Benson, who sold his software company in 1996 and retired a millionaire at age 50, thinks the problem is simple, and he repeats his solution like a mantra: “Space is a place, not a government program.” In 1997, bored after a year of retirement, he founded SpaceDev, the world’s first commercial space exploration company. SpaceDev plans to design, build and launch a series of spacecraft, conducting missions with no direct government subsidies. Even more revolutionary, Benson is promising his shareholders a healthy profit at the end of each mission. “We’re not a charity,” he says. “We can’t afford not to make a profit.”

Slowly but surely, the seeds of capitalism are spreading into the heavens. Benson, a conservationist who worked in the early days of the federal Energy Department during the Ford and Carter administrations, represents the beginning of a wave that could soon rival the upstart dreams of Silicon Valley in the 1980s. The commercialization of space has yet to impress Wall Street, but the public sector — from Congress to NASA to the White House — has embraced the idea that business will lead the next great space age. A bill being hammered out in the House of Representatives would require NASA to stay out of any activities where its involvement would preclude that of the private sector. In other words, NASA would have to either facilitate commerce or get out of its way. Many people, including businessmen and scientists, see a brand-new industry on the horizon. Benson is aiming to be one of its captains.

This fall, SpaceDev will begin building a miniature spacecraft that will launch in late 2001 and land on a near-Earth asteroid called 4660 Nereus. The Near Earth Asteroid Prospector (NEAP) will collect scientific data — for a price — and will claim ownership of Nereus in a bid to establish private property rights in space, since no one ever has, and no law says you can’t. The mission, which is purely profit-driven, was urged on Benson by the scientific community, including astronomers at the cutting-edge Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., a division of the California Institute of Technology that defines and conducts most deep-space missions for NASA. Nereus, which is a half-mile across and travels in a solar orbit between Earth and Mars, will be extremely close to us in January 2002. The asteroid is a floating mountain of stainless steel, gold, and platinum. It will be Benson’s staging ground for one of the century’s most innovative experiments in capitalism.

An early computer enthusiast, Benson earned a degree in geology from the University of Missouri in 1971 and took a programming job in Washington the next year. A neighbor gave him a copy of a study called “The Limits to Growth,” an apocalyptic warning about the consequences of global warming and the depletion of natural resources. Already disillusioned by the Vietnam War, Benson’s eyes were opened to conservationism and the potential future uses of space as the escape route from a doomed planet. He quit his computer job and went to work for the Solar Energy Division of ERDA, the Energy Research and Development Administration, forerunner to the Energy Department. He helped analyze President Gerald Ford’s National Energy Plan and gave it poor marks for ignoring the potential of solar energy, and he later advised Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign on environmental issues.

At the newly named Energy Department, Benson began to clash with superiors, and left government work to become an independent computer programmer. He founded Compusearch Software Systems in McLean, Va., in 1984. The company pioneered commercial PC-based full-text searching, a precursor to today’s Web search engines. It was profitable every year until Benson sold it in 1995 for several million dollars and moved to Colorado with his wife.

But Benson grew restless. So he started reading up on his old avocation, astronomy, and began looking for ways to meld it with his business acumen. “I’ve always liked science and technology and I’ve always liked astronomy, ever since I saw the rings of Saturn through a department-store telescope,” he told me. “I’ve been a businessman all my life, so when I think about space, I think about business.” Benson did the first thing any good businessman would: He defined a market, realizing that the NASA budget represented “one or two billion dollars” that taxpayers were forking out annually “to collect data in space,” since missions mainly produce material for scientists to analyze. Benson decided to re-allocate some of those funds.

At the same time SpaceDev was forming, NASA was looking for ways to get out of routine space matters and into forging new technologies expensive enough to require government funding. As a start, NASA had begun to transfer oversight of its shuttle missions to a private consortium called the United Space Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin. NASA administrator Daniel Goldin is spearheading a cost-cutting campaign with a series of “Discovery” missions, small-scale spacecraft designed to proceed from development to flight in three years or less and cost under $150 million. The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR), NASA’s ongoing mission to the asteroid Eros, is the first of these. Benson finds NEAR to be “a good mission to try to emulate.” NEAR won’t land on the asteroid, but will orbit around Eros for a year once the two cross paths a second time, in February 2000. (The first time, NEAR failed to fire its main engine, missing an earlier opportunity to orbit.) Benson’s mission, he hopes, will do more for less, landing on Nereus for under $50 million.

