Farms on the Asteroids: Hotels on the Moon
Hey Kids! The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has a special offer for you! NASA wants to send your package into orbit.
Never thought you could afford to own your own space program? Well now you can! Just make out a check for $500 and mail it to the Director of Financial Management, Code BF, NASA Headquarters, Washington D.C., and NASA will reserve for you a one-and-a-half-cubic-foot package on a space shuttle flight in the early 1980s. “You will receive an acknowledgment in approximately 10 days,” says the NASA bulletin that makes this offer. “Then we will be working together to make your Space Experiment a reality!”
There’s a little more to it, but not much. You can put anything you want in your package as long as it’s “related to a scientific or technological objective,” weighs less than 60 pounds and isn’t likely to blow up or emit deadly gas or be otherwise obnoxious. And that $500 is only a down payment, with the balance ($2,500) due one year before your package – called, in NASA parlance, a “Getaway Special” – is scheduled to fly to orbit and back.
But don’t delay. More than 252 Specials have already been reserved. San Diego Community College has one, to be used for student experiments. An aerospace scientist in Utah has one; his teenaged son is planning to rip off a lizard’s tail and then launch the lizard to see what a new tail grown in zero gravity looks like. Film director Steven Close Encounters of the Third Kind Spielberg has one, but he says he hasn’t decided what he’ll do with it.
All this may seem like an intriguingly populist endeavor – space science for the masses . . . rocket power to the people. But a longer look at the Getaway Special reservation list reveals the real targets of NASA’s proposition. Johnson & Johnson has booked a Special. So has McDonnell-Douglas. Dow Chemical and General Electric have booked three apiece.
“The intent of the small package payload program [a.k.a. Getaway Special],” one NASA official explained, “is to permit private organizations and individuals to carry out experiments in orbit and have access to proprietary rights. We want to encourage research in new materials and new processes that will lead to factories in space.”
That’s space factories, note, not student laboratories. In a time of diminished public enthusiasm – and congressional appropriations – for space science, NASA is looking more and more for alliances with American business, and business, given incentives like the Getaway Special, is beginning to respond. If the trend develops to its fullest potential, you can forget about Luke Skywalker. The next Star Wars you see may be between IBM and ITT.
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