The Globalization of Space

Marilyn Dudley-Rowley
OPS-Alaska

Copyright © 1998 by Marilyn Dudley-Rowley

This version was prepared for the Pacific Sociological Association meetings, San Francisco, 29 March-1 April 2001.

This is still very much a work-in-progress and, as such, is hardly more than a collection of loosely connected ideas. The first part argues that the human exploration of space is the trigger behind globalization as we know it. The second part explores how globalization feeds back on the human exploration of space and what some of the problems are.

PART I

The American space program has, for years, been obsessed with showing consumers how it enhances their lives through such "spin-offs" as velcro and teflon. My central contention is that human space exploration has done far more than giving us a few nifty materials. It has done nothing short of putting the "quantum leap" into the globalization process.

Globalization is the growing interconnectedness of all people and their societies on a worldwide scale. Although the evolutionary track of globalization can be traced back many centuries, the awareness of the process is recent. A kind of global consciousness has emerged as a function of rapid transportation from one continent to another and of information technology. In what has been characterized as the fifth phase of globalization, begun in the late sixties and which continues today, global consciousness has increased, aided by space exploration (Robertson 1992).

Space exploration cultivated the process of miniaturization of instrumentation. The early rockets could carry only a small payload. "Weight reduction was imperative, and the miniaturization of equipment of every kind, including computers, was one of the more obvious solutions (Nolan and Lenski 1999, p. 227)." Miniaturization made possible the cascade of advances in computer and satellite technology.

It is a bit of an irony that the fifth, or current, phase of globalization has been called "The Uncertainty Phase", for the satellite, landmark instrument of space exploration, allows humans to reflect upon their global image. And, not much is hidden from its detection. It extends the reach and awareness of humankind. Satellite imagery allows us to predict the weather on a global scale. Comsats give us the capacity for instantaneous and easy communication nearly anywhere in the world. A poignant example was the climber on Everest who phoned his wife back home as he lay dying. The satellite is a tool of the global economy. For instance, it tells us if Sri Lanka will have a good tea crop this year and will, therefore, be able to meet its foreign debts. It processes a host of financial transactions.

As an instrument of the Cold War, the satellite aided the end of it by speeding up the process of globalization across several broad categories of interactive phenomena: information technology, ecological effects, social movements and organizations, concern for equal rights, global recognition, the quest for breakthrough ideas, and economic growth. These things have been identified as the key patterns of interaction driving the globalization process (Peterson, Wunder, and Mueller 1999, pp. 16-19).

The computer has been heralded as the landmark invention of the advanced industrial way of life. But, it is the satellite and all that it could do in Earth orbit that provided much impetus behind computer technology. Computers were necessary to the guidance of the rockets that were the satellites’ delivery systems; they were needed to track the satellites; and they were needed to process the huge amount of data that came from them. The computer and the satellite are the heart and soul of...

Information technology. This is the technology of communication and information. Of the categories of things that drive the globalization process, this one is the most seminal. For, it increases the frequency of human interactions at an exponential rate. The speed of social change is itself partly a function of the speed and ease of these interactions. Rapid exchange and processing of information contribute to the global erosion of hierarchical structures. Hierarchical structures are the hallmark of tribalism, nationalistic movements, entrenched governmental bureaucracies, and most corporations. This is not to say that the erosion of hierarchical structures will lead to chaos and disorder, as in the total destruction of law and order. What it will lead to is the kind of chaos that physicists and mathematicians speak of, the mathematical chaos that underpins a reordering of a system. The reason the process of globalization is said to be at an uncertain stage has to do with this. With the Cold War over, world societies are experiencing a renegotiation of global civil order. There lies the uncertainty.

The Cold War was all about who would dominate the process of globalization. Fresh in the minds of the "cold warriors" was World War II. The familiar fear of a one-world order imposed by a leader like Hitler got carried over to the fear of global dictatorial hierarchy imposed by the West or the Eastern Bloc, the inheritors of the Heartland of the 1940s world. After the war, paranoia ran high on both sides, each thinking the other was gaining the upper hand, fueled by the megatonnage each possessed in their nuclear arsenals. The fear of world domination was incompletely salved by the fear of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). And, what would deliver this Mutually Assured Destruction? None other than rockets on suborbital trajectories bound for targets like New York and Moscow, the dreaded Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM), courtesy of space research and development.