How? With low administrative costs, no red tape, and technological innovations that have resulted in miniaturization. Whereas NEAR weighed in at 2,000 kg, NEAP will weigh 200 kg. NASA’s spacecraft required a $50 million launch vehicle, but Benson plans to send his up for between $1.5 million and $6 million. SpaceDev will collect million-dollar research fees according to a published price list from scientists (many of whom will get their funding from NASA), and is also looking into corporate sponsorship (prices for logos, which may adorn the NEAP spacecraft, are negotiable). Construction on NEAP begins in October, using off-the-shelf components. “Most spacecraft are made of commercially available products,” says Benson. “I don’t know if the public is aware of that, but they ought to be.” Future spacecraft will be standardized, “to make many more in the coming years and keep the cost down.”

When SpaceDev launched in 1997, much of the media focused on the company’s intention to declare mining rights on the mineral-rich Nereus. In 1991, Benson had been alerted to the value of natural resources in space in an article by Steve Ostro of JPL, a leading radar astronomer. Ostro examined a near-Earth asteroid and determined that it contained naturally occurring stainless steel. (Ostro would later say of SpaceDev, “As a privately funded commercial enterprise, it marks the dawn of a space ‘gold rush’ with tremendous positive long-term importance to human civilization.”) But Benson began to realize the impracticality of bringing tons of minerals back into the atmosphere. Where would they land?

Luckily, scientists handed Benson a new idea when they began to pay serious attention to near-Earth objects in our corner of the universe, soon determining there may be as many as 100,000, in orbits similar to Earth’s. Scientists believe that as many as 20 percent of them are dormant comet cores, or “space icebergs,” containing water, which can be electrolyzed into oxygen and hydrogen. “And that’s rocket fuel,” Benson says confidently. “Without water in space nothing is possible. With water in space, everything is possible: water supports life, grows food, and serves as energy.” Finding a source of rocket propellant in space “could be a major economic attraction,” Benson has said.

In terms of economic attractions, the new industry could use a boost. Take Iridium, the satellite telephone company with much-publicized money problems. Iridium spent $5 billion launching its global satellite network, but the bottom fell out when it found itself 400,000 customers shy of the 500,000 it needed to break even. In August the company sought bankruptcy protection after going into default on its $1.5 billion debt. I asked Benson what he thought of the debacle. “How could anybody in their right mind have thought that thing would work?” he said, with true bafflement. “It was wildly expensive and under-powered, and it’s not servicing an under-serviced market. How can anyone expect to spend $5 billion on something and then sell $1,500-to-$2,000 telephones and charge $8 a minute?”

Benson rightfully distanced his company from the satellite-telephone industry, but conceded that “Iridium has hurt the market. It has hurt the Wall Street interest in these things.” He knows this problem firsthand. Last April, Benson ended a protracted tussle with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which had accused him of overstating SpaceDev’s earnings potential to investors. In a settlement with the SEC, he agreed to tone down his projections. The usually expansive Benson grew terse when I asked about the run-in: “It’s ancient history and I have nothing to say about it.” For Benson, a stern businessman who prides himself on his nose for financial order, the criticism still stings. Still, he admits, “You never know who the winners and losers are going to be — SpaceDev is just another risky startup.”

For a risky startup, a lot of important people are in Benson’s corner, including NASA’s Goldin, who has said of the NEAP mission, “This is a hell of a courageous thing to do. It will get people’s attention focused on the frontier still to be conquered.”

Benson has also hired some of the best in the field. They include a board of directors with several former NASA officials and mission planners and a chief mission architect, Rex Ridenoure, who spent more than a decade at JPL and before that held positions with the Hughes Space and Communications and Lockheed. Benson himself is chairman of the board, president and CEO, and is active in SpaceDev’s marketing and sales.

Instead of the vision of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke — Pan Am flights to an orbiting space station — the real 2001 will see the launch of NEAP, the potential harbinger of a new age that may be stranger than fiction. The NEAP mission will observe Nereus over a period of one to three months, during which the spacecraft will drop scientific instruments on the surface. In July 2002, NEAP will land on the asteroid, and SpaceDev will claim ownership of it. Since the only law currently governing space is the 1967 U.N. Outer Space Treaty, which deals with issues of national sovereignty in space, Benson may establish a legal precedent for extraterrestrial property rights. As astronomer, professor and writer Timothy Ferris said, “The laws won’t be written in earnest until some buccaneer forces them to be.” Benson clearly relishes the thought of being that space-age pirate.

But SpaceDev doesn’t spring solely from a capitalistic urge. “I’ve been an environmentalist most of my life,” Benson points out. While he initially conceived of the new company as “a way to save natural resources on Earth” by importing them from space, the mission still resonates with the idealist in Benson, only for different reasons. “I think space will happen. People will move off the planet,” he said. “We’ll wind up with self-sustaining human settlements off the earth that in some ways will be valuable, because they will create gene pools.” In the event of “some catastrophe on earth in the future, if there are self-sustaining settlements out in space or on other planets or moons, then the human race will go on.” And of course, if Benson has his way in space, the profit margins will go up.

