Michael Wills MP
Schools Technology Minister
The House of Commons
London SW1A 0AA
Dear Mr Wills,
A recent article in the Sunday Times (5 Nov. 2000, p.1.6) says that you are advising other members of the Government, including Tony Blair, on British patriotic identity. It names a number of institutions which, according to your research, best reflect the nation's values.
There is one striking omission in that list, and I hope you will excuse my writing to you about it.
In his inspirational September 1997 Conference speech, Tony Blair described the British nation like this: "We are by our nature and tradition innovators, adventurers, pioneers." This is of course an exciting moment in history to be an innovator, adventurer or pioneer. As you probably know, space exploration and development has the potential to place vast reserves of raw materials and energy into human hands. There are no pre-existing ecosystems in danger of being disturbed, and no prior claims by less-developed indigenous inhabitants. Space colonisation -- particularly on the planet Mars -- will inevitably be the major historical theme of the next millennium so long as industrial civilisation continues in good health. As Franklin Díaz says of this "new human odyssey" in the November issue of Scientific American: "Such a mighty undertaking will dwarf the westward European expansion of the 16th century" (p.72).
A growing space-based branch of our civilisation can only reinforce the ethical values of democracy, liberty, the fundamental unity of mankind and of the Earth's precious ecological system. It will enjoy the opportunity for virtually infinite economic and cultural growth. It will assert a powerful restatement of the values of social and technological progress, and of the view that human history has direction and meaning because it is part of the creative evolutionary flowering of the universe.
Yet Mr Blair's inspiring words have gone unnoticed. The nation which invented globalisation and the industrial revolution remains stubbornly opposed to any involvement in the multi-globalism and the space-industrial revolution of the near future. I find this is a painful insult to my sense of British identity, and can only suppose that our British genius for inventing the future has fled the country and emigrated to America.
A British ship, commanded by Sir Francis Drake, completed the second ever circumnavigation of the globe (in 1577-1580). Yet the only Briton so far to have represented our country in space flew as a guest of the Russians on a flight which led nowhere (Helen Sharman, in 1991). The nation which used to run an empire on which the sun never set has, very naturally, been full of ideas for creating new empires among the stars. British Aerospace's "Mustard" design of the 1960s was for a space shuttle which would have been more than competitive with today's launch vehicles, had it been built. British engineers at the British Interplanetary Society published the world's first serious technical studies of a manned lunar spaceship (as early as 1939) and an interstellar probe (in 1978). Yet not a single one of those ideas has caught the imagination of public or government.
The latest, Alan Bond's Skylon aerospaceplane project (successor to the Hotol design of the 1980s), languishes in limbo for want of a few million pounds of government money which I understand would be able to unlock much greater sums from the commercial finance industry -- a classic public/private partnership. The same appears to be true of David Ashford's linked Ascender and Spacebus projects, which could launch the first space tourists -- and create an entirely new sector of the economy -- within a very few years.
In the Skylon design, Britain has a competitive edge over both the current US NASA Space Shuttle and its proposed replacement, the Lockheed VentureStar. Skylon is designed around an engine which could be as great a leap forward as the Parsons steam turbine or the Whittle jet engine -- two earlier British triumphs. It was British pioneers such as Trevithick, Watt and Stephenson who created the first practical steam engines which launched the industrial revolution. Yet we as a nation now seem content to sit back and wait for someone else to develop the engines and discover the terra incognita of the future.
Is that the attitude which drove steamships and railways, democratic institutions and the English language around the world? Why is the government so reluctant to endorse projects as promising as Skylon and Ascender/Spacebus, when centuries of British history -- and our very national identity -- indicate that we should be creating the future, not riding as a passenger on the efforts of others?
Britain needs a new flagship project, and one focused firmly on future growth. The Channel Tunnel is now complete. Concorde belongs to an earlier generation. The less said about the Millennium Dome the better.
There have of course been proposals to put a UK astronaut on the NASA-led International Space Station now under construction. But British participation would be worse than a waste of money, for it would create the illusion that we had some stake in the future while crowding out our real creative potential with another one-off stop-gap project, all show and no substance, no vision and no staying-power.
The fundamental problem with the International Space Station is that there is too much money chasing too little mission: the station's main function will be to evolve technologies for supporting humans in space, a capability which could have been bought vastly cheaper twenty years ago using a second-generation Skylab and for which the current station is grossly over-funded and over-designed. The station is thus a symptom of America's loss of direction in space, and positively begs to be undercut by a smaller, more competitive, more capable and more focused project.
I believe that our national character would best be expressed by taking advantage of the tremendous opportunities for long-term space-oriented growth which face us. Britain should adopt its historic leadership role rather than waiting for other countries to take the initiative, especially now that America has mortgaged its future on the vast, unwieldy and inflexible International Space Station.
