LibertyCon was tremendous fun. This year I attended more readings. I got to hear Martin Shoemaker read from his upcoming novel–which I will definitely be getting. Monalisa Foster read from her contribution to the anthology, To Be Men. “Cooper” is a haunting story, and I’ll be picking up that one as well. Les Johnson talked about the development of graphene, from the long search for the miraculous stuff to the startling realization that it had been in front of them all along. I left too early on Sunday to get to hear one of my favorites, Sarah Hoyt, do her reading, but it was still good fun.
On the marketing front, I had an author table for the first time on Friday night. Now that two of my books are in print, this seemed like a thing to do. I had stacks of my books, a poster, bookmarks, and stage fright. It’s important not to show stage fright, so I handed out bookmarks to anyone foolhardy enough to look at me. I felt a little like the perfume lady in the department store, but I read to do this on the internet, so who am I not to follow instructions? Much to my astonishment, people talked to me and even bought my books. My friend Cheri Partain prevailed upon me to get the poster and bookmarks. She designed them both, and got me a great price. I am very grateful to her, and if you are looking for help along these lines she has a facebook page.
I read the first chapter of Mercenary Calling out loud for my author reading. I practiced beforehand, so it wasn’t as scary as having an author table. I was on a panel which addressed the burning topic of whether Star Trek or Star Wars were space operas or space westerns. The consensus came down to that they were both space operas because both stories have sweeping scale. Westerns are more narrowly focused to a specific time and place.
I was also on a panel about Industry in Space. My own concerns revolve around the very immediate and near-term. People are doing stuff now. And, yes, billionaires are people. SpaceX’s fly-back booster is a game changer. The Las Vegas billionaire Robert Bigelow has one of his expandable habitats attached to the International Space Station, although he’s proved out the concept with the sub-scale models he launched from Siberia years ago. Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources are working to achieve asteroid mining. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin plans to put people in space soon. We’re in motion.
My issues are legal. Will the U.S. government interpret the Outer Space Treaty to require burdensome amounts of regulation? Will it claim the treaty bars private appropriation of territory in outer space? The treaty bars “national appropriation,” but that doesn’t mean it bars private operators from exercising rights over land they have worked. These will be important questions as we pursue a new course to the Moon and other planets.
After that, who knows?
by 
Some of the passages in Mercenary Calling remind me of doing a presentation in my “Mars” class at University a few years ago about asteroid mining. It was a mixed under-graduate and graduate class and one of the graduate students asked me, “But isn’t it [asteroid mining] bad for science?”
I was taken completely off-guard. But I answered, “Anything that gets us out there is good for science.”
The girl who asked the question was probably the only graduate student in the class who wasn’t in a space related specialty. The others were researching meteorites or even working with Curiosity’s ChemCam. But it’s apparently not an unusual way of thinking about science, to consider some ideal of exclusivity and isolation, and attempting to keep it all free from the taint of profit.
NASA’s Planetary Protection Policy is grounded in containment. It doesn’t want anything coming from Earth to taint its conclusions about what it finds on Mars.
Congress has told NASA that the agency’s long-term goals must enable the extension of a human presence beyond low-Earth orbit and into the solar system, “including potential human habitation on another celestial body and a thriving space economy in the 21st Century.” 42 U.S.C. § 18312. More explicitly, Congress told NASA to work toward eventual “human habitation on the surface of Mars.” 51 U.S.C. §70504(b). (No, I don’t know why it has to be on the surface. Yes, underground might be safer, but linguistic overindulgence in the drafting of laws requires a separate analysis of its own.)
As a science agency that is part of the U.S. Government, NASA has interpreted Article IX of the Outer Space Treaty to mean that the agency’s missions must not only avoid what the ordinary person might consider harmful contamination—no toxins, no Agent Orange, no peanuts on the aircraft—but microbial contamination as well. NASA tries to limit the presence of bacterial spores on any out-bound surface to no more than 300,000. Accordingly, NASA requires the sterilization of its spacecraft to avoid bringing microorganisms to Mars. The European Space Agency follows similar measures.
People are covered in bacteria, but the law says NASA must work to enable a human presence on Mars. It might be time to recognize that a Congressional mandate overrides an agency policy.