We are living at a moment of great promise. Humanity's breakout into space is underway. Yet success is not inevitable. There is no such thing as destiny. Things happen because people make them happen. If what needs to be done is left undone, magnificent futures can die stillborn in the womb of time. Commenting on the failure of the French Revolution to produce a free society, the German writer Friedrich Schiller said, “A great moment found a little people.” We don't want a future historian to someday say the same thing about us.

It is not enough to cheer the efforts of those currently in the arena. Musk, Bezos, and the rest could easily fail. They need reinforcements. If you have the technical or business skills to help them, you might consider enlisting under one of their banners—or, better yet, think about joining with others to start new space ventures. It's not just space launch that needs revolutionary technology. There are plenty of problems that have to be solved to fully open the space frontier, and plenty of opportunity—and need—for new players with new approaches and new ideas.

A century and a half ago, Horace Greeley advised Americans, “Go West, young man, Go West.” He was right. If you want to do something grand with your life, the frontier is the place to be. Today, the frontier is not the West but the sky. So, look up, young minds, look up.

But whether or not you are personally qualified or situated to join the pioneers, there is still plenty you can do. Many things are progressing well in space right now, but many are not, and there are important political and cultural issues that remain to be resolved, which must be resolved favorably if the spaceflight revolution is to fully bear fruit.

A PROGRAM FOR ACTION

In the beginning, there was the word.

There are those who think that because the entrepreneurial space companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin are moving ahead so nicely, we no longer need NASA or other government-led efforts. They could not be more mistaken. There are commercial opportunities that can support private space activities in suborbital and geocentric space, but they will need public support to make sure they are not blocked by hostile or obtuse bureaucracy. Moreover, the critical initial breakout to the moon, Mars, and beyond will need government funding. This is consistent with the history of exploration and settlement on Earth, where high-risk first missions like those of Columbus and Lewis and Clark needed government backing, with commercial development following later. The space entrepreneurs are facilitating the launch of such initiatives, by developing a substantial fraction of the required flight hardware set in advance. This is dramatically lowering the cost, risk, and schedule thresholds associated with such programs, thereby making them much more attractive to the political class, and more sustainable as well. But still, such a decision will need to be obtained.

It's going to take a public-private partnership to place humanity on the moon and Mars. Right now, the private side of that partnership is advancing boldly. But the equally necessary public side—the space program that reports to you and me—is badly adrift.

NASA deserves a lot of credit. A space agency funded by 4 percent of the world's population, it is responsible for launching 100 percent of all the rovers that have ever wheeled on Mars; all the probes that have visited Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto; nearly all the major space telescopes; and all the people who have ever walked on the moon. But while its robotic planetary exploration and space astronomy programs continue to produce epic results, for nearly half a century its human spaceflight effort has been stuck in low Earth orbit. The reason for this is simple: NASA's space science programs accomplish a lot because they are mission driven. In contrast, the human spaceflight program has allowed itself to become constituency driven (or, to put it less charitably, vendor driven). In consequence, the space science programs spend money in order to do things, while the human spaceflight program does things in order to spend money. Thus, the efforts of the science programs are focused and directed, while those of the human spaceflight program are purposeless and entropic.1

This was not always so. During the Apollo period, NASA's human spaceflight program was strongly mission driven. We did not go to the moon because there were three random constituency-backed programs to develop Saturn V boosters, command modules, and lunar excursion vehicles, which luckily happened to fit together, and which needed something to do to justify their funding. Rather, we had a clear goal—sending humans to the moon within a decade—from which we derived a mission plan, which then dictated vehicle designs, which in turn defined necessary technology developments. That's why the elements of the flight hardware set all fit together. But in the period since, with no clear mission, things have worked the other way.

Neither the space shuttle nor the International Space Station were designed as parts of any well-conceived plan to send humans to the moon or Mars. So, like a ballerina demanding a rewrite of Macbeth to display her skill, insistence that they be included as part of such programs only served to make them infeasible. More recently, other constituencies in NASA have made demands that any expedition to the moon or Mars make use of new hobbyhorses, including variously a space station or asteroid fragment in lunar orbit or high-powered electric propulsion, none of which are necessary, desirable, or, arguably, even acceptable, for near-term human exploration.

