Author's Note: This interview was originally published in 21.C Magazine (2/1997, #23): 52-57. It captures the growth of the private space movement as an American political lobby group, and contains some insights regarding organizational dynamics and lifecycles. A printable copy of this article can now be downloaded for personal reference. You will need the Adobe Acrobat Reader.

The explosion of the Columbia space shuttle flight STS-107 on 1st February 2003 will trigger a reassessment, despite U.S. President George W. Bush's support, of the American manned space program. The accident, which killed seven astronauts, was the first American case of fatal reentry. It has triggered a massive outpouring of international grief. Analyses and media eulogies have flooded the Internet. The White House has gone into crisis mode. NASA and Congressional investigators are considering several different scenarios for the accident's cause. Three independent boards have already been established. The disaster has grave implications for NASA as it is very likely that the American manned space program will be halted for at least two years and work on the International Space Station may be halted. While the Republican Party has promoted the ISS, the Democrats have preferred a more Earth-focused program.

Will the Columbia disaster spell the end of the space shuttle program? Is this latest disaster, just as America has recovered from 9-11, typical of sociologist Charles Perrow's "normal accidents": technology so complex that risk management and ethical oversight is too difficult?

The Disinformation team sends its condolences to the NASA flight crews and the astronauts' families. This time, sadly, they did not return safely to Earth. It's now up to us to learn from this tragedy, overcome its hazards, and carry forth the Promethean Flame to the universe.

In a gesture which neatly summarized the state of the space race in the late 1990s Coca Cola succeeded in the ultimate product placement on the May 16th, 1996 shuttle launch (Rival Pepsi had to settle instead for Russia's 'Mir' space station). 1996 was the year that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) gave way to the privatization of space to combat downsizing and increase profits. The launch of a capitalist icon seemed to accord the ultimate victory in the space race - it also reflected the triumph of free enterprise and competition over government sponsorship. NASA is now entering a new race - to save its very existence.

Faced with the threat of reduced budgets NASA also saw explosive growth in the cheap space-access movement fuelled by the proliferation of private-sector organizations. Straddling SF fandom and commercial aerospace firms, these powerful new groups are invoking the NASA rhetoric of the Apollo space program of the 1960s that succeeded in putting a man on the moon. Now, however, they are talking about putting a man on Mars, and mixed with the ambition is a firm focus on budgeting.

The most effective lobby group to emerge in this free market has been the Washington DC-based National Space Society, with some 27,000 members worldwide. The key to its success is its core of publicly visible members, including Majel Barrett Roddenberry, Newt Gingrich, Freeman Dyson, Marvin Minsky and Buzz Aldrin.

Among the NSS's political successes was the 1991 Launch Services Purchase Act, which requires NASA to hire commercial rockets for all payloads not specifically designed for the space shuttle - a move that helped 1992 commercial space revenues reach US$4.6 billion, and precipitated the drafting of two bills in Congress: the Space Business Incentives Act and the Omnibus Space Commercialization Act, that are a response to NASA's move to make companies pay for R&D rather than through direct subcontracting. The aim of these bills is to subsidise future research through tax incentives by the major private sector aerospace firms.

"NASA needs a major central objective like it had in the 1960s," believes Dr Robert Zubrin, chairman of the NSS executive committee and an engineer at Martin Marietta Astronautics, a major NASA subcontractor. After President George Bush announced the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) in 1989 - which proposed a manned Mars mission - Zubrin developed the MarsDirect proposal, cutting the projected program costs from US$400 billion to US$40 billion. MarsDirect involves shipping a combined mini-refinery and space ship to Mars, followed later by a crew, a strategy which NASA acknowledges would cut travel to Mars by one-sixth.

Zubrin's political lobbying style can be traced back to the early 1940s influence of SF writers Robert Heinlein, Jack Williamson and Isaac Asimov, as well as to the ultra-Right wing technophilliac stance of Jerry Pournelle who supported President Reagan's Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI, or Star Wars) and increased funding for the military-industrial complex. Using incendiary speeches that attack Malthusian and Social Darwinist ideologies, Zubrin invokes America's pioneering spirit which draws comparisons to the historic Columbus voyages that altered the course of European civilization. His mixture of scientifically precise data and media ssavvy public relations recalls the work of Princeton University professor Gerald K. O'Neill, who wrote the seminal space colonization book The High Frontier (1976), and O'Neill also co-founded the first space colonization advocacy group the L5 Society, which merged with the NSS in 1987.

"What captures public attention is the bold new frontier of space exploration, and the focus of that is Mars," says Martin Thorne, director of the NSS Australian chapter. "The potential discovery of life on Mars has everybody interested, and the next logical Apollo program would be a Mars program that would fire up the public's imagination and capture both the business end of getting such a program up and running, and the public activism to get there. It would require a major commitment from NASA for a manned mission, but all it has planned is robotic probe launches for the next 10 years. Where is the place for humanity in that scenario?"

Danish professor of literature, Claus Jensen, author of Contest for the Heavens (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996), aka No Downlink: A Dramatic Narrative about the Challenger Accident and Our Time, which dissected the management structures and launch decisions leading to the Challenger disaster, has heard such rhetoric before. Jensen's book reads like The Wrong Stuff, the administrative equivalent to the personality driven Tom Wolfe astronaut bio The Right Stuff (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979).

"The Mars mission was mentioned in the late 1960s at the Lewis Research Center as a natural follow up to the moon landing, but it didn't come into being. Many people within NASA are longing for a great symbolic commitment, but this great technical muscle-flexing won't fly anymore."

Ironically, Jensen believes that the 'right stuff' rhetoric used by Zubrin and other space-commercialization advocates played a major part in NASA's downfall. "There has always been a symbolic side to space exploration, not just hardware, rockets, or space probes. When journalists wrote about NASA, it was like writing about entertainment. It had to provide spectacular events to attract funding.

"NASA had that famous 'can do' spirit and felt that they could do anything. They began to believe their own public relations department - it was a picture created for external use, but it bounced back on them. It was dangerous to believe in this myth."

The death of primary school teacher Christa McAuliffe in the Challenger shuttle explosion highlighted the harsh reality of NASA's vulnerability to its own hype [and communication problems within] and the political expediency which, until recently, motivated much of the space program. NASA had planned to send a seasoned journalist, but President Reagan seized upon the Teachers In Space (TISP) program to defend his record on education issues after scathing criticisms by 1984 Democrat Presidential candidate Walter Mondale. NASA prioritized TISP in hope of another Apollo public-triumph, and to secure future Congressional funding for the space shuttle program, which was under attack from geo-political shifts, population growth fears and a blow out budget. Despite previous delays and concerns by personnel at MTI - the company that produced the defective O-ring in the shuttle which caused its crash - about cold weather, the Challenger launch decision went ahead in order to coincide with a planned televised link between McAuliffe and President Reagan during his 1986 State of the Union speech. In the aftermath, Reagan referred to McAuliffe and the other Challenger crew members as "martyrs sacrificed for exploration's higher cause," while TISP quickly died.

For critics, the Challenger accident serves as a metaphor for the complex political forces that surround NASA. Jensen believes that the late physicist Richard P. Feynmann's role in the Rogers Commission into the Challenger explosion also became politically motivated: "[Feynmann] wanted NASA and the president to learn a lesson, and was very much troubled by the propensity to contain this story and make it just a malfunction in the space shuttle; not seeing the wider context that could make it happen again under different circumstances, or even within another organization."