A similar CD was carried on last year’s Mars 98 Polar Lander — but only school-age kids could participate. Over 932,000 kids’ names were collected, and Lee says that quite a few adults wanted in on it, too. Now they’re getting their chance. Within a day of announcing the new CD on a NASA mailing list, nearly 9,000 people signed up to have their names rocketed into space in April 2001. Lee says adults are as excited as kids about the names CD, if not more so. In fact, he’s been hearing from kids who don’t want their names sent to Mars, but who have been added to the CD by “overzealous uncles.” Some kids are afraid that the CD will be used by Martians to compile an invasion hit list.

The kids have little to worry about: Because of the high radiation levels on Mars — the planet has no atmospheric shield like Earth’s ozone layer — the data on the CD will be damaged beyond recognition within a few days of landing. NASA could construct a radiation-proof case for the CD, but “the added cost to the mission would be considerable.” Instead, the agency will let the CD destruct and will leave its remains on Mars.

The Mars 2001 Lander is part of NASA’s new philosophy of “Faster, Better, Cheaper,” which attempts to generate maximum scientific returns at a minimum of cost. The mission will carry a number of experiments specifically designed to aid a future human visit to Mars. Most notable is a system devised to create rocket fuel out of materials readily available in the Martian environment, a procedure suggested in the 1996 Robert Zubrin book, “The Case for Mars.”

But until the day when tourists can head off to the Red Planet, the name CDs will give everyday people a chance to send a bit of themselves to Mars. Lee expects that the name lists could become a regular part of NASA missions, at least those with an element of public interest.

“We’d like to do this on the Europa mission,” Lee says. (Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa, will be the target of an upcoming mission to look for extraterrestrial life.) “Humans have a natural inclination to be explorers,” he says. By adding one’s name to the 2001 Lander CD, Lee purports, “you can be a part of the exploration.”

At least for a few days after landing.

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“I’ve been through the solar movement and the environmental movement, but I have never experienced such passion,” Bruce Anderson’s voice quaked. “It was palpable.”

The late night call had shrilled through my cottage. After a while, I began to comprehend that, no, my friend had not been to a workshop on tantric sex. Anderson had flown to Boulder, Colo., on Aug. 13, 1998, to join more than 700 people at the founding convention of the Mars Society.

As director of industrial liaisons for MIT, Anderson enjoys a prime view of the technological horizon; he’s an aficionado of reality, not science fiction. Moreover, with a long history of environmental activism, he’s not inclined to undervalue our present planetary accommodations. So when Bruce revealed the Mars Society’s mission — to establish a human settlement on Mars within 10 years — my pulse accelerated.

The next day, I opened an investigative file. My first step was to dig out the story of the society’s roots in a loose-knit confederation of Mars enthusiasts who called themselves the Mars Underground. Long ago — about 20 years — a group of precocious graduate students at the University of Colorado, including Chris McKay and Carol Stoker in astrogeophysics (both now at NASA Ames Research Center and on the Mars Society’s steering committee), started a seminar on terraforming Mars — transforming the planet into a more Earth-like habitat. That led, in April 1981, to the first Mars conference at which enthusiasts bonded as the Mars Underground, sketching plans for human exploration of Mars. The conferences continued every three years; by the third Boulder conference in 1987, there were more than 1,000 attendees. Carl Sagan keynoted.

Members of the Mars Underground thought their efforts had paid off when in 1989 President Bush called for manned missions back to the moon and on to Mars in the 21st century. Responding to the president’s bugle, NASA proposed a buffed-up space station, already a pet project of many scientists. At the station, a Galactica-sized spaceship would be constructed for a voyage to Mars “flag and footprints”-style (we came, we saw, we conquered). The estimated cost: $450 billion.

It was a lousy plan with a Neiman Marcus price tag. Splat went the Mars movement.

But NASA’s wasn’t the only plan around: Robert Zubrin had one, too. Zubrin, a science teacher, attended the second Boulder conference in 1984. The event rekindled his childhood excitement over Sputnik and Kennedy’s classic 1961 mission statement: to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth by the end of the decade. By 1989 Zubrin, who’d moved on to become a senior engineer at Martin Marietta, had developed his own strategy for getting to Mars and staying there a while. Pitching his “Mars Direct” plan to NASA and the Mars Underground, Zubrin kept fine-tuning his ideas, eventually writing and publishing the book “The Case for Mars” in 1996.

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The book details a plan that takes about five years to execute, at a base cost of $20 billion plus $2 billion per mission. It works this way: 1) Send an Earth return vehicle (ERV) to Mars. 2) On Mars, using off-the-shelf technology, ERV components convert carbon dioxide from Mars’ atmosphere plus hydrogen to produce methane and oxygen — the fuel and propellant needed for the return trip. 3) After a six-month outbound trip, a spacecraft with a crew of four lands on Mars and establishes a base. 4) For 18 months, the crew explores Mars, looking for water, mineral deposits and evidence of microbial life. 5) As the first crew returns to Earth, a second crew arrives, establishing a new base and, perhaps, beginning greenhouse agriculture. 7) The process of launches, new bases, exploration, settlement and eventual transformation of Mars into an Earth-life planet continues.

By 1996, the engineers and scientists of the Mars Underground had dwindled to a small, grim group. But a popular tide was rising. Science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson published “Red Mars” in 1993 and its sequels “Green Mars” in 1994 and “Blue Mars” in 1997 — adding characters and plot to a story line that Zubrin had already demonstrated was technically and financially feasible. When Pathfinder landed on Mars in July 1997, about 2,000 enthusiasts, including Bruce Anderson, watched the first pictures of Mars flicker on a 26-foot screen at the Pasadena (Calif.) Civic Center. Over the next 30 days, NASA’s Pathfinder Web site took 566 million hits.

“I got 4,000 letters from people that read my book, all basically asking, how do we make this happen?” says Zubrin.

That ground swell convinced the Mars Underground to convene the Mars Society Founding Convention in Boulder last August. The epic conference covered a wide swath of territory, including biomedical issues, advanced propulsion and the need for a legal system on Mars. The conference organizers wanted to break out of the confines of the space-industrial complex and build a populist movement — and they got the diversity they sought. For example, Kathleen Bohne, a 12-year-old home-schooled Colorado girl, gave a brilliant presentation, describing how the prospect of exploring Mars had inspired her. And a plenary session on the ethics of terraforming Mars unleashed a ruckus of dissent.

Six of seven panelists spoke fondly of extending the concept of “Manifest Destiny” into space — including Zubrin and, most ardently, science-fiction writer and astrophysicist Gregory Benford. Most panelists had no problem with annihilating indigenous Martian life, as long as doing so advanced human interests. No one gave a damn about the fate of subterranean microbes on Earth, so it didn’t occur to the engineers that people might care about them on Mars.

But when the panelists invited questions, the conversation heated up. It was, essentially, an outer-space version of the abortion debate: When does life begin to have value? To many in the audience, whatever meager life Mars had managed to harbor had the same ethical value as Earth’s biota (the sum of all living organisms). Afterwards, several people from the audience climbed onstage to continue the discussion for another two hours. One of those was a corporate attorney from Los Angeles named John McKnight.

“Dr. Zubrin listened, really listened,” says McKnight, “and understood we weren’t Luddites or anti-Mars or anti-terraforming. For the most part the interchange was exhilarating. I think it did spook some of the Mars Underground to suddenly be challenged by all those people whose values were so different from that of the old steely-eyed missile men.” The docking between lay public and expert engineers wasn’t the smoothest, according to McKnight, but it was a respectful engagement nonetheless. “I think it was the birth of Mars as a grass-roots cause, the real birth of the Mars Society,” concludes McKnight.

Like Zubrin, McKnight had been a space-crazed kid who lost his way. He rediscovered Mars in the mid-’90s with Robinson’s trilogy. The Pathfinder photos of the Martian surface made him feel like he was 10 years old again, living in a world full of possibility. He read everything he could get his hands on about Mars and penned one of the 4,000 letters Zubrin received. On the final night of the convention, McKnight offered to create a worldwide task group to address the legal and ethical aspects of Mars settlement. Riding such enthusiasm, the society took off.

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My case file was already bulging. But I wanted to better understand the object, half the size of Earth and one-10th its mass, that had inspired so much passion. So I attended a lecture at the University of Arkansas by Mars geology expert Harry McSween.

McSween described the ’97 Mars Pathfinder mission. First, the Pathfinder’s rover located andesite, an indication of a possible continental crust system like Earth’s. Second, unlike Earth, where soils vary locally, all Martian soils seem to have roughly the same composition — as though homogenized by dust and wind storms. Third, much of the purported evidence of life on early Mars comes from the study of one Mars meteorite. Embedded in the meteorite are tiny objects that some people think are fossils, but McSween believes are magnetite grains.

