by Frank Houston
A former deputy editor at Fox News Online, Houston is a free-lance writer.

Hundreds of cameras were trained on launch pad 39B on the October day John Glenn returned to space. To the right, inches away on the horizon, was a nearly identical sight -- pad 39A, which held the shuttle Endeavor, set to carry aloft pieces of the International Space Station in December.

Glenn went up and came back down again, wearing the same "blazing aura" that Tom Wolfe described in The Right Stuff and carrying much of the media with him in his nostalgic encore. But the next few chapters in space coverage, starting with the space station, will make the stories of yesterday's astronaut-heroes seem awfully simple. Reporting on the final frontier will now cross national boundaries, combining aspects of science, business, politics, even law.

Consider the space station. In public relations terms, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration knows that it has its hands full, despite the afterglow of Glenn's return trip. Before construction is done, probably in early 2004, U.S. taxpayers will have contributed at least $20 billion, two-thirds the cost of a sixteen-nation endeavor. Critics are waiting in the wings, including those who think the money would be better spent in deep space and on manned explorations. "Pointless, expensive low-Earth orbit missions do not excite the public," says astronomer/professor/writer Timothy Ferris. Journalists will be asked to help sort this out.

The space station, meanwhile, is an international story. NASA plays the lead role but the European Space Agency nations, along with Japan, Canada, and Brazil, will also contribute. Then there's Russia, NASA's former adversary-turned-main partner. When it comes to the space station, Russia is already beginning to look like a deadbeat dad, given its continued dependence on infusions of hard cash from NASA. And if one is to judge from recent revelations about the Mir episode, Russia still tends towards secrecy, and NASA seems perfectly willing to look the other way. The results can be perilous in space. According to some reports, NASA sent its astronauts to join the Mir crew in 1997 without knowing any aspect of their itinerary, resulting in a dangerous flirtation with disaster.

Then there's the business of space. Beyond the station there's another global juggernaut looming on the horizon -- literally. It's called Iridium. The multinational company is the pioneer in global satellite telephony, with a ring of sixty-six "birds" already circling the planet. Originally an offshoot cooked up by some Motorola engineers, Iridium launched its service on November 1. As Wired magazine put it in October, Washington, D.C.-based Iridium is the "vanguard of the privately funded industrial era in space," an era that will make all sorts of new demands on journalists.

In ten years it's estimated that the number of satellites in low-Earth orbit will triple, to 1,700. During that period, Merrill Lynch estimates, space industry revenues will more than quadruple, going from $38 billion already being earned by aerospace giants like Hughes and Lockheed Martin to $171 billion.

Putting all those satellites into orbit requires launching them -- a potentially lucrative service industry. New companies with competing, radically creative plans are sprouting. Most have serious venture capital backing and former NASA engineers on board. Some analysts even think the commercial satellite industry, pushed along by Iridium and new competitors like GlobalStar, looks poised to become another gold rush.

NASA is getting out of the satellite launching business, ceding it to the United Space Alliance, or USA, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin. USA won a $7 billion contract to take over commercial launches in the next four years, using NASA's shuttles. Covering USA will be like covering defense contractors, which have a far less press-friendly culture than p.r.-hungry NASA.

NASA will focus much of its attention beyond the shuttle and its 2004 replacement, the reusable VentureStar spacecraft, and concentrate on the realm of science and exploration. NASA's primary long-term objective is to send more probes to the Red Planet -- what Mars Exploration Program manager Donna Shirley calls "robot Lewis and Clarks," which will scout out "what it's like out there before we send people." Indeed, a manned Mars mission appears to be the gold standard for NASA.

Inevitably, a legal beat will emerge in space, too. "The laws won't be written in earnest until some buccaneer forces them to be," says Timothy Ferris.

Ferris was referring to a new Colorado-based company called SpaceDev. Its founder, Jim Benson, hopes to be just such a space-age pirate: in 2001, the company plans to dispatch something called a Near Earth Asteroid Prospector to an asteroid, Nereus, and declare the mineral-rich rock private property, staking a claim to mining rights. The ambitious plan may force a new area of law to be created; currently, the only law governing space is the 1967 U.N. Outer Space Treaty, which deals only with issues of national sovereignty in space. What about the private ownership of extraterrestrial property?

"Not enough thought is being given to" new issues such as property rights in space, Ferris says, "except by the science fiction writers."

Soon enough, journalists on the space beat may be giving the sci-fi futurists a run for their money.

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe