A little good news is needed now and then. The pioneer spirit is still alive. As a person somewhat responsible for the resurgence in technology prize awards, I have a few things to say about Burt Rutan’s capture of the Ansari X-Prize by being the first to fly a man to space in a reusable craft twice within a week. He follows the great technology pioneers Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, both of whom came to prominence during similar fair contests: The Guggenheim Trophy and Orteig Prize respectively. (From these exemplars some might now see a reason the powers that be shy away from fair contests—contests where they can’t really control who wins the prizes—and it was left to an Iranian family, the Ansaris, to fully fund the X-Prize.)

A speech by Burt Rutan before the National Space Society is worth a view (requires QuickTime ). He repeatedly and angrily declares his embarrassment at the risk averse culture that has strangled the pioneer spirit since the feats of the 1960s—nearly 40 years ago. I’ve got my issues with his speech but we clearly agree that something went horribly wrong with the pioneer spirit subsequent to the 1960s. The turning inward of the human potential has resulted in the halting of human progress upward and outward with aerospace technology being bureaucratically and monotonously scaled up for jumbo jet transportation. The result is the sort of danger warned of by Charles Lindbergh in his 1939 Reader’s Digest article “Aviation, Geography, and Race”: a sea of humanity threatening our race which is, after all, a global minority. Indeed the technological exemplar of this era has been driven by the rise of finance to preeminence—the inward-turning microelectronic revolution. The unintended side-effect of this revolution you see before you now as a website, but it is small consolation for the damage to our pioneer spirit.  As we were warned by Henry Ford the great struggle of the 20th century was creative industry vs global finance.  Global finance has dominated the past 30 years or more. Perhaps men like Burt Rutan can lead us out of our malaise and realize the human potential.  If so it may be due to prize awards like the Ansari X-Prize that give men even younger than Burt Rutan a chance to make a name for themselves purely via their own grit and gifts.

Seminal figures in the technological advances that lead to basic advances in transportation technology were conducted by private individuals competing for privately funded prize awards. These included the Wright Brothers, Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh.  But such pioneering greats aren’t limited to Americans.  Clearly the Longitude Prize was an early exemplar of pioneering greatness.

This sort of incentives-based policy is in the tradition of Anglo-Saxon values. It should be no surprise that such values are being eroded as the ‘nation of immigrants’ changes from pioneering independence to bureaucratic dependence.  The use of a socialist bureaucracy to explore space is a fundamentally different experiment than other proven pioneering approaches to expanding the resource base available to humanity.

In 1989 I was working on grassroots legislation to reform NASA‘s launch services policies.  This led to the passage of P. L. 101-611, The Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990 which required NASA to procure launch services from private vendors whenever possible.  This is common sense if proper boundaries between public and private functions are to be maintained.  As radical as this may sound to many who see NASA as a space transportation company, it was, in fact, Presidential policy at the time and the legislation was therefore, in fact, redundant, but bureaucratic inertia demanded separate acts by the Legislative branch to reinforce the Executive’s own command structure.  This legislative effort started out as an attempt to pass something along the lines of the Kelly Act of 1925 (which formed the basis for Jerry Pournelle’s recommendations first put forth by his Citizen’s Advisory Council for Space Policy in 1980), but compromised when it became clear that resistance from NASA, and its contractors, to citizen involvement in space policy was so intense that serious reform would be impractical.

My testimony before Congress on legislative follow-up to P.L. 101-611 made recommendations for a focus on incentives for commercial investment, rather than plans or “programs”.  An early example of incentives-based legislation, applied to fusion energy policy, the writing of which I coordinated, was recommended for passage by Bussard, R. W., one of the founders of the US fusion program in a letter confessing some of the subterfuge to which technical leaders resorted.  It is still quite relevant today given the reliance on Middle Eastern oil and problems with fission energy.

The point here is that incentives are more effective in general than governmental programs.   The first settlers in America experienced enormous causalities their first years they were in America. Entire colonies were lost. The original colonies included a substantial variety of fundamentally differing approaches to settling North America.  America’s frontier wasn’t built by a centrally controlled bureaucracy—and there is no reason to expect such a bureaucracy will take Americans to their next frontier.

Space policy is a touchstone of European values since Europeans chased the glaciers north during the iceage.  Americans, Canadians, New Zealanders and Australians, as a selected embodiment of that frontier-chasing potential are spiritually a pioneering culture.  Let’s not forget who settled those frontiers, how those “immigrants” differed from later immigrants in the risks they took and the degree to which they raised the carrying capacity of their new lands.

They required raw frontier incentives—not some central bureaucracy controlling all aspects of their technologies.