On the other hand, McSween noted that water is probably present at both Martian poles and underground elsewhere. Erosion and flood deposits indicate massive, long-term water flow — like “pulling the plug on the Great Lakes.” What’s more, hydrogen isotopes in Mars meteorites imply that water cycles from the atmosphere into rocks. Why all the recent fuss about water on Mars, ice crystals on Earth’s moon, water vapor in the atmosphere of Titan (a moon of Saturn), and indications of a hidden sea on Europa (a moon of Jupiter)? Because everything we know today suggests that wherever there is water — no matter how cold, hot, dark, light, pressurized or laced with chemicals or radiation — there is microbial life.

At a reception across campus in the University Museum, McSween stroked a large asteroid on display. “She’s worth a lot of money,” he said. I asked McSween about the Mars Society, but he hadn’t heard of the organization yet, so I explained the society’s goal of beginning settlement no later than 2008 — as compared to NASA’s revised plans today, which vaguely call for human exploration in 2014 or so. “Oh, I think we have to go in steps,” McSween said. “NASA needs to prove it can carry out a large project on time, in budget. They did it once with the Apollo program, but their recent history with the International Space Station isn’t great.”

That ho hum approach — on time, in budget, no risk — has become NASA’s mantra. The collective rush we got from Sputnik’s launch in ’57 and from the glide of human feet upon the moon in 1969 has been supplanted with the tedium of watching objects circle and circle and circle Earth. The Mars Society could restore boldness to space exploration, with its spanking new motto — “Public if possible, private if necessary, but on to Mars!”

Already the Mars Society has 70 chapters in 20 countries, 10 task forces, 900 dues-paying members and a mailing list of 6,000. Relying on the Internet, the Society has become both a global forum and bazaar. Task forces coordinate through discussion and work groups. At the hub is the Web site, providing chapter contacts, news, a library, bookstore, archives and message boards.

The membership has toned its political muscles by rescuing the Marie Curie rover on the Mars 2001 mission from budget trimming. To date, the organization has operated online only — but bricks and mortar, file cabinets and a phone will soon materialize in Lakewood, Colo., at Pioneer Astronautics, a space R&D firm founded by Zubrin. Just before Christmas, the steering committee hired an executive director — John McKnight.

McKnight went to the Founding Convention hoping to engage in one good conversation and “got a lot bigger piece of the action than I ever imagined.” Some of the forthcoming action will be mundane — the start-up challenges of purchasing office equipment, writing procedure manuals, ordering business cards and fund-raising. Another project is the construction of a $1.5 million Arctic base, with money raised from private sources. To be located in the Martian-like Haughton Crater region of Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic, the base will be a prototype of the Mars habitat for researchers and astronauts.

Still another formidable task before McKnight is to finish chiseling a profile of the Mars Society. How, for example, will the Mars Society relate to NASA, one institution to another? Several NASA officials sit on the society’s steering committee, and a large portion of the Mars Underground work for NASA as employees, contractors or subcontractors. Today NASA’s Reference Mission, its blueprint for manned exploration, has evolved away from the $450 billion monster of a decade ago; now it’s essentially “Mars Semi-Direct” — Zubrin’s plan plus two more crew members and one more launch per mission at a cost of about $55 billion. But aside from tiny budget allocations through the Johnson Manned Space Flight Center in Houston for Mars research and astronaut training, what little money Congress is allocating to Mars is all for robotic missions. The shuttle and the International Space Station gobble up NASA’s entire “manned” budget.

McKnight doesn’t fault NASA for its robotic-skewed priorities. NASA can’t lead, says McKnight. “As a government agency, its job is to follow where the president points and Congress pays.” The Mars Society joins existing groups like the Planetary Society and National Space Society on the nonprofit side of the space industrial complex. However, unlike these “newsletter groups,” as Zubrin describes them, the society is an activist entity: It aims to influence where the president points and Congress pays. McKnight elaborates: “We’re doing political action, looking to meet with potential presidential candidates to encourage them to make Mars a priority in the next administration.” In short, the Mars Society wants to see the first U.S. president of the third millennium walk to the podium for his or her inaugural speech and, echoing Kennedy’s promise three decades ago, announce that the United States will lead a global consortium to establish the first colony on Mars by the end of the decade.

“If that doesn’t happen,” says McKnight, “we can act as NASA’s competition by pursuing a private space program. That way, we’ve got a space race again, between us and NASA, and that can only speed the way to Mars.” In such a race, the society has a couple of advantages. “We’re global, with access to a much bigger talent pool, ” says McKnight. “And we have more fronts on which we can progress. We’ll explore the possibility of sending out a hitchhiker payload on a European or Japanese mission. We’re eager to build our presence in Russia. As we grow, we’ll be looking less and less like an American group with an American agenda. But as the big kid on the block, NASA will always figure prominently in our attentions and efforts.”