In the end, the process of globalization itself ended the Cold War. The only "winners" in that war were the societies that had a more open stance toward globalization. The old fear of Mutually Assured Destruction has given way to the uncertainty of the re-negotiation period. The Cold War is over – what now? What now, indeed. Information technology and all the other things that drive the globalization process are breeding the new social forms that will make up the re-negotiated global civil order.

Ecological Effects. The struggle to understand the ecology of the planet has certainly led to new social forms. Stewart Brand labeled the space satellite "an engine of the ecology movement (Drexler and Peterson 1991, p. 6)." Imaging the planet, a direct product of space exploration, has enabled our larger awareness of the biosphere. How like fetal imaging it has been! When fetal imaging became possible, the rights of the unborn were championed on a massive scale and abortion issues became a social problem. How like that process has been the images of the Earth from space. While conservation of regional resources was certainly a forerunner of today’s environmental movement, conservationism flowered into modern environmentalism owing to imagery from space and other instruments and processes of space research and development.

The first truly global social movement is environmentalism. And, that has led to new social forms.

Social Movements and Organizations. Whether we are speaking of more established social movements and organizations or emerging ones, none of these would be able to meet their goals today without information and communications technologies. High-tech industries have spurred trends in networking and cooperative organization. A "spin-off" of the environmental movement is an understanding of how ecosystems are organized and these are turned to for models for the human ecology.

Concern for equal rights. With communication that permeates national boundaries, there is an awareness among people throughout the world of each other’s living conditions. While globe-trotting journalists and early radio and television did plenty toward this end, satellite broadcasting and the Internet have brought a hard reality, a sense of urgency, and a next-door-neighborliness that Marshall McLuhan called in the sixties "the global village". The global village has never been so real as it is now. The atrocities of the nationalities fighting in the Balkans are atrocities against your neighbors who are as real to you as the people in the next apartment.

This breeds a concern for equal rights that doesn’t require the nicety of abstract thought to comprehend. It comes from a concrete level of seeing something as it happens with one’s own eyes. And, from this, we learn to care not only for those getting hurt and disrespected in distant places, but for all individuals in all places in all aspects of their lives, their pains and their joys.

Global recognition was once reserved for nation-states and rare others. It is now being extended to the individual. This process gets at the taproot of innovation. While modern communication and transportation have made available the teachings and technologies of the world’s cultures to nearly everyone, it also makes available the wacko ideas of Rudy the Skinhead and Leroy Bandanna, as well as Joe Six-Pack making a better mousetrap in his basement. Of course, some shoppers in the great Mall of Ideas will not be able to discern the bad merchandise from the good and roll their carts down the aisles of intellectual and evolutionary dead-ends. But, most folks will not be suckered. They will know the difference between the teachings of Martin Luther and the writings of the Unabomber; the teachings of the Buddha and the ravings of teenage boys in trenchcoats with guns in their bookbags. They will shop and compare, and most importantly, compare notes. It’s a mathematical inevitability that deeper global understanding in all its many facets – and those yet to be discovered – will emerge. The quest for breakthrough ideas is in no danger of being called off.

The quest for breakthrough ideas. The infrastructure that has spread from the satellite and the computer is the Gutenberg Press of our time. And, it was all made possible by the human exploration of space.

One such truly breakthrough idea is molecular nanotechnology that could, virtually overnight, change technology as we know it. Nanotechnology techniques can construct materials and alter the structure of matter at a molecular level. Nanotechnology is the logical extension of the miniaturization effort that began in the early days of space exploration. Its time has come. Without the kinds of computer technology inspired by space exploration, we could not employ nanotechnology. That’s because this technology requires a great deal of memory storage and requires a vast quantity of data to be processed.

What about economic growth and the global economy as we know it in the present? This is usually the phenomenon that most people associate with globalization. It is an emergent property of all these categories of interactive phenomena. Only an interdependent global economy could provide the capital mass or the financial avenues to bankroll the application of breakthrough ideas, truly effective global organizations, the enhancement of each individual, to assess the environmental degradation of a whole planet and repair it, and to extend the human ecology to other venues.

PART II

Space exploration does not stand apart from the globalization process. It is part and parcel of the thing it has magnified. The globalization process, therefore, requires us to re-think the exploration of space. We’ve already begun. At the heart of this re-thinking is the idea of humans permanently living and working in space environments – the extension of the human ecology.

