Reflections on a death, and life on the final frontier

No, it's not morbid.

So two things happened this week.  I started reading Ashlee Vance’s When The Heavens Went on Sale:  The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach.  And I got word that Mark Hopkins died.

Vance’s book is a look at several space startups – mostly companies much smaller than SpaceX, though to be fair “smaller than SpaceX” is now a category that includes basically all space companies, and for that matter national space programs.  I haven’t finished it, and will probably write some sort of a review when I have, but it got me thinking about where things are going in space, and a bit about my own involvement along the way.

I was already thinking of that as I taught Space Law (or “The Law of Outer Space” as our schedule terms it) for the first time in a few years.  I shelved that course for a bit while I taught another course that was new to me – and to everyone, as I think I’m the only law professor who teaches it – the Law of Distilled Spirits. It was a new course involving a lot of hardcore regulatory law (it’s not just bourbon flights) and I wanted to teach it several years in a row until I kind of had it down.  But last year I had a student show up as a 1L, child of two Space Force folks, who said that her decision to come to UT Law was based on taking Space Law from me.  “So I guess I’m teaching Space Law next year,” I said.

It's a paper-writing course, and I just finished grading the papers last weekend, on topics ranging from space tourism, to asteroid mining, to governance of societies in outer space.  Then I heard that Mark Hopkins had died.

Mark’s involvement in the space movement goes back a decade or more before mine started.  I got involved in the 1980s (well, I joined the old L5 Society in the ‘70s while still in high school, but I was just a member who got the magazine).  He was a founder.  And while I worked hard for many years, rising to be Executive VP of the National Space Society and chair of its Legislative/Policy Committee, Mark was a founder of the merged organization, working hard to put the L5 Society, which had members and energy but limited institutional credibility, together with Wernher von Braun’s National Space Institute, which had institutional credibility out the wazoo but lacked the members and energy.

Mark had more commitment to the cause than me.  I played around with rockets as a kid and teen.  Mark tried to build much bigger ones, and had missing fingers, and some other injuries, to prove it.  He dedicated his life to promoting human settlement of outer space, though organization-building, message-spreading, and lobbying.  And he sacrificed a lot to do it.

Mark was an economist with degrees from CalTech and Harvard.  He worked for RAND, and coauthored an influential early (1977) study for NASA  Space Settlements:  A Design Study.  This was just a few years after Princeton physicist Gerard K. O’Neill proposed large-scale human settlements in outer space.

For years, the phone would ring at random times, and when I’d answer it was always the same:  “This is Mark Hopkins.”  (He always started exactly the same way.)  Then followed some sort of problem, usually leading to either a request for advice, or for me to do something.  He made those calls by the dozens, to people all over, every day, and he followed things up with a memory for detail.

I was involved in the space movement.  Mark was committed.  (Old joke:  You know the difference between bacon and eggs?  The chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.)  The space movement was part of my life (and still is), but it was his life.

Talk of space settlement, colonies on the Moon and Mars, and even space tourism was, for most of his life, considered crazy and out-there by most people.  Nowadays people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson, among others – including the companies in Ashlee Vance’s book, Planet Labs, Rocket Lab, Astra, and Firefly – are working in various ways to make that happen.  The space tourism part is already real, and well past the “giggle factor” that prevailed even at the turn of the millennium.  That happened in no small part because of the patient, long-lasting, unrelenting work of activists like Mark.  And he was instrumental in leading the successful fight to block the 1979 Moon Treaty, which would have made the kind of space development we’re looking toward now impossible, by placing space resources under the control of a large (no doubt corrupt) international organization.

The old L5 Society was supposed to hold its final meeting in a space habitat at the Lagrange 5 stable-orbit point for which it was named.  Mark didn’t live long enough to attend that meeting.  He saw the Promised Land from the Mount Nebo that is today’s rapidly advancing space economy, but didn’t get there himself.  At this point, I don’t know if I will, either.  (Back around the turn of the millennium, he and I were discussing longevity research, and he commented:  “I’ve done the math, and I’m pretty sure we’ll be in the last generation to die.”  “Well, you’re a lot older than me,” I retorted.  I mean, a bit over a decade is a lot, right?  I thought it was then, anyway.)

As I’ve written before, I think that there are long-term and short-term reasons to see humanity spreading throughout space.  The long-term reason is that it’s a huge, rich, environment that can, just within our solar system, support trillions of people at levels of wealth far beyond anything on Earth now.  (Sure, it looks desolate at present.  But so did the American continent seem desolate to Europeans before it was settled and exploited.)

The short-term reason is that expansion is both a source and an outlet for positive energies that are in scarce supply on our ever-shrinking planet.  The “Global Village” was sold as a good thing, but people should have remembered that life in a traditional village, where everyone knows everyone’s business and resources are scarce and already allocated, wasn’t so great.

We’ve seen this before.  In the space law book I co-authored with Rob Merges, we quote Samuel Eliot Morison on Columbus and his impact:

At the end of 1492 most men in Western Europe felt exceedingly gloomy about the future. Christian civilization appeared to be shrinking in area and dividing into hostile units as its sphere contracted. For over a century there had been no important advance in natural science and registration in the universities dwindled as the instruction they offered became increasingly jejune and lifeless. Institutions were decaying, well-meaning people were growing cynical or desperate, and many intelligent men, for want of something better to do, were endeavoring to escape the present through studying the pagan past. . . .

Yet, even as the chroniclers of Nuremberg were correcting their proofs from Koberger’s press, a Spanish caravel named Nina scudded before a winter gale into Lisbon with news of a discovery that was to give old Europe another chance. In a few years we find the mental picture completely changed. Strong monarchs are stamping out privy conspiracy and rebellion; the Church, purged and chastened by the Protestant Reformation, puts her house in order; new ideas flare up throughout Italy, France, Germany and the northern nations; faith in God revives and the human spirit is renewed. The change is complete and startling: “A new envisagement of the world has begun, and men are no longer sighing after the imaginary golden age that lay in the distant past, but speculating as to the golden age that might possibly lie in the oncoming future.”

Christopher Columbus belonged to an age that was past, yet he became the sign and symbol of this new age of hope, glory and accomplishment. His medieval faith impelled him to a modern solution: Expansion.

Expansion is a solution to many of our modern problems, too, I think.  If Earth remains a closed system, it seems almost inevitable that it will wind up a poorer and less free system:  A global surveillance state, with social credit scores, scheming bureaucrats, and probably waves of mass hysteria spread instantly by social media.  In fact, that future is already here to a degree, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

I don’t want to live in that world, and I don’t want my descendants to.  Thanks to Mark Hopkins, and a bunch of space companies currently getting off the ground, we may not have to.