The Mars Society chose the timing of its debut carefully: It has time to influence the November 2000 election. The just-launched Mars Polar Lander destined for the planet’s south pole, along with the December-launched Mars Climate Orbiter, will begin returning new data on Mars in late 1999: analyses of rock and soil samples, views of the south pole, sound recordings, subsurface temperatures and observations about the movement of water and dust in the Martian atmosphere. That should help stir public interest in Mars. So, too, may a TV miniseries: Variety reported in November that Fox plans to air a miniseries based on Kim Stanley Robinson’s books, produced by “Titanic” director James Cameron and to be shown in the first quarter of 2000.

Underground for two decades, the Mars movement now pushes at the landscape of possibility — a pioneering spirit prepared to erupt into our lives through TV, educational initiatives, new products, symposia and, if the Mars Society achieves its goal, an international commitment to colonizing Mars. As the pitch of Mars fever increases, people will wonder: Is this a good thing?

Those of us who experienced the ’60s, either the big waves or the ripples of its wake, shared a sense of taking part in something more important than ourselves. Previous generations have found such passion in other historical moments. For young people like Kathleen Bohne, the rising tide of the Mars movement may be a rare opportunity to participate in the next defining moment in human history.

And what exactly is that? Today humanity sits on a threshold. Soon life will vault from Earth to Mars, the moon, asteroids and other planets. Some people will argue that the urge to leave our problem-ridden Earth is merely another expression of a disposable society. Others will contend that we should, instead, invest the time and energy in bettering conditions here.

But surely a global conversation about how we’ll seed Earth-originated life on another planet could reward us with a heightened perspective on problems at home. Such a conversation, and its outcome, might improve conditions on Earth via a simple mechanism — elongating the axes of time, distance and scale in which our species thinks and acts.

The Mars Society is a forum for the emerging philosophy of planetary exploration. Here, the lay public can collaborate in setting a course for the settlement and governance of Mars. Will we generate a prime directive (` la “Star Trek”) for noninterference in the evolution of other species, including microbes? What might a legal system for Mars look like? Can we devise less exploitative templates for relationships among human beings, between humans and other species, between humans and their habitat on Mars?

Such off-planet questions, while they may seem at the margins of relevance
today, will only grow more common, and more urgent, in the future. Answering them well could benefit not only the pioneers of Mars but the rest of us back
home.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
–T.S. Eliot

See, there’s the problem in a capsule. Even in this long season of Mir muddling, not just NASA but too many Americans are unwilling to draw a clean line between the extravagant joys of sci-fi and the downright dull reality of human life as lived in space. Until we do, we as a nation won’t be able to enter a vital and long overdue discussion about our priorities in space. Namely, whether we really should spend more fortunes to keep propelling people up into a black vacuum.

Stripping away illusion won’t be easy, given that the movie and rocket industries share a huckster’s soul joined from their very beginnings. When, in the 1920s, German director Fritz Lang conceived a film called “Girl in the Moon,” he hyped it by hiring scientists to make a real, working space rocket. The film launched before the real rocket was barely begun, but a teenage space nerd named Wernher von Braun was thrilled to be allowed to tinker with the leftover parts. Master of the pitch, von Braun went on to build rocket weapons for Hitler and then head up America’s own space program, all along invoking Darwinian destiny, God’s will, whatever story worked best to sell his claim that man must get to Mars and beyond.

Granted, for a brief moment in the 1960s, the accelerating gains of NASA made almost any space saga seem plausible. My own family not only bought the feverish dream, we lived it, especially when my engineer father was assigned by Lockheed to work on RIFT, a short-lived nuclear-powered rocket to the moon. At his send-off party, nobody let worry about a possible radiation catastrophe intrude on the swinging mix of martinis and Herb Alpert tunes. Hey, if astronaut Alan Shepard was already golfing on the lunar surface, why doubt Stanley Kubrick’s vision of the far-off year 2001, with Pan Am shuttling vacationers to the moon?

Of course, ever since the Apollo stunt was achieved, the trajectories of NASA and Hollywood have diverged by light years. The exploding Challenger killed a school teacher; the Strategic Defense Initiative proved a fraud; the ho-hum shuttle missions of the ’90s have tried to catch a satellite on a stick or let one out on a balky tether. And now the claustrophobic Mir seems a microcosm of all the petty irritants of life on Earth. Except that up there, the inevitable parking lot fender bender or appliance on the fritz can be lethal.