The current Deep Space Gateway (aka “Lunar Orbit Platform-Gateway,” or “LOP-G”—I am not making this up) program is a case in point.² If you want to understand the merit of this project, consider a business proposition where you are offered a chance to rent an office in Saskatoon. Under the terms proposed, you will need to pay to build the office building and agree to a thirty-year lease at $100,000 per month rent, with no exit clause. In addition, you will need to spend one month per year in Saskatoon and travel through Saskatoon on your way to anywhere else for the rest of your life. That, in a nutshell, is the DSG/LOP-G project. It will cost a fortune to build and a fortune to maintain, and it will add to the propulsion requirements and timing constraints of all missions to the moon and Mars that are forced to stop there—as they surely will, since otherwise the pointlessness of building it will be revealed to the public. It is not an asset but a liability, or rather an entitlement, created for no other purpose but to provide a mechanism to drain agency funds to NASA's largest contractors.

This is unacceptable. NASA's space program is our space program. It does not belong to the major aerospace contractors, or even to NASA's management. It belongs to us. That some of the money that NASA's human spaceflight office throws around on useless projects might end up in the hands of entrepreneurial space companies is not enough. The American people deserve a space program that is really going somewhere. We are paying for it. We have a right to insist on real results.

The mission needs to come first. First and foremost, the NASA human spaceflight program needs a clear, driving goal, which should be to initiate a permanent human presence on the moon and Mars within a decade. Such a deadline is as necessary as a defined destination, because without it, the goal has no force and activities will continue to be directed by entropic vendor or political constituency pressure, rather than by the alleged purpose.

Rather than continue paying for endless cost-plus contracts to “develop” things with no real purpose, NASA needs to set clear goals and contract for services to support those goals. So, for example, let's say enabling human lunar exploration is the goal—as it currently allegedly is. NASA should put out a request for proposals to industry for systems to deliver cargos to the moon, and astronauts round-trip, offering to match development costs dollar for dollar and to award a certain number of missions to the best bidders. Whoever got such a contract would be strongly incentivized to minimize development cost and time because they would be paying half the cost out of pocket and would not start making a profit until actual missions began. This, in fact, is how the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program set up by former NASA administrator Mike Griffin enabled the rapid development of the Dragon system for delivering first cargo, and now crew, to the International Space Station at a cost to the agency of less than 5 percent of what it has thus far spent on the cost-plus Orion system—which, after fifteen years of development, has yet to be flown.

If NASA wants to send humans to the moon or Mars, it should not spend billions on random cost-plus infrastructure projects that supposedly might come in handy if someday there were a program to go. Instead it should just take competitive bids for delivery services. It should incentivize the development of additional systems, including rovers, habitats, life support, power units, space suits, and so on, the same way.

Approached in this way, we can have our first permanent bases established and operating on both the moon and Mars within a decade, for a small fraction of NASA's current budget. We will also have a vibrant private space industry, driving down the cost and advancing the technology of launch vehicles, spacecraft, propulsion, and every other system needed for space exploration and development with all the ferocious creativity that free enterprise can bring to bear. With that, the doorway to the universe will be flung wide open.

Europe, Russia, China, Japan, India, and others could do the same thing, provided they choose to be part of humanity's future. I hope they do. There is room in space for more than one flag.

But a decision to do it is required. That is where you come in.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

If you want humans to get to Mars, then you need to become a space activist.

We have immense latent support for space exploration in America and many other countries, but only a tiny fraction of it is organized. The harvest is plentiful, but the gatherers are few. Permanent organizations with active memberships are needed to generate the kind of political muscle required. In a nutshell, Mars needs you. It's not enough to wish the space program well; if you believe in a future that is not limited by Earth's horizons, you need to join with other like-minded individuals and make your voice heard. Joining a space activist organization is probably the best way to do that.

In the United States, there are basically four organizations to choose from. I'm a bit prejudiced here because I happen to be a leader of one of them, the Mars Society. But I'll try to give you an accurate enough picture to decide where you should center your efforts.

