President John F. Kennedy speaking at Rice University

 

 

 

 

Artist’s rendering of a possible lunar mining facility. Image produced for NASA by Pat Rawlings (SAIC).

 

 

Signatories to the Artemis Accords as of April 2026

 

 

Artemis II splashdown during the Mets game at Citi Field, 10 April 2026

 

 

“Opening the Space Frontier — the Next Giant Step” by Robert McCall for NASA

A shorter version of this article was published by Quillette on 14 April 2026: The New Frontier

How much would you pay to take your cat or dog with you on a cruise?

For some people, the answer would be “a lot”! But the market hasn’t addressed this demand. With the exception of service dogs (who are not pets, and no, buying a harness on eBay doesn’t make her a service dog), pets are not allowed on any regular cruise ship. If you want to bring your four-footed companion, you need to spend $2 million for a condominium cabin on Storylines (which actually has a veterinarian on board). Minor exception: the Queen Elizabeth 2 and Queen Mary 2 will let you place your pet in a kennel, but they can’t stay in your cabin.

Post-COVID, cruising is booming. Disney just ordered eight brand-new cruise liners.

https://www.travelagewest.com/Travel/Cruise/disney-cruise-line-4-new-ships

Other cruise lines are doing the same. Thousands of cruisers would cheerfully pay a substantial extra fee to bring their pets along. I propose the new ships dedicate a certain number of staterooms to being pet-friendly. Modern technology and some common-sense rules can keep everyone safe and comfortable.

The rules

Small pets only. A simple filter would be that they have to be in a carrier that fits underneath a standard airline seat. (So, no German shepherds! Sorry!) And there would be a limit of two or three per stateroom.

Transported only in carriers. Absolutely no provisions for pets to be in common areas, even on a leash. You bring them to your stateroom in the carrier, and you take them off the ship in their carrier. If you want your dog with you at a port of call, they have to cross the gangway in their carrier.

They have to wear a collar with an electronic tag. These RF devices (similar to an Apple AirTag) are becoming more common on cruise ships, with Princess Medallions allowing you to locate members of your party anywhere on the ship within a few feet. Placing one of these on each pet, plus high-resolution location sensors in the designated staterooms, would allow the system to know not just when the pet is in the room, but in what part of the room. This is important (see below).

Supplies. You bring your own litterbox, litter, and food. For dogs, the balcony areas of the designated staterooms will be carpeted with artificial turf, and there will be plastic poop bags, a sealed waste container and a water hose for rinsing the area. If your dog needs lots of running and activity, they’re not going to be a good match for the cruise ship.

Paperwork. You’d need some sort of certificate from your vet, stating that the pet is in good health. You’d need to bring any needed medications. And if the pet gets sick, you’re on your own… you need to get them off the ship, and good luck finding a local vet.

Technology

Each pet-friendly stateroom would have a prominent red or green light displayed on both sides of the door. This display would be keyed to the collar tag(s) of the pet(s) registered to that stateroom. In addition, each pet-friendly stateroom would have one additional door (shown here in green) separating the entry vestibule (shown here in yellow) from the main part of the cabin (green). These diagrams are taken from the Disney Wish, but most ships have similar layouts. Larger suites would make this even simpler.

If the vestibule door is open, the entry light is red. Neither guests nor cabin staff should open the door to the corridor. If you’re headed out of your stateroom and the light is red, don’t leave until you’ve secured your pets. If you’re in the room with the pets running loose, the cabin staff won’t enter to freshen your towels or turn down your bed.

If the vestibule door is closed but one or more tags are detected in the vestibule/bathroom/closet areas, the entry light is red. Same rules apply.

If and only if (1) the vestibule door is closed and (2) all tags are located on the other side, then the light will turn green. Then you may exit the cabin safely without the risk of your pet darting out the door, and cabin staff can enter as well.

Implementation

Staff will need to be firmly instructed to close the corridor door before opening the vestibule door to service the cabin. Similarly, they will have to chase all pets into the bedroom area and secure them behind the vestibule door before attempting to leave. This will slow down servicing each pet-friendly cabin, which is one justification for the increased price.

How much extra? I don’t know. The cruise lines will have to figure that out. It’s a premium service, requiring some investments in technology and in staff training. I’d suggest something like: first pet, $100/day for the first three days, then $30/day thereafter. Second and third pets, $10/day each.

The Disney Wish has 1254 staterooms. If future sister ships configured 10% as pet-friendly (mostly higher-end staterooms and suites, since you’d need the balcony), you could have 120 slots available on each cruise. That would translate to an average of $500/week per stateroom. If they had a “take rate” of 50%, that means an additional $30,000/week of revenue, or $1.5 million/year. It sounds like easy money for the cruise line.

I hope someone tries this!

https://quillette.com/2024/09/03/life-on-mars-space-elon-musk-starship/

The review has been up on Quillette for a few months now, and they’ve given me permission to reproduce it here on my own blog. (The version below is my original; the version they posted was lightly edited, but didn’t change anything substantial.) I also recorded an audio version if you’d rather listen to it; you can click on the link below, or find it on Spotify.

https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=QLTUL3889171822

A review of The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet and Why We Must by Robert Zubrin, 280 pages, Diversion Books (May 2024).

This is a remarkable book. It’s notionally about colonizing Mars… with plenty of math, diagrams, and technical disquisitions about how that will be accomplished. But it’s mostly a book about mankind… our history, our capabilities, and our future potential. 

Robert Zubrin is well known in space circles. An earlier book, The Case for Mars (1996), is based on his work surrounding Mars settlement dating back into the late 1980s. He has been the leading proponent of a “Mars Direct” architecture, one of the first proposals for drastically reducing the cost of a Mars mission by extracting propellant from the Martian atmosphere and building shelters from Martian rock and regolith.

Now, with The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet (2024), Zubrin has consolidated three decades of additional research, as well as substantial new discoveries about Mars made by 21st century orbiters, landers, and rovers. He adapted the first chapter of the book in these pages in March 2024 <https://quillette.com/2024/03/19/what-can-we-create-on-mars-robert-zubrin/>.

Zubrin starts from a position of manifest destiny: we should send humans to Mars, in quantities sufficient to establish multiple 10,000-person cities, in order to take the next step in human development.

There are likely to be many noble experiments on Mars. Some will fail, but others will succeed, leading their cities to grow, prosper, invent, create, and, by example, set a new standard for the further progress of humanity everywhere.

This is not a universally held belief.

Millions of people would state that “we have enough problems here at home,” and we shouldn’t be expending time and treasure on exploring or settling Mars. An extreme faction would state that we shouldn’t interfere with Mars at all, leaving it in pristine desolation, without exporting our pollution, factionalism, and wars to other worlds. Zubrin rejects these positions, stating “To claim that humans do not have the right to alter Mars because has the right to be unaltered is as nutty as claiming that Michelangelo was committing criminal mutilation of marble blocks by chiseling them into statues.” He follows with strong arguments as to why permanent Martian settlements will benefit all of mankind, even those individuals who never set foot outside their home province on Earth. 

But even among space enthusiasts, the settlement of Mars is not universally accepted as a goal. Since Apollo, U.S. space policy has been roughly divided among three camps, which can be described as O’Neillians, von Braunians, and Saganites. Zubrin is marking out a fourth way.

During the heyday of the Apollo moon landings, everyone expected NASA’s next big step to be to Mars. In 1969, Gerard K. O’Neill asked his Princeton students “Is the surface of a planet really the right place for an expanding technological civilization?” Upon pursuing variations of this question with a decade of students, he concluded the answer was “No.” 