Meanwhile, thanks to ever-improving special effects technology, TVs and cineplexes teem with exotic life in other galaxies. Hollywood keeps using outer space as Fritz Lang intended: as a vast screen onto which we may project our limitless imaginations, writing and rewriting our scripts, personal and national, any way we like. Take a recent episode of “Star Trek Voyager” in which a Korean-American officer named Mr. Kim gets the hots for a busty newcomer recently disconnected from a hive of machinelike aliens called The Borg. Mr. Kim’s lust grows by the light of the star ship’s pulsating warp core, but when the Barbie-shaped Borg asks, in metallic monotone, whether he wants to “copulate,” the flustered Kim has to make up his mind. Just like that, we’re invited to imagine not just interracial but interspecies sex. Or sex unentangled by feelings. Or sex with a machine. Or (perhaps most far-fetched), inconsequential sex between military crew members.

Sadly, a NASA consultant has let slip what sex in gravity-free space would really be like. In a book called “Pioneering Space,” Alcestis Oberg writes that “interplanetary lovers have to keep very, very, still or crash themselves through the nearest exit.” Even belted down, their slightest thrusts would ruin precious experiments by jiggling instruments. Weightlessness draws the body into an unhandy fetal “slouch,” and as for bodily fluids, well, sweat “sticks in globules to the skin and makes one feel exceedingly tacky and slippery.” All this grimly dovetails with what else is known about how badly space travel treats the human body. Nausea and vomiting come with the territory, as would deadly doses of radiation on the way to Mars. And the longer you stay up, the more your muscles atrophy, your bones deplete. The Mir crew had to exercise for a week to ready themselves for a day’s brief fix-it mission. As the Russians of Soyuz proved, nine months of weightlessness renders you virtually crippled.

My point is that NASA’s outer space is the direct opposite of Hollywood’s. On “Star Trek,” space is a playground for experimenting with notions of self, free from laws of physics and culture. On Mir or any other cramped craft we’re likely to send aloft, space is a hostile freeze demanding strict adherence to procedure, a swarm of bureaucrats monitoring the trapped pilots’ every move.

So why the continued, willed blurring of these two antithetical “spaces”? Why, for example, is the voice of “Star Trek’s” Captain Picard chosen to narrate a pro-NASA propaganda film, aired on PBS, that makes a U.S. mission to Mars sound inevitable? Follow, as usual, the money. Specifically the $17 billion already spent on a space station that so far is only paper, the $77 billion more the project will ring up within seven years, by General Accounting Office estimates, all of this often justified as mere prep work for a who-knows-how-expensive manned mission to Mars.

“The ‘Star Trek’ lobby” is how Robert Park refers to the powerful interests pressing for this money. By which Park means, basically, the aerospace industry. Park, a former head of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and now a physicist at the University of Maryland, was invited last week to address NASA’s Langley operation on the 40th anniversary of Sputnik. He took that opportunity to reality check the “Star Trek” lobby:

“Everything we have learned in the past four decades has said we are going down the wrong road. Humans are not going to Mars. Even if we could survive the trip, which is doubtful, the astronaut in a suit has no sense of touch, nothing to hear. Only sight. And we have better eyes on Mars now, thanks to Pathfinder’s robot. If we do explore the solar system it will be virtual, by probes and robots.”

Park says that every NASA scientist he talks to agrees with him — but usually very privately. That leaves the space station and its fleet of attendant shuttles orbiting in search of a purpose. Science? The National Science Foundation is expected to fund astronomy and every other avenue of scientific inquiry with half the space station budget. Yet the position of the American Physical Society is this: The space station cannot be justified on the basis of science.

Russian relations, then? Hard to see how a floating symbol of cooperation in space will deter anyone bent on selling nuclear secrets to bad guys on Earth. No, the primary purpose of the shuttle and space station is to train more astronauts, says Park, and that fills him with dread.

“The danger is that we are going to spend as if we’re sending people to Mars and beyond, even though we will never do it. By the time that becomes clear, we won’t have the budget for probes and robots and satellites perfect for the job. The greatest single obstacle to space exploration is human beings.”

What if we did follow Park’s common-sense advice, putting to rest futile dreams of landing our bodies on distant planets, choosing “virtual” space exploration instead? We would get our full fix of images from out there, enough to satisfy astronomers and Hollywood F/X artists alike. The billions left over could, perhaps, be devoted to some other American Dream Project equally symbolic of a national consensus. This would present a perfect opportunity to finally begin to shake off the Cold War hangover and democratize the setting of science goals in America. As is done now in countries like Britain, Denmark and Holland, lay persons might cross-examine experts, deliberate among themselves and then report their findings on science and technology policies at national press conferences. If, after a thorough, rational assessment of the costs and risks of plutonium-powered electrical generators in space, the citizenry votes to spend the whole pile sending swarms of Cassini’s cousins into the heavens, so be it. More likely, Park’s “virtual” space explorers would remain the modest budget item they are today, and the savings would flow to health research or renewable energy or some other quest of direct, tangible benefit to the average person.