In twenty years time, tourists, scientists and politicians will be regularly flying into orbit and back. Will they be doing so on British designed and built aerospace shuttles? The first astronauts will be setting up bases on Mars and prospecting for minerals among the asteroids -- will British participation be seen as essential to those projects' success, or will we be no more than hangers-on? The first large space structures will be harvesting the almost infinite reserves of solar energy -- will they be designed and financed in Britain?
Will we be as confident of our national destiny as were the creators of the Empire? Or will we try to pretend that we are no more than a province of the Unholy Belgian Empire, with no greater destiny than to squabble endlessly among ourselves about our internal bureaucracies and no vision of any universe greater than what lies immediately in front of our noses? Will our most talented and energetic "innovators, adventurers, pioneers" have in future to adopt US citizenship in order to realise their dreams? Or will the Alan Bonds, David Ashfords and Michael Foales of tomorrow be proud to be British?
The question is very much one of our perception of our national destiny.
The present-day historical situation is surely clear enough: humanity is on the threshold of a new epoch of explosive economic and cultural growth which will shape the next thousand years as British and European colonisation of the globe shaped the past five hundred. The dates when Neil Armstrong stepped on the Moon and when the first astronauts eventually land on Mars will be venerated in the calendars of the solar system for tens of thousands of years to come; the dates when Britain scraps the Pound for the Euro, restores the Pound, switches into the Dollar and so on will soon be of interest to specialist historians only. (Who now remembers Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain for any achievement other than their financing of Columbus's voyages to the Americas?) Modern politics focuses entirely on ephemeral issues -- there is no vision of the big picture and therefore no concept of our place in history (an effect obvious enough in the recent US presidential election).
A century ago Britain had a mission to civilise the world with steam power and the abolition of slavery; today we are rudderless. In 1901 the Duke and Duchess of York (the future king and queen) made a triumphal voyage around the Empire; today we seem to think that losing the Empire has condemned us to national decline, less viable than Canada or Switzerland (countries which see no need to abolish their national currencies or merge their identity with their neighbours).
If we were capable of taking our past history seriously and living up to its inspiring example, we would now be speaking of our national mission to civilise the solar system -- a mission within which the mundane issues of health, pensions, fuel tax, our relationship with mainland Europe and so on would find their natural place. This is not to say that domestic issues are unimportant. Clearly they are important. But they are subordinate issues, housekeeping issues: they do not amount to a compass capable of guiding our nation through the next thousand years.
For that compass, the broad concepts of growth and progress are required. Yet without the infinite opportunities which spaceflight is now opening up to us, even those ideas can amount to nothing more than ever more subtle adjustments of taxes against benefits, of rights against duties, of military restraint against intervention -- all on an increasingly crowded world in which the ultimate collapse of civilisation and the destruction of our values and all that we hold dear is a long-term certainty, whether through natural climate change, an asteroid on collision course, the effects of industrial pollution, world war, the exhaustion of natural resources such as fossil fuels, or cultural stagnation in a world with no remaining frontiers to cross.
Of course many people believe that manned spaceflight is far too expensive for such a small and weak nation as ours, having only the fourth largest economy in the world; that we must leave the initiative to the big boys, and that we should be happy if we can make so much as the odd nut or bolt for their space systems. This is a myth. Our health and social security budget alone stands at around £100 billion annually. The Skylon spaceplane would require on the order of £1 billion per year for ten years or so -- a project of the same order of magnitude as the Channel Tunnel or the Trident nuclear submarine programme, with the difference that most of the investment could be raised in the private sector -- and it would have a globally marketable product at the end of that period. David Ashford's Ascender spaceplane would get space tourism off the ground for a mere £50 million over four years. Even Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct programme to put exploring teams of astronauts on Mars could be taken on for £2 billion a year over ten years or so. In comparison with what any modern nation spends on social security or defence even the last of these is a minor sum, even were that country to undertake such a project alone (and more affordable still were we to go 50/50 with the Americans -- a more natural partner for Britain than the European Space Agency in such ventures).
Our British history offers further encouragement. Captain Cook was one of the greatest of maritime explorers: his voyages of discovery were sponsored by the Admiralty. The transatlantic passenger trade in the early part of this century was dominated by two express superliners -- the Mauretania and the Lusitania -- that had been built with a government subsidy to answer the challenge from German shipyards. In those days we knew what enterprise meant, and we knew how to raise our horizons and make the world's oceans our own. Have we forgotten now? Even when we are entering a year whose date is synonymous with the ocean of space and with an author from Somerset who wrote of a voyage of exploration to Jupiter?
