Fwd: [luf-team] Re: A motion to the board of directors

[Bryan Bishop]

From: Eric Hunting <erich...@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 7:57 PM
Subject: [luf-team] Re: A motion to the board of directors
To: luf-...@yahoogroups.com


I think Cale's suggested review is a fine idea and I'd be happy to cooperate with it. However, I would like to share my opinions on the nature of the situation with the LUF.

There is a common notion that the essential problem with the LUF is a lack of organization. Unfortunately, no. It's much more basic than that and much more difficult to address. Formal organization is, of course, necessary for any going concern once it gets to a certain scale and level of complexity. (below that, it tends to be obstructive because progress relies more in individual initiative) But for 'improved' organization to be a solution it has to actually have resources to organize. The essential problem with the LUF--the same problem all space advocacy groups in the world are struggling with to varying degrees--is that, as a community, it literally has next to nothing to work with because the demographic of space enthusiasts is generally poor and has become a dry well of talent and practical skills. Consequently, our repeated attempts to 'organize' and 're-organize' have been like cargo cultists cutting a miniature runway in the jungle and putting up crudely carved models of airplanes in the hopes of propitiating the space establishment gods. There is a common delusion that if you pretend to be 'professional' with enough sincerity, wear the suit and go through all the executive ritual motions, are always positive in attitude, and never--ever--complain, then money will happen. We have a serious problem with such routine magical thinking in America. This is why the US has the worst attrition rate for start-up businesses in the developed world. This is what brought us to the world economic collapse of 2008. There's a fundamental lack of understanding that the structure of a business venture--even a non-profit venture--is built from the product up, not the other way around. And the key 'product' of space advocacy is eyeballs--which is why I keep saying, again and again, year after year, that space advocacy is show-biz yet, still, almost no one comprehends what that means.

The very hard reality is this; right now there is more talent, practical skill, creativity, and vitality among the Bronies than there is among the entire global space advocacy community. The empirical proof of that is seen all over the Internet. They do stuff! As I was saying in another post recently, it would be far easier today to rally the global support to build a life-size re-creation of Ponyville than to build a space settlement mock-up. That's not a joke. THAT is the situation we have to figure out how to deal with.

There is no simple solution to this situation save the brute force of large amounts of money--enough money to outright buy the scarce skills and talent our community lacks in and of itself like the founders of New Space companies do. (and let's face facts. For all the talk of space as a new commercial frontier, none of these are publicly traded companies. Their start-up investment comes from their founders and their personal friends and money cultivated in entirely different industries. They aren't really concerned about financial risks because that's a minor inconvenience to them. The motivation is not profit in any normal ROI terms but personal interest and they set no examples anyone else can reasonably follow. New Space is the 21st century equivalent of the Reform Club--and there's nothing wrong with that, but let's not pretend it's an actual industry quite yet) This situation is the product of the evolving demographics of the American middle-class, which has thrown-away its cultivation of practical skills and industrial literacy as corporate America sought to become the Pointy Haired Boss of the world. It is amplified by the woefully deteriorated cultural relevance of space, thanks to decades of space program disillusionment combined with the worsening anachronism of space advocacy's vision. And what little talent is still cultivated in our community is lost to the space establishment that draws it away (because people need jobs) and plants it in its Mushroom Farm, out of our reach because of the hazard to professional people's careers association with space advocacy has become--due to the political hazard we represent to the space establishment and the large number of cranks we tend to harbor. That, in a nutshell, is why the community of space advocacy has become, to be frank, so fundamentally inept.

But perhaps our single biggest obstacle--the real problem underlying all this--is communication. Space development is one of the few remaining fields that simply cannot show people the things it intends to do in photographs because those things don't exist to be photographed. That means everything we need to show people has to be illustrated--and by artists competent in industrial design and the fundamentals of astronautics, or at the very least possessing a college-level general science education and reading comprehension. Unfortunately, commercial illustration is, today, a dead art.

You see, when space advocacy was founded getting photos to mass print media was still so expensive and complicated a process that most everything in our culture still had to be hand drawn to be shown to the public. Thus the fairly sophisticated skill set needed for commercial illustration was ubiquitous. This made it very easy for the founders of the space advocacy movement--largely science and engineering professionals and writers for those fields--to get their vision to the public through mass media. One of the key founders of space advocacy and collaborator with Wernher von Braun, Wily Ley, was a scientist, engineer, science writer, AND very prolific artist and industrial designer. His designs and drawings set the example for space illustration and, in collaboration with early space artist Chesley Bonstell, established the basic aesthetic of space for the popular culture well into the '60s. And it also helped one hell of a lot to have a mass media mogul and futurist like Walt Disney directly and personally participating in this early advocacy movement. He was smart enough to recognize the entertainment value in it and had the media resources to go after it. But once the technology of reprographics advanced to where photography could finally get to print media on the cheap, illustration was progressively pushed into a shrinking number of niche applications and the skill base for illustration--not to mention the general level of education among artists--rapidly declined. It became progressively harder for producers of space media to get the illustration they needed, competing for talent as they were with a rising SciFi media industry that decreasingly challenged artists intellectually and had more profit potential.