Either way, America would have grown out of its long, spaced-out adolescence. To keep our wildest space fantasies while grounding our astronauts — there is my vision of the final frontier.

Their claim, of course, is a bit out there, but the issue they raise should not be laughed off.

Earlier this summer some of the world’s top space scientists gathered at Princeton University for the Space Studies Institute’s biannual conference. Since 1974, the Institute, which was founded by physicist Gerard O’Neill and is now headed by Freeman Dyson, has examined man’s expansion into space. Past SSI conferences have included discussions of orbiting space colonies, lunar bases and vast arrays of solar energy panels in orbit around Earth. This year, man’s ownership of space was the order of the day, and, as would be expected, a number of lawyers were on hand.

For example, James Dunstan, a communications lawyer at Haley Bader and Potts, an Arlington, Va., firm, led a conference session called “International, Legal and Economic Considerations.” Dunstan, who half-jokingly described SSI as “a support group for lawyers,” pointed out an appetizing legal conundrum: Nobody’s clarified a private property code for space. The logic was simple: Why would I want to spend the money to build a mine on a planet if someone else could land their spaceship there and claim a share of my ore? Why invent a better way to harness solar energy if I had to share the profits? For those who believe in the universality of market solutions, shouldn’t the marketplace be universal?

If it seems rather early in the game to worry about interplanetary mining operations when we still have trouble getting the Hubble Telescope to focus, tell that to the American Bar Association. An ABA committee is already looking into the legal ramifications of private and intellectual property in space, and its head, New York lawyer Lawrence Roberts, presented a paper at the conference on regulating solar system resources. We must be especially careful, he warned, when it comes to a planet that might contain life, or the potential for life. But for dead moons and asteroids, Roberts said, our top priority should be the development of private property. Apparently, science was not of major importance.

In a major confession, however, the lawyers admitted they couldn’t conquer the void alone. Investment bankers and venture capitalists were also needed, a suggestion greeted with widespread approval from the many engineers and businessmen in the crowd. One presenter even proposed setting up a venture capital fund, a sort of space development bank that could be run out of the Department of Commerce. Others argued that the private sector should be left alone to supply the necessary funding. “After all,” said an engineer as he left a conference lunch, “we let the market decide things down here. Why not everywhere?”

Some at the conference remembered that space exploration used to mean more than making a buck. Steven Wolfe, who was billed as a “consultant,” proposed a march from Harlem to NASA headquarters in Washington to show that space should be available for everyone to explore. Wolfe seemed frustrated with the world in general, and one got the sense that his largest reason for supporting space colonization was simply to get the hell out of here. Whatever the origins of his frustration, his plea fell on relatively deaf ears. The audience didn’t want a march from Harlem; they wanted a march to Wall Street. Educate people? As Dunstan said, “In our society, we value knowledge, but we don’t believe in just transferring it. We believe in selling it.”

Maybe such sentiments should not have been surprising in these free-market times, particularly when NASA is struggling valiantly to maintain a workable budget (the White House and Senate have recommended it be slashed by $209 million, the House by a slightly less drastic $148 million). The SSI has always held a finger up to the political wind, and if NASA had more money to spend, perhaps attendees would have felt more charitable to the agency (the only truly spontaneous applause at the four-day conference came when a NASA-funded graduate student described the agency as an energy-leeching bureaucracy).

To be fair, NASA is trying to get with the program. Jet Propulsion Lab documents describe the Pathfinder mission to Mars as “our current business,” which produces a “product” of “information about Mars” and whose customers include not just “scientists” but “everyone.” But many of those looking skyward weren’t buying. “There’s only one thing that’s going to take us into space,” said a scientist. “That’s the potential to make some real money.” One wonders whether whatever force created the very cosmos these men sought to exploit had ever thought in such terms; but then, as a conference veteran remarked, “God had a pretty decent budget to play with.”

Yes, God did have a bigger budget, but government spending on space provided more spin-off products like Tang and Teflon. It has inspired Americans to go into science, and even — if only for intermittent moments — bridged gaps of class, race and gender. It has even made us think of our world in new ways. “In the long run,” the late Carl Sagan wrote, “the greatest gift of science may be in teaching us, in ways no other human endeavor has been able, something about our cosmic context, about where, when and who we are.”

That we now desire to turn the heavens into terms sheets and stock options is pretty depressing for those of us who were hoping to meet Obi-Wan Kenobi out there, not Gordon Gekko. Plaintiffs Ismail, al-Umari and Khalil may be less an amusing aberration and more an ominous sign of things to come. The way the lawyers, businessmen and bankers see it, if there are indeed hundreds of billions of worlds out there, then they all could use some deal-making acumen. And if we soil the cosmos in the process, the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.