The Planetary Society is the largest of the four, with perhaps fifty thousand members. Founded by Carl Sagan, Louis Friedman, and former Jet Propulsion Lab director Bruce Murray, it is led today by astronomer Jim Bell and television science educator Bill Nye. The Planetary Society is primarily interested in promoting the robotic exploration of the solar system, but it is supportive of a humans-to-Mars program, provided it is done along the lines of Carl Sagan's international collaboration model. You can join the Planetary Society by sending a check for $37 to The Planetary Society, 85 South Grand, Pasadena, CA 91105. For more information, go to www.planetary.org.

The National Space Society is the second largest, with twenty thousand members. Founded by Wernher von Braun and Princeton space visionary Professor Gerard O'Neill, it is led today by Mark Hopkins, Kirby Ikin, and Alice Hoffman. The primary interest of the NSS is to promote the human settlement of space, including the moon, Mars, the asteroids, and free-floating space colonies. The NSS would be equally happy supporting a moon or Mars program based on any of the patriotic-JFK, internationalist-Sagan, or private-enterprise-led models. The NSS is organized into about a hundred local chapters, which organize local and regional events as well as a national conference once a year. You can join the NSS by sending a check for $20 to National Space Society, 1155 15th Street NW, Suite 500, Washington, DC 20005. Membership benefits include a bimonthly glossy magazine and frequent mobilization bulletins concerning the space program. For more information, go to www.nss.org.

The Space Frontier Foundation is the smallest organization, with about five hundred members. Founded by Rick Tumlinson and Jim Muncy, and led today by Jim Feige and Charles Miller, the Space Frontier Foundation has a very strong free-enterprise tilt. Of the three approaches to space mentioned above, it would favor only the free enterprise model. If opening space with maximum free enterprise and minimum government involvement is fundamental to your principles, then consider joining this group. The Space Frontier Foundation sponsors one national conference per year. You can join the Space Frontier Foundation by sending $25 to The Space Frontier Foundation, 16 First Avenue, Nyack, NY 10960. For more information, go to www.spacefrontier.org.

The Mars Society is the newest of the space organizations. Together with many other members of the Mars Underground, including Chris McKay, Carol Stoker, and Tom Meyer, as well as science fiction authors Greg Benford and Kim Stanley Robinson, I founded the Mars Society with the purpose of furthering the exploration and settlement of Mars by both public and private means. Our founding convention in Boulder, Colorado, in August 1998 drew seven hundred people from forty countries, featured 180 papers and talks on everything from Mars mission strategies to the ethics of terraforming, and attracted international press coverage. As of this writing, we have around seven thousand members, divided into seventy chapters, of which forty are in the United States and thirty span the globe. Our activities include broad public outreach, political lobbying, and the operation of two human Mars exploration simulation bases: one in the polar desert on Canada's Devon Island and the other in the desert of southern Utah. To date, more than two hundred crews of six people each have gone to these stations and undertaken simulated Mars missions ranging from two weeks to four months in duration. During these missions, crews are tasked to perform sustained programs of field exploration in geology and microbiology while operating under many of the same constraints that human explorers would face on Mars. By doing so, we are learning a great deal about what field tactics and technologies will prove most useful when humans finally journey to the Red Planet. At the same time, press reportage of these missions—which has appeared in the world's leading media, ranging from the New York Times, CNN, and the Discovery Channel to the BBC and Russian, Chinese, and Japanese national television—has helped make the vision of human exploration of our neighbor world tangible to hundreds of millions of people around the globe.

The Mars Society holds its international convention every August. You can join either through our website at www.marssociety.org or by sending $50 ($25 for students) to Mars Society, 11111 W. 8th Ave., Unit A, Lakewood, CO 80215.

If you want to reach me, you can write in care of the Mars Society address above. If you want to help, sign up at the website so we can put you on the Mars Society electronic mailing list. If you join the Mars Society, you will also get access to our online library. You can get a fair number of my technical papers there, as well as those of many other authors, covering topics ranging from interplanetary propulsion technologies to the ethics of terraforming.

Finally, if you are not a joiner, then do what you can to spread the vision in your own way.

As the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley once said, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

Making history is not a spectator sport. It's your turn at the plate.