In O’Neill’s vision, humanity should expand beyond Earth, but in large self-sufficient habitats (then called “space colonies” before the word “colonization” became toxic) orbiting in free space. Exploitation of solar system resources would provide a profit motive, and the government would be just one, very large, customer of private sector aerospace technologies. Although most O’Neillians support the idea of mining the Moon for resources, they tend to be more focused on asteroids and comets. Their attitude towards Mars can be summed up by space venture capitalist Michael Mealling: “Why would I go to so much effort climbing out of Earth’s gravity well, just to climb down another one on Mars?” There’s a strong O’Neillian camp in space development today, most notably led by Jeff Bezos and his aerospace company, Blue Origin.

Others, mostly tempered in the Cold War, see space as a continuation of politics by other means. These are the von Braunians—believing that spectacular space missions are a way of demonstrating national superiority, much as Apollo showed the world how a free market could outperform the Soviet centrally-planned economy. (Of course, in the process, Apollo created an American centrally-planned economy, which derailed space development for forty years. Think for a moment why we have a national “space program,” but did not have an “aviation program” or “automobile program.”) Traditional aerospace and defense primes like Boeing and Lockheed Martin fall into this category. Bluntly, they’d be happy with “flags and footprints” missions that have no lasting economic impact, as long as the missions are paid for by the taxpayers.

Yet a third group of space enthusiasts, honoring the vision of Carl Sagan and others, believe in sending robotic probes everywhere in the solar system (and perhaps beyond), but without sending people. This faction believes that the cost and risk of human missions are too high, and that we can collect ample scientific knowledge at a substantial discount without risking the lives of human explorers. This camp is best expressed by the Planetary Society and its fellow travelers. They point with pride to the amazing discoveries of the NASA Mars rovers (Spirit, Opportunity, and Perseverance.) They fail to note that these same discoveries could have been made in an afternoon by one geologist, on foot, with a rock hammer and a magnifying glass.

I suspect Zubrin would reject the Saganites and the von Braunians outright. He would probably make common cause with the O’Neillians, and I suspect would welcome the chance to let the free market thrash out the potential advantages and disadvantages of Mars cities versus orbiting habitats. But Zubrin and Elon Musk are the leading exponents of a fourth camp, which I will call the “New Martians.” And a substantial portion of his new book relies upon SpaceX’s Starship architecture for transportation to Mars, upon Mars, and beyond Mars.

Starship is revolutionary. NASA’s space shuttle, albeit a technological triumph, never lived up to its economic objectives. Each launch cost approximately $1 billion. When operational, Starship will cost $5 million per flight, for five times the payload… an overall 1000x improvement in cost per kilogram to orbit. And since Musk is already setting the groundwork for mass production, a fleet of Starships will have the capability to take millions of tons of cargo—and thousands of settlers—to Mars.

Zubrin goes through a lot of math, which the less-technical reader can easily skip. But even if you don’t know the difference between Delta-V and Delta House, the numbers are compelling. The fare for a one-way trip for one person and his or her basic equipment will be about $300,000. Which is not a trivial amount of money, but is well within the ability of millions of people to liquidate and/or borrow. And, as he points out, in constant dollars, this is comparable to the price of a berth on a ship from Europe to the New World in the 17th century. People found a way to fill those berths. They’ll find a way to fill the berths on a Mars colonial transport.

At this point, the reader begins to understand Zubrin’s vision (which he shares with Elon Musk). These will not be “NASA missions” (although NASA may purchase tickets for some of its personnel). In the words of aerospace engineer and author Rand Simberg, “It’s not NASA’s job to go to Mars. It’s NASA’s job to enable the National Geographic Society to go to Mars.” You can expand that to include large companies, entrepreneurial startups, space agencies from smaller nations, church groups—SpaceX and its eventual competitors will carry anyone who can pay the fare. This enforces a completely different set of requirements, metrics, and success criteria on a Zubrinesque Mars settlement.

And the key word is “settlement.” NASA is currently planning for the Artemis missions to return to the Moon. (Officially, NASA has no plans for Mars missions at this time.) Even though the claim is “this time to stay,” the plans for long-term habitation of the Moon are timid, with astronauts confined to landers and, eventually, surface habitats scarcely bigger than landers. The overall impression is of Antarctic outposts, crewed by handfuls of stalwart astronauts with decades of training. 

Zubrin is proposing cities on Mars: tens of thousands of people with all the living quarters, industrial areas, and life support necessary to thrive in an environment vastly harsher than Antarctica. And children. Lots and lots of children. No matter what Elton John sang, Mars will be the kind of place to raise your kids. 

He draws an explicit analogy to the English and French settlements of the New World. England sent families, or women who wanted to raise families. France built trading outposts, staffed entirely by men. By the 1750s, even though France’s population was four times the size of England’s, English colonists outnumbered the French by 40:1 (2 million to 50,000). Zubrin expects a similar dynamic on Mars. The cities that attract and support the most families will economically win out against technocratic settlements who see children as a bother underfoot. Mars needs women—and children—if it is to thrive.

He does the math to demonstrate that lifting from Earth all the infrastructure needed to support thousands of people on Mars is economically unattractive. Only those devices which require a deep industrial base will be shipped from Earth. To use an analogy from the American frontier, you didn’t ship lumber to San Francisco. You shipped axes and saw blades, which were used to cut down local trees and make them into lumber. 

Whatever can be made on Mars, will be made on Mars. From building materials, to growing crops, to industrial machinery, Mars settlements will resemble busy workshops and factories more than scientific outposts. The New Martians are going to be busy surviving and thriving. They’ll deliver plenty of scientific discoveries… but discoveries driven by the need to constantly build infrastructure for themselves and their children.

Chronic labor shortages will lead to different social norms. Children will get much of their education “on the job,” helping their parents. And elders who would be retired on Earth will continue working as long as they are able, passing on knowledge to younger generations. It will be a much harsher world. Zubrin explicitly draws analogies between the new world on Mars and the New World of the Americas in the 18th and 19th centuries. A shared sense of culture and of building a shared future will be critical to avoid social breakdown.

As noted in the quote above, Zubrin expects many “noble experiments” on Mars… not a single planetary-wide government, but a messy patchwork of cities, smaller settlements, industrial parks, and possibly individual homesteaders. While not promoting a laissez faire lack of regulation, he clearly believes that competition fosters creativity, innovation, and efficiencies that can’t be met by centralized planning. It will be interesting to see how this plays out if New Martian cities populated from Western democracies are sharing the planet with more authoritarian outposts from China.

Note that, at this point, Zubrin departs from his fellow New Martian, Elon Musk. Musk has repeatedly stated that he wants to build a million-person Mars city in the next ten years. Zubrin dismisses this goal, even if you make allowance for “Elon time” on schedules. He’d much rather see multiple 50,000 person cities over the next fifty years, with the ability of each one to compete with all the others for raw materials, people, and capital investment.

But what are all these people going to do?

Government-funded settlements will look like Antarctic outposts: small, cramped, and completely dependent on Earth for survival. Fulfilling the vision of true cities on Mars will require unlocking vast sums of private investment capital. What does Mars have that’s worth investment by private-sector entities that want to make a profit? Mars has rocks. Earth has rocks. Mars has (frozen) water. Earth has water. Mars has carbon dioxide. Earth has, arguably, too much carbon dioxide. It’s hard to imagine any scenario in which extracting raw materials from the Martian surface for export to Earth makes any sort of economic sense.

No, those raw materials need to be transformed into usable resources. Zubrin makes a case that:

There are really no such things as ‘natural resources.’ There are only natural raw materials. It is human creativity that transforms raw materials through technological innovations. On Earth, land was not a resource until people invented agriculture. Oil was not a resource until people invented petroleum drilling and refining and machines that could run on the products. Aluminum was not a resource until the late nineteenth century, when technologies were invented to extract the metal from aluminum oxide. Until then, it was just dirt.

Mars has an entire planet full of raw materials. (And acts as a gateway to even larger stockpiles in the asteroid belt; see below.) Those raw materials will be transformed into useful resources by human ingenuity. And those resources will be used to solve problems, both for the New Martians and for humans everywhere.

