Barriers to eternity

Gravity, if you think about it, is a phenomenal thing. The sheer fact that the mass of our planet binds us to it, illustrates how small we as individuals are. It is  my thesis that there are two primary policy options for any political body committed to Aeonic Politics (AP). The immediate reduction of greenhouse gases and largescle investiment into research and development of an SSTO.

Both of these problems are being tackled. Climate change is more than a political movement of concerned citizens but also a sheer force pressing on civilization. Thus  there is reason to believe policy will respond. Ideas for Single Step to Orbit Aircrafts have been floating around since the 1960s and the US space program has lost momentum since the 1970s.  The recent and well covered launch of Virgin Galactic’s Space Ship Two (which is not an SSTO I might ad) and the confidence companies such as Virgin and Space X express at in a future and emerging space “tourism” market are further good news.

What is interesting about these two AP problems is that the seem to demand entirely contrary political climates. As Burt Rutan argues, governments cannot be relied on as driving actors for space “trourism” (which really is nothing but a prelude  to colonization). Climate change and environmental policy in general, however, are the free market’s nightmare. If you look at the history of American environmental politics since 1945, you will find that the larger government grew and the more it was involved in regulation, the easier it was for congress to pass environmental bills. When Regan set the stage for a “small is beautiful” American government, it were the environment ministries that were always hit first since they are, for capitalists, a type of anti ministry.

I do not want to end in aporia since there are solutions to these problems. Lets just take a look at how much it currently costs to launch into space:

“All in all, the Buran-Energia program cost between 16 and 17 billion dollars, by comparison the US STS program cost between 3-5 billion dollars. There is no reliable data on the cost of one launch, but this value can be obtained indirectly, using the cost of the  launching 1 kg of payload with the Energia superbooster, using data from Stanford University Studies. Using these figures, a standard Buran-Energia launch costs 131.25 million dollars all up. According, however, to evaluations by specialists at NPO Molniya, the constructors of the shuttle, the cost of lifting 1 kg of payload with Energia is in the range of 3000-5000 $/kg” How much establishing an independent moon base would cumulatively cost, I do not know, but the above figure suggests a lot!”

http://www.k26.com/buran/index.html

At the same time, a recent report released by the Pembina Institute, a Canadian environmental government watch dog, presented the results of an in depth study in to the costs of reducing greenhouse gases for Canada. I use the Pembina example since ina ranking of the 60 wealthiest countries in the world, Canada came out 59th (i.e. second last) after Saudi Arabia. Mitigating additional climate change is expensive for Canada. Right wing sceptics argue meeting its Kyoto targets would cost Canada 20 Billion $. Of course this is debated and needs to be taken with a grain of salt, like most things in the media and on the net.

Although reducing these AP goals to a simple decision between cutting carbon emissions and perhaps subsidizing the space industry is an oversimplification to say the least, both are variables at play and it is important to gain a grasp of the numbers involved.