its command, should be able to evoke an impressive performance in any single area of achievement that it selects as a demonstration.
Building a pyramid isn’t so difficult when the haulers-of-blocks don’t have any say in the matter.
Very well, so the Soviets got a big booster first — but even that needed a lot of help from squabbling generals and bungling bureaucrats on our side. America had developed the greatest production and consumer economy the world had ever seen, an agricultural system whose productivity was becoming an embarrassment, and an average standard of living that exceeded that enjoyed by millionaires a hundred years previously, and more — all at the same time.
The other guys were having to build walls and wire fences around their countries to keep the inhabitants of their workers’ paradises from escaping.
Where the irony lies is that in seeking a tangible challenge to demonstrate the technological, scientific, and economic superiority of a free society, the planners turned to precisely the methods of centralized state-direction that their system was supposed to be superior to. “We won. So our way is better,” was the cry.
“Yes, but you had to use our way to do it!” was the retort that it invited.
The only debate was over which way the state should direct the program. The possibility that perhaps the state had its place, yes, but shouldn’t be directing the overall form of the program at all was never entertained.
As with the doctors arguing over the dose, the premise that they were administering the right medicine was never questioned.
But the American economy was huge and robust.
Even if Apollo was a long-term technological answer to a short-term political need, and even if it did represent something of a malinvestment, the effect could have been absorbed without undue damage. If we compare the cost with what the U.S. spends every year on such things as alcohol, cosmetics, or entertainments, it wasn’t really so huge.
The crowning irony is that its worst effect may have been due to the fact that it succeeded!
It’s difficult to argue with success. Some of history’s worst disasters have been brought about by taking a solution that has worked successfully in one area, and trying to apply it in another area where it isn’t appropriate.
And the greater its success in the past, the more persistently will its advocates continue trying to apply it even when it has long ago become obvious that it isn’t working.
An example is the stupendous success of the physical sciences in the centuries following the European Renaissance, when the new methods of reason brought understanding to subjects that had been dominated by dogma and superstition for a thousand years.
By the eighteenth century, apologists and enthusiasts for science saw scientific method as the panacea for all of humanity’s problems. If science could unify astronomy and gravitation, heat and mechanics, optics and geometry, then surely science could accomplish anything. Poverty, injustice, inequality, oppression, and all of the other social problems that had plagued mankind since communal patterns of living first evolved, would all disappear in the scientifically planned, rational society.
Unfortunately, however (or is it?), people are less obliging and predictable than Newtonian particles, and tend to frustrate utopian grand designs by having ideas of their own about how they want to live. A society of individuals who were free to dissent and choose would never yield the kind of consensus that the various schools of early French and German socialism required on how to decide priorities and allocate resources.
Hence, the institutions of a free society become obstacles to the plan and must be removed. And once the individual and his rights become subservient to the state’s collectively imposed goals, society takes the first step down the slippery slope that leads towards the secret police, the Gestapo, the Gulag, and the concentration camp.
Apollo left a generation of administrators and legislators imbued with the conviction that if centralized government control and massive federal spending can land men on the Moon, then big government programs is the way to accomplish anything. Poverty, injustice, inequality, oppression, will all be cured by progressively larger doses of the same measures that have achieved just the opposite everywhere else they’ve been tried.
Yes, massive state-directed programs can achieve results. They can produce bigger booster rockets, or build pyramids, or plant flags on the Moon with high PR coverage at a cost that no one would pay freely — if that’s what you want to do. But they don’t solve social problems.
The real problem that I see was not so much the program itself — it represented a comparatively small proportion of the American GNP and was probably the kind of medicinal binge that the nation needed anyway — but the massive social programs inappropriately modeled on the rationale of Apollo afterward. The spectacle of government directing the nation to the successful conquest of the Moon became the model. The original ideals of a people free to direct their own lives with government functioning in a passive, protective capacity faded, and politics has become an arena of contest for access to the machinery of state to be used as a battering ram for coercing others. The only debate is over whose views the state’s power should be used to impose upon everyone else. The notion that it doesn’t exist for the purpose of imposing anyone’s is forgotten.
As space came to be seen by the majority as posing such immense problems that only government could hope to tackle them, so society has turned increasingly to government for direction in the everyday aspects of living that were once the individual’s own affair: to insure his health and security, to guarantee him a livelihood, to educate his children, to protect him from his errors, to compensate him for the consequences of his own foolishness, and to tell him what to think.
Yes, we got there first. But who won the race?
What lessons would younger Americans today have learned from growing up with, working in, and absorbing the value system of an independent, self-reliant, freethinking people — government in its proper capacity, business corporations, scientists, and crazy individualists — charting their own expansion into space in their own way, according to their own needs, and for their own reasons? What the world never had a chance to see was a society free to evolve its own pattern of discovering, exploring, using, and adapting to the space environment.
For a true evolutionary pattern is just that: undirected.
Only egocentric, Ptolemaic man could imagine that evolution was directed toward perfecting intelligence. Every eagle knows that it was directed toward perfecting flight, every elephant that it was to great strength, every shark that it was to perfecting swimmers, and every eminent Victorian that it was to produce Victorians.
But in reality, evolution isn’t directed toward anything. Evolution proceeds away from. Away from crude beginnings and on to better things that can lie in a thousand different directions. As the wagon-train song says, “Where am I going, I don’t know. Where am I heading, I ain’t certain. All I know is I am on my way…”
But in that direction lies all that is truly new, exciting, revolutionary, and beyond the wildest dreams of even the most creative planners.
And that, maybe, would have shown the Soviets, and the world, something that was really worth knowing.
reprinted by permission of Libertarian Alliance and .
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