The New Martians are  going to invent. Zubrin goes through an entire panoply of sectors where focused teams with a compelling need could make substantial advances—especially if liberated from stultifying bureaucracies back home. From fusion power to biotechnology to industrial automation to robotics—Mars will be perennially short of power and labor for decades. Inventions to make more power available and to leverage that so larger enterprises can be managed by fewer people… those inventions will be critical to the survival and growth of New Martian cities. But those inventions will be equally applicable to problems on Earth. So the first exports from Mars will not be metals or volatile gases or Martian-made devices. The first exports will be patents. The New Martian cities will become intellectual property powerhouses. And, as such, they’ll attract investment from wealthy investors, just as Columbus attracted investment from the court of Isabella and Ferdinand, and just as Silicon Valley attracted investment from wealthy individuals, pension funds, and venture capital firms.

And, interestingly, the New Martians won’t just export back to Earth. Given their location and lower gravity, they will also import and export goods and services to the asteroid belt—a sprawling collection of rocks between Mars and Jupiter with trillions of dollars of metals, volatile gases, and other valuable materials. The implacable laws of orbital mechanics dictate that an orbitally-refueled SpaceX Starship can travel from Earth to Mars… or from Mars to the asteroid belt. (And back.) But a Starship cannot make it from Earth to the asteroid belt without a refueling stop. That will be at Mars. Therefore, Mars will act the role of Seattle in the Yukon Gold Rush. Everyone will fuel there. Everyone will refit there. Everyone will sell their extracted raw materials there. And everyone will use the cities to let off steam, after years trapped in asteroid mining vessels. 

Zubrin even goes so far as to forecast an interplanetary version of the “triangle trade” which built the economy of New England, with Earth supplying high-tech manufactured goods to Mars, Mars supplying low-tech goods and food staples to the asteroid belt, and the asteroids sending metals to Earth.

Mars could become the economic hub of the Solar System.

This sounds like science fiction. In fact, it sounds like the Solar System described in “The Expanse”—an award-winning set of novels that was made into a highly-acclaimed popular television series. It also has echoes of “For All Mankind,” another popular television series that includes the earliest stages of Mars settlement and asteroid mining. Zubrin’s strength is taking concepts that sound like science fiction, then analyzing the technological, economic, and political underpinnings that would be required to make them reality.

I have some quibbles with Zubrin’s vision. First off, he bases a lot of his economic projections on the value of Martian real estate becoming an attractive financial asset. But, except for a passing comment in the Epilogue, he ignores the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. This treaty, with 122 signatories, forbids any nation from claiming an extraterrestrial object as its sovereign territory. So the United States cannot simply annex part of Mars (or the Moon) as the 51st state and extend American rule of law to that territory.

This has been a subject of academic debate for years but, now that extraction of extraterrestrial resources is on the near horizon, it has become much less theoretical. The U.S. and China have (publicly) diametrically opposite interpretations of the treaty, with complex consequences. The U.S., with the Artemis Accords (43 signatory nations and counting) is attempting to build a coalition of nations willing to take steps towards recognizing property rights on extraterrestrial bodies. But it’s early days yet, and the consensus is fragile. It’s doubtful that the billions of dollars necessary to build a new Silicon Valley on Mars will be available until the legal framework of land ownership is nailed down.

Second, Zubrin makes a strong case that, in the long run,  thriving successful cities on Mars will necessarily be populated mostly by native-born New Martians, not emigrants from Earth. However, we have absolutely no idea if this is possible. Humans have evolved for millions of years in Earth’s gravitational field. We have no data on how humans will thrive and reproduce in lower gravity. At the furthest limit—zero gravity—the data is discouraging. Robert Heinlein was wrong, and zero G is unhealthy for humans. From muscular atrophy to loss of bone density, to glaucoma, to immune systems disorders, astronauts who have stayed for 6 to 12 months on the International Space Station have experienced various levels of health problems, from annoying to potentially debilitating. 

Many physiologists believe that the 1/3 Earth gravity on Mars should be sufficient to stave off these disorders and enable successful conception, gestation, and birth. But we don’t know. Until we have vastly more data from 1/3-G centrifuges in Earth orbit, it’s irresponsible to hypothesize about tens of thousands of humans being safely born on Mars.

Lastly, Zubrin’s view of colonization and settlement is very U.S.-centric. There have been other models in recent human history. Australia was settled by British criminals. Although it has done well, the Australian frontier evolved very differently than the American frontier. Brazil was colonized—not settled—by the younger scions of Portuguese upper classes, who came to extract as much wealth as possible as quickly as possible, and had no intention of staying and building families. There are other examples.  The steps outlined by Zubrin are necessary but not sufficient to achieve his vision of a thriving and self-sufficient Mars. 

But these problems can be solved, whether through negotiating new treaties, or through better understanding of human physiology. Fundamentally, there is an entire new world there for the taking, with a land area equal to Earth’s. In the long term (centuries, not millennia), Zubrin explores how Mars could be terraformed into a planet where humans could walk on the surface without spacesuits… and someday, without even breathing masks. Humanity won’t be held back by treaties, or by technical obstacles. Expansion is what humans do.

Zubrin quotes approvingly from the Turner thesis (on which, coincidentally, I wrote my senior thesis in 1979):

“To the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.”

Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 1893

This is the foundation for Zubrin’s concluding argument. Settling Mars isn’t just about making humanity a multi-planetary species. Settling Mars is about improving the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness for everyone on Earth. 

John F. Kennedy correctly labeled space as “The New Frontier,” but we haven’t been treating it as a frontier. We’ve been treating it as scientific curiosity, occasionally visited by super-qualified astronauts selected for physical, mental, and emotional excellence. That’s not how a frontier works. Crossing the Atlantic to settle in the New World attracted people who were dissatisfied with their role in Europe. “People who did not ‘fit in’ with the Old World’ could discover and demonstrate that, far from being worthless, they were invaluable in the New.”

Similarly, the American West was settled by malcontents, restless souls, and people who felt trapped by the crowds and smokestacks of East Coast cities. “Go West, young man” was not just an exhortation by Horace Greeley. It was the touchstone of an age, when ambitious young men (and, eventually, women) could move to an unpopulated desolation and carve out a homestead… or a fortune.

(Of course, America was not actually “unpopulated,” and the treatment of native Americans was deplorable. Luckily, abuse of native populations is one problem we won’t have anywhere in the Solar System.)

Society has changed, but human nature has not. Having a relief valve for the built-up pressures of modern industrial civilization is needed more than ever. In the process, the settlers will be required to improvise, adapt, and invent new technologies to overcome the challenges of their new frontier. As Zubrin claims, “without the opening of a new frontier on Mars, continued Western civilization faces the risk of technological stagnation.”

We’ve spent fifty years taking small steps into orbit and onto Earth’s Moon. Settling Mars will truly be “one giant leap for all Mankind.” It will unlock vast new resources, bringing the possibility of wealth and well-being to everyone on Earth. Zubrin reframes the history of the 20th century as “the real lesson of the last century’s genocides is this: We are not endangered by a lack of resources. We are endangered by those who believe there is a shortage of resources. We are not threatened by the existence of too many people. We are threatened by people who think there are too many people.” Rather than squabbling on Earth’s surface, with wars for oil, water, or other finite resources, we can lift our eyes to the endless wealth of the Solar System. Rather than the endless jostling with our neighbors for lebensraum, every nation or group can have as much living room as they desire. 

The social, economic, and political problems of 16th century Europe could not be solved within the boundaries of Europe. Solutions involved zooming out, and reorganizing society within a larger frame that included a New World. The same is true today. Earth’s problems are solvable, but they are not solvable solely on Earth. Zubrin has done a masterful job of summarizing our challenges, our capabilities, and our future potential. For humanity to thrive, we need to build a new world on Mars. 