The investigation of the globalization of the use of resources, products, industries, economies, and technologies is a special province of macrosociology, the study of the world system of societies. The macrosociological perspective holds promise in the prediction of social phenomena, to include public policy and the redefinition of public services, by observing how aspects of world populations, organizations, environments, and technologies interact upon each other over time. Special circumstances of increasing organizational complexity (like the emergence of the transnational organization), emerging environments (like "cyberspace" and Low Earth Orbit [LEO]), and the technologies which pertain to these (like the Internet and space stations) are globalizing space.

A salient example of the globalization of space is the International Space Station (ISS). It is widely thought, even among government executives, that the ISS is an American-sponsored project where we "permit" the space agencies of other nations to participate. This is a gross oversimplification. We wouldn’t be able to have much of a space station without our Russian partners. We had to make them crash their beloved Mir to focus their effort to help us get the station up and running!

There are a number of historical and economic correlates to the globalization of space. I’ve already addressed several of these in the foregoing. 1) the technological legacies of World War Two, such as advancements in aviation, nuclear energy, computers, and rocketry; 2) the subsequent related historical events following World War Two, like the Cold War and the Space Race; 3) the advanced systems development management procedures which emerged during World War Two which were invented to undertake large one-of-a-kind projects which incorporated significant advances in new technology; 4) the impetus this management protocol gave to the emergence of transnationalization; and 5) the rise of computer technology, especially in the reduction of size of computers and the increase in their functions, and in the birth and expansion of the Internet, its technical infrastructure, and its business paradigm.

These correlates, among others, not only set the stage for the globalization of space, but also for its correlate, the long-duration space mission. In truth, longer duration space missions have been possible for nearly three decades, as the Russians have so adequately shown during three generations of space stations. But, a long-duration space mission was not necessary during the early days of the space program when the primary goal was to beat the Russians to the moon. It is, however, necessary to almost anything else of value done in space, regardless of it being a robotic or manned mission; that value determined by the globalization of many aspects of populations, organizations, environments, and technologies.

Now, it is a sociological fact that just because societies have on-the-shelf technologies to deploy, it does not follow that they will deploy them. Political, economic, and other forces, perceived and actual, have always delayed or denied entrée to some technologies in many societies throughout history. On the other hand, political, economic, and other forces are shaped by technology and technological feasibility. It is the advancements in computer technology that make industrial societies approaching the 21^st century markedly different than they were five decades ago. The computer and the infrastructure of that technology have combinatorially increased the power of existing space technology by many powers. Microcomputers decrease the reliance of spacecraft on the Earth for telemetry tracking and control. Spacecraft can do far more if they have onboard computation power for stored logic. If, for instance, a communication channel goes down, the spacecraft can move to another channel, or it can go to a backup mode for position, or it might exercise its thrusters to move to another orbit (Karas 1983, p. 33). They are in a sense "self-healing and self-navigating" (p. 33), and this gives spacecraft an autonomy that was not especially necessary for a short-duration mission, but is absolutely essential for a long-duration mission. That is not all. Computers make possible the speedy identification, definition, and solution of simultaneous equations necessary for optimizing individual component performance within advanced systems. It is the advanced system project in its most comprehensive sense that has led to the rise of the transnational organization. The computer and its infrastructure have helped make possible a new complex social organization.

We are making some interesting discoveries now that the Cold War Era and its Space Race are history. What we are finding out is that these efforts are much more than national demonstrations of technology as once they used to be. They are:

very unique engineering solutions ironically engendered by tight budgets and hard economic times; and
they involve the invention of new social forms engendered by our entree into long-duration extreme environments and the unprecedented level of international cooperation required for human permanency in space.

As has been outlined many times elsewhere, the survival of the human species, near-term and long-term, depends on expansion into the solar system: to gain the experience of living and working indefinitely in extraterrestrial environments and to locate a breeding population off-planet, among other specific reasons. The United States possesses the resources and knowledge base to foot the first critical steps of the expansion, but has, at least two times, let the opportunity pass: 1) when Congress cut the legs out from under a sustained lunar program and the von Braun Mars plan and 2) when the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) was dismissed out of hand from "sticker shock".

It is in the common interest of the world community to expand into the solar system. However, it does not seem likely that the United States, the most powerful nation-state on Earth, will be able to transcend "political drag" and other forces to accomplish this. What is needed is a transnational organization which can acquire the expertise and resources to undertake long-duration space research and missions, to command sovereignty, and thus address the challenge of solar system expansion and production. The organization which might grow into such a transnational institution is the one which was established to win the Space Race for the United States. That organization is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Its consortial relationships with businesses, non-governmental entities, and other federal agencies are important steps. Just as crucial is NASA’s relationships and encouragement of other national space agencies, to include the Russian Space Agency.

However, we must be wary of a number of obstacles. For one, unless we are talking about the employment of nanotechnology, small is not all that beautiful in the space enterprise. "Faster and cheaper" is not necessarily better. For, "faster" frequently has come to mean cutting corners like not checking units of dimensional analysis to see if "miles" have been erroneously substituted for "meters". "Cheaper" has meant "deeper" on at least two occasions, as when NASA augered in the Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander into the regolith of Mars. The "faster, cheaper, better" policy was doomed to get NASA into trouble from the start. A cold eye on this policy shows that it has been little more than a public relations slogan mouthed against the backdrop of a large capital project, the largest engineering feat since the Panama Canal and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, that has been hiding in plain sight over our heads. I am talking about the International Space Station.

The political powers-that-be recently called NASA on the carpet about overspending because there is a certain "cognitive dissonance" between the spaceman’s version of "small is beautiful" and a large capital project literally hanging over our heads. What was the NASA response? The space agency that got its driving impetus from Nazi rocket scientists used an old Gestapo tactic to appease the politicians by "shooting one of its own". NASA fired one of the prime movers behind making the space station a reality and other long-duration space projects. That was Mr. George Abbey, Director of the Johnson Space Center.

A second obstacle is thinking that the commercialization of space will be the blueprint of space enterprise for the future. Large American companies dedicated to space projects are basically interested in re-manufacturing the same ICBM design over and over. The smaller companies are little more than someone’s hobby – or worse, a bit of fiction on a business card!

A third obstacle is resting on our laurels. There is no apparent space race, and certainly not with the Russians, our "bully-able" partners. But, there is a space race. Our competitors are the Europeans. For example, the French Ariane has filled the payload gap left by the unfulfilled promises of the shuttle. The Europeans have become unified over a number of areas and one of those is space. They have a common space agency, the ESA, in addition to their several separate national space agencies. There are several European partners involved in the International Space Station. European demands for station usage might well see a heavy European presence on the station with the Euro-partners virtually co-opting it until such time as they can field one of their own. If there is going to be a "commercialization of space" as many wishful thinkers hope for, then the Europeans will have a large hand in it.

A fourth obstacle can only be viewed from the macrosociology perspective. This is the kind of negative feedback that has squelched innovation a number of times in the past, as in the top segments of early agrarian societies removing incentives from the food-producing peasants to innovate better technology, or the Chinese Navy burning its fleet on the eve of the European Renaissance. We may be seeing a "drag force" of negative feedback in the few times we have stepped away from space projects that would have ensured the permanency of humans in space – like withdrawing from the moon, de-orbiting our space station, Skylab, not following up with the SEI, and the latest Gestapo tactic that has made the ousted man’s interests taboo to work on within the American space agency.

Overcoming these obstacles require the encouragement of NASA to engage in consortial and transnational relationships. But, to be an effective partner in such arrangements, it must be a strong partner. That requires some degree of sustained and stable federal backing that ensures the strength of the agency while providing incentives to it to initiate and follow through on the construction of a transnational space organization.

References Cited

Drexler, K. Eric and Chris Peterson (with Gayle Pergamit). 1991. Unbounding the Future: the Nanotechnology Revolution. New York: Quill William Morrow.

Drucker, Peter F. Post-Capitalist Society. 1993. New York: HarperBusiness.

Karas, Thomas. 1983. The New High Ground: Strategies and Weapons of Space-Age War. New York: .Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Nolan, Patrick and Gerhard Lenski. 1999. Human Societies: An Introduction to Macrosociology, 8^th edition. New York: McGraw-Hill College.

Peterson, R. Dean, Delores F. Wunder, and Harlan L. Mueller. 1999. Social Problems: Globalization in the 21^st Century. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.