Table of Contents Introduction: A Personal Story ................................................................................ 3 Motivation: General Introduction ............................................................................ 7 Part I: The Dream ....................................................................................................... 13 From Icarus to Apollo .............................................................................................. 13 The First Workable Proposals: Cranks, Visionaries and Rocket Societies .................................................................................................................. 15 The First Space Advocacy Groups: Russia, America, Germany, &Britain .................................................................................................................................... 22 Russia: Interplanetary Communication and GIRD ................................... 22 The British Interplanetary Society ................................................................ 25 The American Interplanetary Society .......................................................... 27 German Rocket Society and von Braun ...................................................... 28 After the War: Motivations along the Path to Apollo ................................... 33 The Imagination and Expectations of the Ages ........................................ 34 The Magic, Commodity Scientism and Selling the Moon ....................... 40 The Moon Sale: Every Saturn must go ........................................................ 63 Part II: Vision .............................................................................................................. 70 Outside NASA after Apollo: Movements and Motivations ......................... 70 Visions, Revisions and Paradigms ............................................................... 70 O’ Neill’s Space Islands ................................................................................... 73 L-5 and Hensons ............................................................................................... 79 O’ Leary’s Reasons for Space Migration .................................................... 85 Werbos and Rationality ................................................................................... 88 NASA after Apollo: the Paralysis ...................................................................... 90 Hangover of the seventies .............................................................................. 90 The new normalcy of the eighties ................................................................. 94 The age of studies ........................................................................................... 100 The age of Peace, finally? ............................................................................. 104 Huntress Study: Frontiers of Science ....................................................... 116 Part III: Mission ........................................................................................................ 119 The Power of Now ............................................................................................... 119 Now, singularity and the sublime ............................................................... 119 The Millennial Project ..................................................................................... 126 Now and power holders ................................................................................. 129 Possible Future Scenarios ............................................................................... 131 Mars Alone: a Personalized Scenario ........................................................ 132 Spaceplane: a Commercial Scenario ......................................................... 136 Rerun of the Race: a Government Driven Scenario ............................... 146 Runaway Technology Scenario ................................................................... 153 Reasons: An Overview .......................................................................................... 169 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 175 English Résumé ....................................................................................................... 181 Czech Résumé ......................................................................................................... 182 Bibliography ............................................................................................................. 184 Film and Media ......................................................................................................... 197 1 Appendix A: Common Acronyms and Abbreviations .................................. 199 Appendix B: The Space Frontier Advocacy – Robert Zubrin ..................... 203 Appendix C: Future of NASA – Weinberger Memorandum to Nixon ....... 210 2 Introduction: A Personal Story As a boy, just before the age of school, I still remember the thrill of the man on the moon and the hushed comments of my family of the Soviets trying to do the same. I understood that the Soviets were up to something even though it was never officially revealed at that time. The clandestine story of N1 Moon rockets was only partly revealed in the nineties. Back then what I understood was that the Soviets tried and failed. I was proud to be a child born into such a fantastic and adventurous age. What beats being born just in time for the "Space Age"? It started with Sputnik in 1957 but for real only with the cosmonaut Gagarin in 1961, which was just about the right time for me to appear. The Soviet propaganda hammered into my pliable mind two major milestones in the adventure of humanity, the destiny to be fulfilled: the Space Age and the Atomic Age. Only to a much smaller degree it was also the Age of Plastics (Yes, Mrs. Robinson) and possibly a smallish Age of Fertilizers. Of course it was also the Age of Computers (or what "we" in the east termed better as the Age of Cybernetics) and the IT revolution came much, much later. I still remember as a little boy having political discussions with friends on our walks to school in the early seventies. We gloated that "we" beat the arch-villain Nixon in Vietnam. "Listen, he almost jumped when he heard how many B52's he just lost!‖ Now I wish that particular arch-villain was jolted harder for what he did. No person is more responsible for the demise of Apollo than Nixon. Archival recordings report the ―law-n-order President‖ almost nuked Hanoi, perhaps for his lost B52s. In this person's mind the close call was much closer than at any other time. Forget the Cuban missile crisis. It could have been Hanoi and that could have been it. Reading through the early history of space I remember with nostalgia every single step that unfolded. It was Skylab that nearly failed. I made a model of it with exotic coffee plastic cans1 that were smuggled from behind the iron curtain (Vienna) by 1 ―A toy or a TV program, a book, a painting, a school science fair project; each can touch off remembrance of a place, an emotion, the person we once were. For each individual, the Space Age offered an array of visual representations and symbolic threads that could, intimately and personally, weave a unique tapestry‖ (Rosenberg 157). 3 a remote Austrian relative, tante Grete. I remember the joint Soviet - American flight in 1975 and the propaganda spin it received. The Boy Scouts (an official designation for us was ―Pioneers,‖ the only youth group the regime tolerated) loudly protested that the ships were not really equal in size as pictured. Rather, the Apollo module was about three times the volume of the Soyuz. The latter seemed of the same size as it was depicted in the painting close to the Apollo space craft. ―They‖ knew how to spin spaceships to appear just right. Then came the moment of a particular Czech heroism: we were the third nation in space. We put our Vladimir Remek out there on the Soyuz 28 mission. Remek was cute, undoubtedly intelligent and in spite of a stutter he was undeniably Czech. Now the Space Age began for real when even "we" Czechs went boldly into space. The Americans lagged. Little did I knew that Jimmy Carter, the Baptist from Georgia, with his huge peanut grin so lionized by the Voice of America and whose regular daily listener everybody in my circle became, took the rudder only at the expense of a much more pro-space (and somewhat less bigoted) Arizona candidate, Morris K. ―Mo‖ Udall. In the Wisconsin primary it was by one of the closest margins that Carter defeated Udall, a mere 37 to 36 percent, and only after the vote swung the other way than the night before. But this led to Carter winning the Democratic nomination and eventually the presidency and the consequences for space-political climate were huge. Mo already signed up for L-5 colonies in space but Carter pushed his zero growth agenda, freezing in the White house in his sweater. He was such a model! The space cowboy reversed the policies: America still lived in the age of plenty and Wild-West (or Space) frontier expansion was still much more appealing than that appalling, sustainable self-decomposition. By that time homeless people started to freeze outside of the White House. But at least there was some television and movie stir-up with the real Enterprise out there. Little did we teenage boys know that the name ―Star Trek‖ came at a price.