-30-

Stephen Fleming is an experienced investor in space startups, and the founder of the Arizona Space Business Roundtable. He recently retired from the University of Arizona after a long career at Georgia Tech and in the private sector. He maintains an aerospace and entrepreneurship consulting practice at www.boostphase.com, and spends way too much time on Twitter/X at @stephenfleming.

But all good things must come to an end, and after careful consideration, I’ve decided to retire from the University and from the Center for Quantum Networks at the end of June.

My CQN role will be ably filled by Alireza Shabani (formerly of Cisco), and Julie Emms will maintain oversight as the Administrative Director of the Center. I plan to maintain my role with the Arizona Space Business Roundtable.

There are a couple of consulting engagements that I expect to take on through my alter ego at Boostphase <http://www.boostphase.com>, and I’m involved with a new venture capital firm being formed. I also plan to maintain my engagement with various not-for-profits in Tucson, such as DM50 and SARSEF. But I plan to start prioritizing more time on cruises and hanging out with my granddaughter!

Please stay in touch, and best of luck with all your endeavors.

We’ve been partially electric for over a decade, though. We leased a Chevy Volt in 2012, and bought another one when the lease expired in 2015. I love the torque, the silence, and — especially recently — the ability to avoid gas pumps!

Our second Volt is in great shape, but it’s aging. And we happened to visit a friend in Florida who has a Tesla Model Y, and he was approved for the Full Self Driving beta. He gave us a ride, and I was hooked. This is the future, and you can buy it today!

But it’s an expensive purchase, so we wanted to do our due diligence. It turns out there is an “AirBnB for cars” website named Turo… and it has a lot of Teslas for rent. We found a brand-new Model Y with Autosteer (not the beta FSD) and decided to spend a weekend with it.

Paul, the owner, met us in our driveway and gave us a five-minute lesson before riding away with his wife. I’d cheated — I’d watched a couple of hours of videos on the Tesla user interface beforehand. If not, I think I might have been a bit overwhelmed. (I’m really interested in how Hertz is going to educate drivers for their planned fleet of 100,000 Model 3s.) As it was, there was a lot to learn… I’ll try to take this in rough chronological order.

Getting Started

Getting in was a challenge. The exterior door handles require two hands. If you’re carrying something, you have to put it down. It’s nice that they’re aerodynamic, and I understand that the motorized Model S/X handles are a mechanical nightmare… but really? This seems to be a step backwards. Door handles are a solved problem.

Sitting in the driver’s seat, the rear visibility is terrible. Way worse than any other car or SUV I’ve driven. I kept trying different angles on the center mirror, but nope. (And, on an $80,000 car, shouldn’t that mirror be motorized with a memory setting?)

Setting the side mirrors is idiotic. The left hand mirror is straightforward… enter the proper mode, then wiggle the roller switch on the left hand side of the steering wheel. So adjusting the right hand mirror is obvious… wiggle the roller switch on the right hand side of the steering wheel, right? Wrong! You have to switch modes, then keep wiggling the left roller. That’s idiotic.

I did it wrong, and I watched three other people do it wrong. Everyone did it wrong. At a certain point, that’s on Tesla, not on us. This is a software fix, and Tesla should fix it.

Adjusting the steering wheel made horrible crumpling noises in the dashboard. Not inspiring confidence in an $80,000 car. (And something that our Volt and our Hyundai do in complete silence.)

More cabin comfort issues… that glass roof. Gorgeous. Ridiculous in Arizona heat. There needs to be some sort of sunshade to cover it. I am glad I found the setting to automatically run the A/C when the interior gets over 105º, because that’s just mid-morning in an Arizona summer.

And trying to adjust the temperature is stupid. You have to tap on invisible targets to the left or the right of the displayed temperature. There’s also some sort of slider function that I encountered occasionally, but I couldn’t figure out how to access it repeatedly.

Cellphones… Yay for wireless charging! I have an iPhone 12 Pro Max, in the Apple case. It’s just a hair too big to fit in either of the wireless charging stations. A couple of millimeters would help here.

Self Driving… Sometimes

Alright, enough time in the driveway. We quickly got out on city streets and immediately tried yanking the shift lever twice to enable Autosteer. “Not available.” Well, this is a dinky residential street. Let’s turn onto a bigger street. “Not available.” Huh? Another turn, this time onto a six-lane road. Yay! Blue lines appear on the screen, and the car takes over lane-keeping. It handles gentle curves with aplomb. I’m able to change lanes with the turn signal. (A little more abruptly than I’d like, to be honest, but it works.) Kinda creepy, kinda magic. This is fun!

And this is exactly what I want, and why we’re considering buying this car. TMI: I have double vision… “torsional diplopia,” which makes it difficult to drive, particularly at night. This gives you an idea of what I see:

I want a whole bunch of CPU cycles looking out for me, making better decisions than I can, and making me more confident on the road. Maybe this is it?

Here’s comes a traffic light. It’s green. And the car… stops. Tapping the accelerator fires it up again until we get to the next green light. And the car… stops. The display is accurately distinguishing between red and green (and amber) lights, but the logic model seems to be “Traffic signal: STOP.” That’s weird.

I knew that without the FSD beta, this car wouldn’t make turns for me, but I wish it could. As is, the adaptive cruise control and lane-keeping are just a hyperactive version of what we already have on other cars. In fact, it was less helpful than our Hyundai… which will yank the wheel when you’re departing from your lane. The Tesla seems to be all or nothing… either it’s driving (and keeping you perfectly centered in your lane), or it’s NOT driving (and you’re on your own). I was hoping for more assistance and less feigned autonomy.

We experimented with keeping our hands off the wheel, of course… even getting to the point where a klaxon sounds and a big red error message told us that it wasn’t going to play anymore for the remainder of that drive. And, having XY chromosomes, I found some empty roads to floor the accelerator and enjoy the G-forces. Whee!

(Hey, Paul, if you were trying to get your safety score up in order to get approved for the FSD beta… sorry, dude. After three days with us, you’re never getting approved. Oops.)

But we spent most of our time trying to simulate daily drives to the grocery store, to work, to dinner, etc. The adaptive cruise control was essentially flawless in slowing down to avoid hitting cars in front of us. And most of the time, the Model Y did a great job of staying between the lane markers.

Except when it rained.

With rain-slick roads, the cameras apparently just gave up on identifying lane markers, and refused to attempt Autosteer. This is probably the safe choice, but it was certainly disappointing, since rainy weather is dangerous, and a semi-autonomous vehicle ought to make it safer. (I wonder if the Full FSD beta is as cautious?) This seems to be a circumstance where radar would be useful…

I had no reason to expect an “augmented reality” view of the road ahead, but I think I was expecting it anyhow. I drove a Cadillac with infrared night vision twenty years ago, and I’m surprised it wasn’t implemented here. It’s a great use of a heads-up display. (What? There’s no heads-up display in the Tesla? Why the heck not?)

Nearing the end here. Mostly, I felt safe behind the wheel of the Model Y, even with the robot in charge. It doesn’t understand speed bumps… even when clearly marked with pavement paint and roadside signs, the car would dash over them at full speed, which was a bit teeth-jarring until we learned to take it out of Autosteer on streets with speed bumps. (There a lot of those in Tucson.) And traffic circles seem to be outside of the car’s mental model.

I only got genuinely scared twice. Once was approaching a construction site. The cameras accurately identified the orange-and-white construction barriers blocking our lane… and the car completely ignored them. We kept traveling at a steady pace with no warning, no lane change, no “Hey, human, time for you to take over”… nothing. I let it go longer than I was comfortable with, then finally jerked the wheel to avoid the nearest barrier. I honestly think we would have plowed right through them if I hadn’t.