A number of journalists (such as Jeremy Paxman and Matthew Parris) have been trying to redefine our national identity. They have been asking what it means to be British. They have even been trying to revive the concept of being English, a concept useful in football but pure madness in any other context -- we might as well try to segregate those of Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Norman and Viking ancestry. Thanks to the Empire and the Commonwealth, British identity is intrinsically a global, cosmopolitan one. Any attempt to balkanise it in the age of satellite communications and news media, worldwide air travel and interest groups focused on the global environment, global development and global human rights issues is (thankfully) doomed to failure.
Yet the writers of books on national identity are responding to a need, for in order to be certain of one's identity one needs also to have an idea of what one is not. If to be British is to be a global citizen who just happens to hail from Great Britain or Northern Ireland, what is there left to oppose ourselves against? Is it not too inclusive a concept?
In the past, national identities have been defined in an arena of competing nations: if I am British, then that automatically sets me into competition with anyone who is German, say, or Russian, or American, or whatever it may be. That scheme was appropriate to the age of national rivalry -- in other words the age of war -- but the developed nations are now (thankfully) moving out of that period of human history. Modern nations are too complex and too interdependent, their populations too intolerant of pain, for war among developed nations to offer profitable gain to their governments. We may still administer a bloody nose to Serbia or Iraq, yet even so we shrink from what in earlier times would have been the logical conclusion: physical occupation of Belgrade or Baghdad, and the forcible overthrow of its government.
The most developed nations are evolving beyond the age of war, therefore their sense of national identity must transcend national rivalry and find some other source for the definition of what one is not.
Confined to a single crowded planet, there is no other source, and we would eventually return to the destructive habits of the past. But 43 years of the space age demonstrate that we are no longer confined to Earth. Our environment is now the infinite universe of stars and planets -- all of which, so far as we can tell, are completely barren of all but the most basic bacterial life. The natural evolutionary step for us to take now is therefore to define our sense of identity in opposition to the lifeless worlds and brute physical forces which surround us.
Rather than warriors of nation A competing against nation B with murderous intent, we should now become warriors of life competing against chaos and death, against the random turbulence of the wider universe. Given the minuteness of our planet amidst the starfields of the galaxy this is an awesome prospect, an idea too big for most people to grasp quickly. Yet it is the epoch towards which our culture is tending. It is the evolutionary consequence of a successful globalising civilisation based on science, technology, industry, market capitalism and consumerism. It will be the inspiration for those leaders who foresee a future in which humanity achieves its potential as an agent of the creative power of the universe. It elevates to a sacred mission not just spaceflight, but genetic and nuclear engineering, the information revolution, and in general all the arts, sciences and technologies of mankind.
This is still a minority view. The opposite view is heard more often. A rash of articles in the press over the past couple of years have promoted in one way or another the view that human progress is pointless or too dangerous to carry any further. Professor Norman Davies (Sunday Times, 2 Jan. 2000) completely missed the positive general trend, submerging it in an inundation of irrelevant and mostly unpleasant detail. Bill Joy (Wired, April 2000) prophesied the imminent extinction of humanity. David Selbourne (The Times, 30 Dec. 1999) raged against everything modern. Bryan Appleyard has published articles and a book opposing technology and futuristic optimism. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto (Sunday Times, 1 Oct. 2000) compared our industrial civilisation unfavourably with some pre-industrial ones in an explicit denial of progress.
The optimistic point of view -- the one which illuminates the creative evolution of natural systems, including human society -- struggles to be heard. As a result we are losing out on the atmosphere of hope and pleasure which we have every right to be taking in our civilisation's achievements and future prospects.
We are also having to get by without any political leadership worth the name. So when nationalists stir up hatred against foreigners, religious fanatics preach religious intolerance, naive juveniles campaign against global capitalism or technophobes against nuclear and genetic engineering, it would be helpful if some figure in authority were able to explain clearly exactly why those views were unenlightened, retrograde and out of touch with reality. But without a vision of the overall scheme of creative evolutionary progress, that counter-argument cannot be made.
It is sometimes said that politicians cannot provide national leadership, since they are blinkered by the short electoral cycle and the press of day-to-day events. This may often be true. Yet if you -- like other people in Britain and abroad -- sometimes stop to consider that your country will still exist -- in one form or another -- in a thousand years time, that your party may then be in power, your children's children alive, and so on -- in short, that we are after all still no more than a few steps away from the dawn of human history -- then you may find these ideas help you when the more traditional ideas about national identity fail to match up to the immense challenges of the new millennium.
In conclusion, I should like to leave you with the following questions:
Yours sincerely,
Stephen Ashworth (Mr)
Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society
By Stephen Ashworth, December 2000.
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This page posted on 22 December 2000 / 31st Apollo Anniversary Year