In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein’s masterpiece about freedom, revolution and the humor of artificial intelligence, there’s a bit where the lunar colonists throw rocks at the Earth. Big rocks. Gravity makes them into incredibly destructive weapons. The people of Earth can’t do much about it because even getting to the moon is a huge effort. This is a military principle we’ll call the high ground effect, as in when you have the high ground, you have a huge advantage over the other guy. That’s why fighter planes attack from above, why artillery is placed on mountains and why countless battles have been fought over hills (Pork Chop Hill. Bunker hill. etc. etc)

Remember this effect. It will matter soon.

The big news this week is that that misbegotten ground hog has condemned us to another month and a half of global non-warming. Of slightly less import but possibly still newsworthy is that this budget cuts funding for NASA’s shuttle replacement program and for the planned return to the Moon (see here, here , here and here). One obvious point about this: In a budget with a deficit of $1.6+ trillion, the changes being made to NASA are not about the cost-benefit analysis. A budget with such an astronomical deficit is not one where there has been any effort to make the hard budgeting decisions. Just forget that idea. This leads to exactly one conclusion: The cuts to NASA and the narrowing of its mission is an ideological decision.

The ideology in question does not value human space exploration and is shutting the effort down (although it should be mentioned that some of the criticism leveled against some of the programs being canceled – Constellation for example – is entirely justified). Some particularly gullible people will point out the story about replacing NASA’s own launch capabilities with “commercial partnerships.”For the record, while this is a nice idea it has two flaws in my view: It doesn’t go far enough and it probably won’t work. NASA should be no more than a space port authority and maybe an insurance underwriter (since insurance is an essential part of any American activity today). Space should be the province of people, not merely governments. It is the job of humans to explore, to build lives, to start companies and set up homes. Governments don’t do that stuff and there’s no reason to expect them to.

Not to mention that NASA has essentially been on life support for decades. It was obvious even before the last Moon landing in 1972 that the US government in general and NASA in particular had become bored with the whole space program. Like any good bureaucracy, NASA hung on, trying to find ways to justify itself but it’s hard to get excited about billion dollar science projects when there is plenty of fine science going on in the world closer to home. Politicians in particular tend to focus on bread and butter issues (what goodies can I bring home to my district?). Justifying exploration to people of such petty vision is wasted effort. Even if one rare politician really gets it, not enough of the rest will to consistently get the votes to keep it going.

Unfortunately, though NASA has been legally obliged to cooperate with private companies for years, it has not been particularly good at doing so. Again, like the bureaucracy it is, NASA’s idea of cooperation is to design a 10,000 page application form and a committee (or twelve) to evaluate them (Note to the satire impaired: I might be exaggerating slightly to make a point). Few companies are willing or able to jump through all the required hoops. In any case, the future of space exploration is probably not in driving truck for NASA. More is needed.

Forty acres and a robot mule would be a nice start but never mind. At this point, we should turn our attention to the terrible flaw in both my preference for space exploration driven by people, rather than governments, and the new plan for NASA to not bother putting people into space on its own: Space is no longer the domain of one or two super powers. Dozens of countries now have space programs (see here). Most exist for the purpose of launching satellites. Quite a few have (using someone else’s launch facilities) sent astronauts to the International Space Station. Many have at least some military applications, even if they don’t advertise the fact.

This proliferation of space technology is important: Any country that has trained astronauts and launch facilities (such as India and China) and the intent to put humans into space can do so.

What this means is that the United States is giving up the high ground (Remember the high ground and the example of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress? I told you it would matter). Other countries are going to take it. This is guaranteed. A number of other countries are showing more interest in space exploration than the US is now. And there is nothing to stop them.

As ominous as that sounds (and I admit it’s intentional), I don’t believe that this is directly a risk to American national security. There is little evidence that any nation currently exploring the possibilities of space travel means to use space to harm the United States or any other country.  There has been some disturbing work to develop satellite killing technology (see here for example) but I’m not aware of direct threats to US material or people. That does not mean there is no risk of violence.

Actually, I think there is a huge risk of violence in space, when astronauts from multiple countries that are not necessarily friendly to each other begin doing more up there than just running a few show orbits. When they establish bases on the Moon or in orbit, when they begin looking into economic uses (such as asteroid mining or zero-g manufacturing), this alone could spur interesting competition. Competition does not directly lead to violence, of course. Competition over scarce resources (such as the best orbits, or even the first discovery to win a big contract) certainly can. Even if, contrary to all history and common sense, the countries involved avoid the use of force, the possibilities for confrontation will escalate over time.

And, under current plans, the likelihood that the US will be in a position to act as a stabilizing force is tiny and diminishing. Maybe, just maybe, the government should do something more concrete than outsourcing what little space program remains. Just a thought.

Here are some more links that might give food for thought:

• Iran’s latest launch
• Succinct statement on NASA’s situation
• Increasing Chinese space presence
• Future space station plans

Remember the old days, when America had a space program? Me too. Forty years ago tomorrow, on July 20, 1969, my mother woke me up (I was young then and went to bed earlier than I do now) so I could watch Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon on small black and white TV set sitting on top of the piano in the living room.

I wasn’t as excited as I could have been, partly because I was half asleep but mostly because I was a huge science fiction fan. To me, walking on the Moon didn’t seem historic. It seemed inevitable. Neil Armstrong’s “One giant leap” didn’t seem like a giant leap. It was just a minor stepping stone in the grand adventure of exploring the universe.

The shortsighted stupidity of politicians and self-absorbed inertia of massive bureaucracies were unknown to me at the time.

Since the end of the Apollo missions, the official American space program has been marching in place, like a bored zombie. There are no colonies on the Moon or even a space station at L5 or some other adequate location. In two years or so, the U.S. won’t even have its own capability to send humans into space. After billions of dollars and a couple of decades of research into a follow on to the space shuttle, NASA apparently lost interest in the project. The agency that put a man on the Moon in less than 10 years, found keeping people in space was just too hard.

There are grounds for hope for real human space exploration as private companies begin to take up the slack that NASA has dropped. Companies like Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites and SpaceX develop their own technologies for reaching and dealing with space. It took a long time for people to figure out that NASA wasn’t in the game anymore and they would need to do it themselves but that leap seems to have finally been made. Even individual states are getting in on the act, as witness the announcement in January that Virgin Galactic has leased land for a space port in New Mexico.

So on this 40th anniversary of a truly historic achievement, I’m going to be wearing a black armband, in mourning for a once great agency that has become just another (albeit funny shaped) pyramid.