The other scary moment was driving through Gates Pass, west of Tucson. This is a demanding twisty-turny road, and honestly, the car did the right thing by giving up and putting the human in charge. But I kept trying to see if it would build up a good enough mental model to Autosteer. So I kept double-yanking the shift lever. When, all of a sudden, the screen lit up with rainbows, Blue Oyster Cult started playing “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” and Christopher Walken starts asking for “more cowbell”! On the afore-mentioned twisty-turns road with other cars following close behind, this was absolutely terrifying, and I’m glad there was enough shoulder that I could pull off and do something, anything, to make it shut up.

(Elon? Easter eggs are cool, but not when they’re safety hazards.)

That makes this as good a place as any to voice one of my most serious complaints about the car. Everything happens on the touchscreen. Everything. Which is exactly where I should not be looking when driving the car. The Model Y exacts a high cognitive load from the driver… possibly too high for most people. There are innumerable messages, bells, all alerts, all the time. But there is almost no use of voice synthesis… everything is displayed as text messages on the lower left corner of the screen, where I can’t see it without moving my head and taking my eyes off the road.

And… Elon? You’re going to need bifocals someday. For those of us who already wear them, this UX is horrible. You flash up a two-line message for a couple of seconds. By the time I look away from the road, find the sweet spot in my progressive bifocals to focus on the message, and read the first line… it has disappeared. With no way to get it back. I have no idea what any of the second-line messages said. I hope they weren’t important. The print is way too small, the contrast is way too low, the timing is way too fast, and the location of the messages is way too far from the road.

All that can be fixed in software. Please consider skipping the next fart button, and create a “Geezer Mode” for those of us old enough to have earned enough money to buy this car. It seems to be optimized for young people with perfect vision. That’s not me.

Final Observations

I understand why Tesla doesn’t want to implement Apple CarPlay (or Android Auto). They see their infotainment system as a competitive advantage, and I suppose it is. But after having CarPlay for a year, I can’t imagine buying a car without it. There should at least be a sandboxed option to make it available.

Parking in our garage was difficult. It’s narrow and cluttered, and the Tesla’s cameras and ultrasonic sensors got confused. It’d be nice to have a quick “shut up” button to eliminate all the warnings from all directions.

And the onscreen rear camera assistance didn’t help much. Our other cars have detailed graphics overlays showing where you are and where you’re going. The Tesla’s two white lines are rudimentary by comparison.

Tesla’s backup camera.

Hyundai’s backup camera

We also tried the Summon function, but it didn’t work at all, because we have a slight slope coming out of our garage. (It worked fine in a local parking lot.)

Charging: We have a Level 2 charger in our garage with the universal J1772 plug. Which fits absolutely everything on the road except for Teslas. Yes, there is an adapter cable. No, Paul didn’t pack it in our rental. And there aren’t any Superchargers anywhere near our neighborhood. (Nearest one is seven miles; there are only three in the metro area.) So we wound up charging at 110 volts, 12 amps… which means we added 50 miles of range in about 10 hours. Ouch.

And finally, what I assume is a problem with any EV, not just Tesla: With one-pedal driving, you almost never touch the brake pedal. You lift your foot and regenerative braking starts charging the battery, while slowing the vehicle down. But the brake lights don’t come on! Someone driving behind you — especially a partially-attentive human — doesn’t notice that you’re decelerating.

I don’t know the right answer here. Illuminating the brake light without a foot on the brake would be simple, but confusing. How would you distinguish when the driver really does apply the brake? Flashing just the center-mounted brake light could indicate “decelerating but not braking” but, again, confusing until people get used to it. Adding another set of lights — orange, not red? — to indicate “decelerating but not braking” would make sense, but is probably illegal under NHTSA regulations. But we probably should do something… or we’re going to see a lot of rear-ended Teslas.

[Edit: I am reliably informed that the Model Y, and other makes of electric cars, do indeed illuminate the brake lights when decelerating. That may not be a complete solution, but at least they’re doing something.]

Conclusion

I was really psyched about the Model Y. Two years ago, the Wall Street Journal called it “the world’s best car“:

Everything else in this category—Mercedes-Benz GLC 300, Range Rover Evoque, Jaguar F-Pace, Porsche Macan—feels like a sluggish, sloppy antique, a squawking modem trying to connect to the cloud.

And they might be right.

Before renting the vehicle, I had gone through the Tesla website, and had set up an order for the vehicle I wanted: Model Y, white exterior, white interior, all the toys. After three days with Paul’s Tesla… I didn’t pull the trigger.

Maybe I’ll reconsider a Tesla in a year or so, once Full Self Driving is smarter and more available. Maybe I’ll buy a Cadillac with SuperCruise, and enjoy the increased safety performance of radar, even if it only works on highways. Maybe I’ll wait until Ford adds LIDAR and self-driving to the Mach-E. Maybe I’ll wait for what I really want, which is a totally self-driving Winnebago. Maybe I’ll just pay for a whole bunch of Lyft rides.

I’m glad I got to spend a weekend with a Model Y, and it’s a really nice vehicle. Just not right for me, right now.

NASA NIAC Symposium

NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) is “NASA’s DARPA”… the place where the space agency funds ideas that are too difficult, too far out, or too nearly-crazy to make it through the more buttoned-down world of regular NASA contracting. Every year, they bring together 150 NIAC Fellows to discuss their latest work… and this year is in Tucson! And it’s free, and open to the public. More details will be on NASA’s webpage soon, but block off September 21-23 for mind-expanding talks on revolutionary exploration systems, novel propulsion, human systems & architectures for extreme environments, sensors, and imaging.

https://www.nasa.gov/content/niac-symposium

7th Interstellar Symposium

Immediately after the close of NIAC, the Interstellar Research Group comes to town with its biennial symposium. (I hate the word “biennial,” but it’s accurate, and classier than typing “every other year.”) This is an amazing event that brings together scientists, engineers, futurists, and other interested parties who are engaged in laying the foundations for outposts throughout the Solar System and achieving a pathway to the stars. You and I aren’t going to be able to go to the stars… but our robots can. And our grandkids might!

On Friday, 24 September, we will have a set of pre-conference seminars on astrobiology, terraforming, life support, and space law that you can read about here: https://irg.space/irg-2021-seminars/. Then the conference kicks off with an opening reception on Friday night, followed by regular programming on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday — including three insightful keynotes: https://irg.space/irg-2021-keynote-speakers/

The IRG symposium totals four intense days of programming (with some local tours wrapped around it, including a behind-the-scenes look at the new Martian habitat simulator at Biosphere 2). If you live in Arizona, you should be here. If you can get to Arizona, you should consider it! And if you’re working in these fields, you should apply to speak at it!

Applying to Speak

The abstract deadline is in a little more than ten days, so hurry! We selected a few early entrants which you can read about on the website here: https://irg.space/irg-2021-abstracts-accordion/

But we need more! In particular, we’re interested in papers on exoplanets, astrobiology, and long-term human life support. If you’re working in those areas, please submit your abstract ASAP: https://irg.space/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/2021-7th-Interstellar-Symposium-Call-for-Papers-V2.pdf

Registering to Attend

Everyone (including speakers) needs to register to attend. This year, we’ve added a wrinkle: IRG has created an annual membership program. It’s completely optional, but if you are a student or a senior, and planning to attend the symposium, it’s a no-brainer: a $25 membership saves you $82.50 on early-bird registration! (If you’re not a student or a senior, a $150 Professional membership gets you the same discount, which means you get your first year of membership for a little less than half price.)

If you’re interested, first register as an IRG member at https://irg.space/membership-account/membership-levels/ . Once you are confirmed as a member, you can get an Eventbrite promo code. (That process will eventually be automatic, but at the moment, there’s a human in the loop.) Then…

It’s really important to register on Eventbrite for the conference… that drives everything from meal counts to badges. Go to https://www.eventbrite.com/e/7th-interstellar-symposium-registration-148839060637. If you got your membership promo code, press the green “Register” button, then enter that promo code at the top of the next page before selecting any items. That will reduce your early-bird registration cost from $275 to $192.50. Then you can select optional events like seminars ($100) and working tracks (free). Payment for the symposium is through EventBrite’s credit card processing system. 

If you didn’t register as a member, just proceed with the list prices. (Note that list price goes up to $300 on July 16th!)

Hotel and Airfare

Finally, be sure to book your rooms in the Marriott block by clicking here: https://www.marriott.com/event-reservations/reservation-link.mi?id=1616704002796&key=GRP&app=resvlink

If you’re coming a few days early, or staying a few days later — Tucson is awesome, and there’s always plenty to do, but don’t forget that the NASA NIAC symposium is in the same hotel just prior to IRG’s symposium. And it’s free! 

When making your travel plans, we’ll likely have a joint NASA/IRG reception on Thursday evening, 23 September… and I’m scheduling some interesting space-related tours on Monday and perhaps Tuesday, 27-28 September. Stay tuned for those.

And don’t forget to check Southwest for airline fares, both to Tucson and to Phoenix, since they don’t participate in travel aggregator sites like Expedia. There’s an hourly Groome Shuttle from Phoenix Sky Harbor that drops you off about four blocks from the hotel… a ten-minute walk, or a short Uber ride.

Finally… the Ask

The ticket price of the symposium barely covers our expenses for the meeting rooms, audiovisual, and so forth. To provide a top-notch experience, we rely on gifts from generous patrons, both corporate and individual. You can view the various “standard” patronage levels at https://irg.space/benefits-of-patronage/ … but there are multiple opportunities not listed there to become the “name” patron of a lunch, a coffee break, the opening reception, the awards dinner… it’s a long list. If you’re at all interested, please contact me and we can talk.

If you’ve read this far, you can tell how excited I am about these two meetings in Tucson. It’s an unprecedented opportunity to stretch your mind and to talk to some of the thought leaders and visionaries regarding humanity’s destiny beyond the Earth. My work at the Arizona Space Business Roundtable tends to focus on the near-term dollars-and-cents of making money in space. For one week in September, let’s look a little further out. I look forward to seeing you here!

David Wichner at the Arizona Daily Star has written a great article… but the headline writer missed a great opportunity to label it simply “Old Pueblo, New Space.” It mentions the Arizona Space Business Roundtable, as well as several of our former (and future) speakers. It’s nice to have something to point to when non-specialists ask you “So what’s going on in the space business in Tucson?”

You can read David’s article online here: https://tucson.com/business/tucson-tech-old-pueblo-gets-new-rocket-firm-as-new-space-industry-develops/article_c575f250-665b-5210-842a-2bdcb8cb5d18.html

Since the Tucson.com website doesn’t always play nicely with personal printers, I’ve also formatted a PDF of it here. Enjoy!

http://academicvc.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Old-Pueblo-New-Space-2.pdf

This week’s Innovation out of Failure class discussion centered on a conversation I had with Stephen Fleming. With Stephen touching on everything from startup successes and failures to risk taking at a university vs. in business to the role of market forces in the innovation/failure nexus, the students were given a lot to think about. After class, a few even expressed to me that they were even more passionate about entrepreneurship as a result of hearing his stories. Now that is a good success for a Monday morning…

I just wish the You Tube algorithm hadn’t selected a screenshot that looks like I’m blowing my nose!

Back in the Before Times, when I used to leave the house every day, I took Uber and Lyft a lot. (We are a one-car family, and a bicycle won’t get me everywhere.) And, channeling Thomas Friedman, I always liked to strike up conversations with my drivers. 

One thing I noticed from this random sampling of Tucsonans was how many of them were “boomerangs” — they were raised in or around Tucson, but couldn’t wait to get away after high school or college. Many went to California (it’s right next door); others went to Texas, or Chicago, or even overseas.

But, after a period of years, they came back.

These are the boomerangers. And we need more of them.

More Than Site Selection

The site-selection industry is built around targeting companies: identifying possible corporate relocations or expansions, matching them with the right real estate, workforce, and financial incentives, and competing with other cities trying to do the same thing. Tucson has had reasonable success playing that game, and it has potential for more — in a recent survey, we ranked at the very top among a handful of cities highlighted by the Site Selectors Guild. These are the consultants that companies hire to help them find the location of their next factory, research facility, or headquarters.

But not all important site-selection decisions are made by companies. Individuals make personal “site selection” decisions all the time. In the hypermobile America of the past few  decades, individuals and families relocate across state or across the country for all sorts of reasons: better jobs, bigger houses, better education, better weather, or to be closer to family. 

I always asked my Lyft drivers why they came back. “Family reasons” would be at the top of the list. Or they got tired of shoveling snow. Or California mortgage prices. Or they wanted to raise their kids where they grew up. Or, it just felt like home.

The specific reasons don’t matter. What matters is that this is a neglected part of Tucson’s narrative, and an underutilized asset for the region. 

There is a well-documented diaspora of Tucson talent that disappears in their late teens and early twenties — the “brain drain” that causes city and county leaders to despair. There are tens of thousands of Tucson natives who have scattered across the U.S. in search of better jobs, better education, cooler summers, or just to find something different. They’ve learned a lot from new experiences, and built networks of friends and co-workers in all corners of the country. They’re smarter and better connected than they were when they left Tucson. They’re worth more. And, right now, most of them are contributing to the economic growth of others cities and states.

Bring them home.

The existing boomerangers have shown the way. After being part of the “brain drain,” they’ve individually taken part of a “brain regain” as these individuals move back to take the next steps in their careers, or their family relationships, or just putting down roots.

These individuals already know what summers are like in Tucson—but they also know how glorious the weather is during the rest of the year. They know that Tucson is a welcoming, supportive community. And many will have family and friends here, and (for the graduates of local colleges) an alumni network that can help them quickly integrate into cultural, social, religious, and professional groups. 

Economic development organizations are traditionally not good at marketing to individuals. (A notable exception is Austin, Texas, in the late 1990s and early 2000s: They started with job-recruiting trips targeting individuals in Boston and the West Coast, continued with national print advertising in consumer publications, and culminated in the decidedly non-corporate “Keep Austin Weird” campaign.) Companies and site-selectors are easier to target. And if you’re contemplating a national advertising campaign aimed at raising Tucson’s profile among the creative class, it’d be easy to spend a lot of money spreading one’s efforts too thin, with no results. 

But a targeted “boomerang” strategy can be cost-effective and highly productive. Based on high-school and college graduation data, we could maintain a constant low level of direct contact with former Tucson residents for years—keeping them apprised of new companies, new amenities, new social initiatives, and new housing opportunities. (Just mailing Tucson’s real estate listings to former residents now in California would be eye-opening!) The idea isn’t one big marketing push — rather, it’s “drip irrigation,” always making sure that there’s a recent contact whenever an individual reaches the point of considering moving to another town. Job change, marriage, kids, pandemic — whatever the trigger, we want them to consider “You know, maybe it’s time to go back to Tucson.”

If Tucson’s high schools, colleges, and universities don’t maintain appropriate contact data for their graduates, then: “The best time for planting a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.” Task them with starting to maintain that data now, and fill in the gaps as best we can. But the goal is to have repeated low-cost contact with the targeted individuals over a period of years.

Once we’ve identified former Tucsonans who could be interested in returning, we need to put services in place to make the move easy. 

Plug them in.

In particular, in targeting individuals rather than companies, the region will need to develop new programming and new events. Boomerangers will need to be integrated into the community with invitations to Tucson’s wide array of cultural events, sports, festivals, seminars, continuing education, and more. Perhaps we could identify existing members of the business community to act as one-on-one “Boomerang Buddies” for the first year, making sure that the boomerangers take full advantage of all Tucson has to offer, and that they (and their spouses!) don’t regret their decision to leave the big city. We can also host a monthly series of wine tastings, dinners, hikes, bike rides, or other events, giving each new resident and their “Boomerang Buddy” a natural opportunity to build their networks.

Even with limited funds, we could do a lot with a “concierge service” approach to relocation.

• “We’ll pay the movers.” Offer to reimburse the cost of relocation, up to a modest limit.

• “We’ll pay your fees.” Some of these individuals will be working remotely (see below) and won’t have the built-in social network of an office environment. To help build a sense of community, we should encourage these new virtual workers to build as many personal connections as they can. That can be Rotary, or a softball league, or a hiking club. For the first year, if they join a qualified group, we’ll reimburse the membership fees.

• “Your kids are covered.” Day care is an enormous issue for young parents. Just having a program to match new residents with appropriate day care would be a big help. (Subsidizing it for the first year would help even more, but would get expensive.)

• “You’ll meet everybody.” Several times per year, have invitation-only “Welcome Back, Boomerang!” events for new residents who have been attracted by the program. They’ll get a chance to meet the mayor, city and county officials, local legislators, university leaders, and local CEOs in a setting that encourages conversation and connections. 

For a relatively modest investment, “boomerang” marketing and recruitment could bring hundreds of talented professionals back to the region, helping the local innovation economy reach critical mass.

Surf the wave.

Building such a set of services to accelerate the existing trickle of boomerangers will take months. By that time, we hope that the country will have emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic with effective treatment, a reliable vaccine, or both. There are many unknowns, but it seems likely that there will be lasting social and business impacts that could favor Tucson. 

Overnight, much of corporate America has learned how to work from home. And, after initial skepticism, many companies realized that it worked well. In a post-pandemic environment (with the fear of the next pandemic always around the corner), many individuals who have traditionally been attracted to the density and excitement of big cities are going to choose to live in smaller cities or even rural areas. In such a climate, Tucson is an amazingly attractive destination. I’ve addressed some of this in my four-part series of blog posts, starting with Tucson After the Coronavirus.

Large technology companies like Facebook have already committed to allow the majority of their employees to work from anywhere (with a corresponding salary adjustment to acknowledge that pretty much anywhere in the U.S. is cheaper to live than the Bay Area). Companies in other sectors are following suit. That could lead to an entirely new class of boomerangers who could be recruited back to Tucson to enjoy the city’s low cost of housing and high quality of life, without changing jobs. 

If Facebook cuts your pay by 20%, but your mortgage is cut by two-thirds, it’s still a good deal! (As I referenced in my 2013 post: At a certain point, the difference in cost of living means you can live your life differently in Tucson than in one of the high-cost creative-class supercities. To take an obvious example, the arithmetic of housing prices and day-care costs can make it cheaper for half of a two-career couple to stay home with the kids. That’s a life-changing decision, and one where Tucson wins!)

Let’s set our total available market to be all Tucsonans (or Arizonans) who have left the state. We have already seen a trickle of boomerangers coming home for personal, family, or financial reasons. The Age of Coronavirus means that the served available market just expanded dramatically, and could turn that trickle into a flood.

A particularly attractive model is “Tulsa Remote,” launched before the pandemic in an effort to recruit a diverse group of talented professionals across multiple industries to relocate to Tulsa:

Tulsa Remote is a unique recruitment initiative aimed at attracting talented individuals to Tulsa. The program brings remote workers and digital nomads to the community by providing $10,000 grants and numerous community-building opportunities. Each grant is distributed over the course of a year to eligible remote workers or entrepreneurs living outside of Oklahoma… The City of Tulsa and other community organizations lend their support to ensure program participants are fully immersed and engaged in the community. 

Tulsa is approximately the same size as Tucson, also has a major Air Force Base, and has similar workforce challenges. As a first step, Tucson can simply copy what Tulsa is doing; it’s a good model. Nominally, $500,000/year could help bring fifty high-earning professionals to Tucson, ready to be welcomed by the city, the county, and a variety of community organizations. By adding “concierge services” to the program, Tucson could differentiate itself from other mid-tier cities and live up to our “Top Eleven” ranking from the Site Selectors Guild. 

Who Bells the Cat?

I’ve mentioned “we” a lot in this post. In one sense, “we” is all of us who live in Tucson and care about its future. In another sense, “we” needs to include a cadre of people for whom making this happen is part of their day job. I don’t know who they are, or how they get paid. Maybe they work for the city. Maybe they work for Sun Corridor, or the Tucson Metro Chamber, or the Southern Arizona Leadership Council, or the Pima Association of Governments. Maybe we need a new organization (I hope not!). But building a solid program to target, recruit, and integrate “boomerangers” will require a budget, and some leadership, and at least a part-time staff. 

In normal times, this would be “nice to have.” In the age of coronavirus, we are suddenly competing with every other mid-tier city in the country, all of whom are trying to figure out how to lure high-paying talent away from New York, San Francisco, and Chicago. Once a young family has moved to Boise or Huntsville or Indianapolis with the intention of putting down roots, it would be doubly hard to recruit them to Tucson, even if one or both of them grew up here. So we need to act quickly, while the shape of the COVID19 realignment is still coalescing.

Conclusion

Tucson has all the widely-recognized assets of our peer group: great workforce, business-friendly policies, low taxes, good infrastructure, great weather, low cost of living. But we have an underutilized asset—the diaspora of Tucsonans who have left the region and are building successful careers elsewhere. A targeted campaign to identify and recruit these potential “boomerang” individuals would be a great complement to our existing corporate recruitment efforts.

In contrast to NASA’s historic model of a single booster (Saturn, then Shuttle, now SLS) to carry all payloads, we are seeing an evolutionary explosion of different booster sizes to serve different payloads, orbits, and missions. SpaceX and Blue Origin have staked out the large-booster territory, with huge rockets demonstrated or under development that are comparable to the Saturn V which sent astronauts to the Moon. At the other end, multiple companies are vying to dominate an emerging market for small, low-cost, quick-turnaround launchers that can serve commercial or scientific payloads of tens to hundreds of kilograms for costs far below that of traditional suppliers, while offering agile responsiveness that cannot be matched by large boosters.

Orbital Launch Requirements

Satellite orbits are described by altitude, inclination, and circularity. Low Earth Orbit (LEO) starts at the fringes of the stratosphere—approximately 150 km high—and ranges up to approximately 2000 kilometers. Geosynchronous orbit, used for large comsats, is at an altitude of 36,000 km. Most of the satellite constellations being proposed will operate in LEO.

The inclination of a satellite’s orbit is tightly connected to the ground location of its launch site. Equatorial orbits (inclination 0°) benefit from being launched as close to the Equator as possible; if launched from locations north or south of the Equator, the spacecraft will have to burn propellant to adjust the plane of its orbit to the equator. This is why the International Space Station is at a highly-inclined orbit of 51.6°, to make it easily accessible from Russian launch facilities in Kazakhstan.

For Earth surveillance satellites, it is frequently desirable to operate in polar (inclination 90°) or near-polar orbits. In a polar orbit, a satellite will pass over the entire surface of the Earth during the course of several orbits; ideal for telecomm coverage. Sun-synchronous orbits (inclination of approximately 80°, depending on altitude) are of interest to imaging companies: the same spot on Earth can be repeatedly photographed with the Sun at identical angle, minimizing distortion due to shadows, while only sacrificing coverage of relatively small and uninteresting territories near the poles.

Rocket launches are noisy at the best of times, and occasionally dangerous. They need to take place in relatively isolated locations. And to protect the uninvolved public, it’s best to take off over open ocean, to minimize risk from jettisoned first-stage boosters, or from falling debris in the event of a launch failure.

The FAA enforces restrictions on launch capability based on avoiding harm to the general public. (Fundamentally, that’s why you want to launch over water… the probability of a piece of your booster falling on someone’s head in the open ocean is vanishingly small compared to launching over populated areas.)

For equatorial or shallow-inclination orbits launched from the Western Hemisphere, the best locations are on the eastern coasts of North and South America, allowing jettisoned stages or debris to fall harmlessly into the Atlantic Ocean. (Launching to the east takes advantage of the rotation of the Earth, reducing the amount of propellant required to get to orbit.) Thus, NASA has traditionally launched its orbital missions from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with smaller rockets sometimes launched from Wallops Island on the Virginia coast. There are currently developments underway to add another coastal spaceport in Camden County, Georgia. The European Space Agency launches eastward out of French Guiana (benefitting from its near-equatorial geography).

Polar and sun-synchronous orbits are more difficult. Latitude is less important, but the launch site needs to have a stretch of ocean downrange to the north or south. There are currently very few polar launch facilities in the Western Hemisphere. Traditionally, the USA has launched polar or near-polar satellites from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, with limited launches of smaller boosters from Kodiak Launch Complex in Alaska or Kwajalein Island in the North Pacific.

The Smallsat Revolution

If you only need to launch a dozen or so satellites per year, this isn’t really a problem. But suddenly we’re hearing about satellite operators applying for licenses to launch hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of satellites in “megaconstellations.” What happened?

Moore’s Law.

Miniaturization has gotten to the point that it’s possible to build usefully-functioning satellites that you can lift with one hand. Of course, there are tradeoffs. Big satellites can have big antennas. If you want to have a small satellite with a small antenna, you can’t transmit and receive signals as far. Which means you want to be in a low orbit only a few hundred kilometers up, not the “Clarke Orbit” at 36,000 km where large comsats live.

And you may want to build your satellite with cheap cellphone-quality components rather than specialized space-qualified parts. Which brings down the cost dramatically, but probably means your satellite will fail faster in the harsh thermal and radiation environment of space… dying in months or a few years, rather than decades. That only makes sense if you can launch replacement satellites frequently and cheaply.

The flip side? These new satellites are tiny. You can literally build hundreds or thousands of them for the cost of a traditional large comsat.

Need for New Polar Launch Facilities

Multiple players are planning to capitalize on the smallsat revolution by launching fleets of smallsats for communications and for Earth observation. As explained above, those satellites need to be in polar or near-polar orbits. The need for new polar launch facilities has been becoming more urgent for years.

Vandenberg, Kodiak, and Kwajalein are all military bases, launching through military-controlled airspace, and have substantial operational penalties due to the need to coordinate with military operations. Historically, operations at any of these sites impose delays of months or sometimes years between commercial launches. (Friends of mine have personal experience with orbital launches from Kwajalein, and are not considering that site… like Kodiak, it has all of the drawbacks of Vandenberg, plus a long ocean voyage to get there, with the unique added bonus of an occasional typhoon.)

Currently, the Indian Space Research Operation is capitalizing on the requirement by promoting launches from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Andhra Pradesh, which supports polar trajectories over the Indian Ocean. There are obvious legal and logistical difficulties in transporting US-made satellites to India; in addition, the ISRO prefers to launch using their own PSLV (Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle), discouraging satellite operators from choosing other boosters.

There are two polar-orbit launch sites being developed in the Western Hemisphere: one in Hawaii and one in Nova Scotia. Neither is currently operational (a launch was attempted from the Hawaii facility in 2015, but failed). Both are geographically unattractive—Hawaii due to its island location, and Nova Scotia due to its remoteness and winter weather conditions.

SpaceX has conducted multiple polar launches out of Vandenberg AFB. Last summer, SpaceX began offering “ride-share” flights, charging $1 million to launch a 200 kilogram satellite. This is dramatically lower than historical prices, and this pricing caused a great deal of consternation in the small-launcher market. Many people immediately assumed that SpaceX would wipe out the burgeoning market for smaller rocket launchers.

But ride-sharing has its limitations. Fundamentally, it’s equivalent to taking the bus rather than driving your own car. You don’t get to decide the route, or the schedule, or who you ride with. It’s very cost-effective when the bus is going where you want to go, when you want to go there. And if cost is an overriding concern, you may choose to ride the bus even if it means a long walk to or from the bus stop. But millions of people decide to drive their cars every day because they value their convenience, flexibility, and privacy enough to pay the higher cost-per-mile.

If you are launching dozens or hundreds of small satellites, combining them into a ride-share or even a dedicated large launch makes sense. We’ve seen this most recently with SpaceX’s launches of its own StarLink satellites, with 60 satellites densely packed into each Falcon 9 launch.

But what if you only need to launch one or two satellites? Maybe you’re not building a megaconstellation. Or maybe you are, but one of the satellites has failed on-orbit and needs to be replaced. Or perhaps you’re a military commander, and you need a satellite in a particular orbit right now, and not whenever the next bus is scheduled to leave.

(I have to tip my hat here to Dale Brown, who popularized the concept of small, responsive “Need It Right This Second” NIRTSats in his military thrillers as far back as 1992!)

Over the last few years, I have had a number of conversations with rocket and satellite companies about dedicated launches, shared launches, and the demand for spaceports. Even with the cost advantage of ride-sharing, they seem to agree there’s a market for “several hundred” flexible launches of small satellites per year… and “over half” of them require polar orbits.

If you’re in one of these situations, and you call up Vandenberg or Kodiak, you’re in for a long wait. Military launches get first priority, and civilian launch windows are likely booked out months or years in advance. What you want is a civilian launch location, facing north or south over an ocean, with easy access to rail lines and a well-trained aerospace workforce. And it’d be nice if you weren’t in a hurricane zone.

There is no suitable oceanfront property in the United States—but there are attractive potential sites just over the Mexican border in Sonora.

From the Sonora Desert to the Stars

Arizona is landlocked… but the Sea of Cortez runs north-south. And it gets very close to U.S. soil — only 40 miles near Yuma, just over the border from Rocky Point / Puerto Peñasco.

There is direct rail access from Tucson through Nogales to Guaymas on the Sea of Cortez. A site near Guaymas could access sun-synchronous orbits with minimal plane-change maneuvering. Polar launches (90° south) would have almost 300 kilometers of unimpeded ocean before briefly passing over a sparsely populated area of Baja California. Locating a spaceport near Guaymas would also benefit from proximity to Mexico’s rapidly-growing national aerospace cluster in Hermosillo.

Alternatively, a site near Yuma/Puerto Peñasco could launch due south without overflying any substantial populated regions (taking advantage of Baja’s Valle de los Cirios and Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve). This region is also accessible by rail from both Arizona and California, connecting it to the enormous Southern California aerospace manufacturing ecosystem. It would have the major advantage of launching from US soil (eliminating time-consuming export paperwork for the launch operator and the payload clients). Southbound launches would exit US airspace within seconds, so would need close coordination with Mexican authorities to ensure safe operation in Mexican airspace and to minimize the risk to the Mexican public on the ground.

In both cases, a Sonoran spaceport would provide US rocket manufacturers with a secure rail-accessible polar launch facility, with excellent year-round weather and a well-trained workforce. Small- to medium-sized rocket launches from Arizona or Sonora are not going to put SpaceX or ULA out of business, but they can supply a critical piece of the overall launch puzzle.

Obtaining launch licenses for a spaceport can take months or years… far more time than is required to actually pour the concrete. And if we launch from Mexican soil, international coordination will probably add more months of delay. The best time to start this process would have been two years ago. The next best time is now.

Image credits

Rocket launch: SpaceX

Starlink photo: Marco Langbroek

FAA site restrictions: Spaceport Camden