Today there may be a few hundred people left in the whole world fully qualified to do effective aerospace visualization, and for some reason they don't seem to participate much in any space advocacy groups--most likely because, like everyone else in the old fashioned space establishment, they consider association with people in space advocacy to be hazardous to their professional reputations. There is almost no original art produced in space advocacy today. Most of what you see on web sites and in space books today is endlessly recycled imagery from NASA going back 40 years. You can't talk about the future from a contemporary perspective with 40 year old media! Today's space artists are in huge demand by the space agencies and aerospace companies and command big commissions or salaries and so have no use for the likes of us. They don't seem to volunteer for any projects that do not originate in their own tribal artists community. Many other artists and designers have the raw talent for this work, but no competence in illustration, generally no college-level science education (because the art schools don't care about that sort of thing anymore), and no interest in the subject of space beyond SciFi. You don't need a basic science education for SciFi art anymore because that's largely abandoned the idea of representing plausible futures and technology and reverted back to Flash Gordon and Barsoom with a contemporary style applied. There's little to no real science fiction art now. There's no effective difference between Star Wars and Lord of the Rings beyond style. It's all variations of fantasy.

Right now there is orders of magnitude more artistic effort freely invested in the steady production of pornographic Pokemon art than there is in the subjects of space, science, and the future. That's what today's young talent is interested in. Good work art schools! Good work NASA Public Outreach! Send my regards to John Madden! ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp6W6MEbb4A )

Without access to illustration, space advocacy is generally incapable of communicating its development visions and objectives to the public and that means we are forever trapped in a Catch-22. We can't get our message out because we can't afford the art. We can't afford the art because we can't get our message out. Consequently, the whole genre of space books--with the exception of astronomy photo books and those books written by the small community of science celebrities--is dying, steadily declining in production value and sinking into media market obscurity. Unless the author is Neil deGrasse Tyson, publishers won't front money for art anymore. Artists won't speculate on art in collaboration with authors because they don't trust anyone outside their tribes--least of all, publishers. And so nothing happens and whole fields of literature dry-up and die. They end up in a death-spiral where the poorer sales become the less publishers will spend on production value and so the lower the sales get and the more they're neglected. Publishing executives no longer comprehend their responsibly to production value and the cultivation of a market--they'd rather just try to use law to control consumer behavior and punish people for not doing what they want. (right this moment these buffoons are actually waging war on the First Sale Doctrine!) It's now virtually impossible to produce a space book of the same level of production value as with the original TMP twenty years ago unless the author is in the top-most tier of science celebrities. In a few more years the only space books published by others will be hopelessly obscure self-published works selling a few crude print-on-demand or eBook copies a year.

I had hoped that, with a more visual approach to a TMP2 book project, we could revitalize this field of literature and the space advocacy movement with it. I wanted to create a Man Will Conquer Space Soon for the 21st century. The TMP2 wiki was designed for this project, which is very different from a typical book project and more like producing architectural books. It is, essentially, a catalog of industrial and architectural designs in text. It was intended as a sourcebook for a project where one develops a set of designs as 'actors' and assembles them on a cinematic storyboard to craft a travelogue-like narrative going forward through time. My intent was to craft a book rather in the same way Disney imagineers craft a theme park attraction--because I wanted to showcase our vision by taking the reader on a visual trip into space and the future. I was literally trying to do this THIS in book form. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJNSCjahErI ) But that now seems impossible. There simply isn't the talent and will today to do it. It's probably more practical to consider a CGI-based video project because, even though that may be much more expensive, today's CGI artists generally only understand the use of their skills in a video/film context. Going to these folks with a book project is like going to a yacht manufacturer with a proposal to build an airship. It may be technically logical, but does anyone have the out-of-the-cubical experience to get that?

If we cannot communicate our vision directly, our only remaining option to capture eyeballs is to try to leverage the media potential of our pursuit of it--to make media by recording our pursuit of physical projects/activities into photos and video. It's what I call the Cousteau Paradigm because Jacque Cousteau set the definitive example of this approach. The Cousteau Society created what was essentially the equivalent of a non-government Mercury/Redstone program through crowdfunding. It did many of the same things space advocacy groups all aspire toward. And the way it did this is relatively simple; Cousteau leveraged the commercial and public interest value of photographs and film he made about his own lifestyle and activity on improving the means for that activity. The formula is simple; interesting and/or funny people doing interesting and/or peculiar things in exotic locations equals money in the bank. It's really difficult to screw that up even at a modest level of production value. Add in the impact of bringing full color images of a largely unexplored sea to people's TVs and you've got a hugely powerful economic resource. All that Cousteau accomplished in his career was rooted in this and it set an example that, today, a whole nature media industry now follows. It works.

But can space advocacy follow this example? There is a vast assortment of projects and activities we might do that would make good content. Today, more than ever, building and construction activity, science, and 'reality' content  have become popular as themes for mainstream entertainment. What if being a member of the LUF meant pursuing a lifestyle 20 years ahead of everyone else? What if we could share that experience with the world? Interesting people doing interesting things in interesting places… But, sadly, we face the same fundamental competency problem. Photography and video are now easier and cheaper than ever and, thanks to the rapidly improving technology, that part of things doesn't really take much skill to produce passable content. Right now there are thousands of people making their own TV shows in their own homes and reaching audiences of thousands to millions on-line. But to produce media showcasing people making and doing things requires people who can actually make and do things! That's where this all goes to hell again.

Since I first joined the FMF--now going toward twenty years ago--I have been continuously generating and proposing project ideas for this group, always seeking things that were more accessible in terms of cost and skills. I always knew the demographics of space enthusiasts was weak, but I long believed that, in a community so international and large, there had to be some latent reserve of practical skills waiting for the right project to draw it out. So that's what I tried to do. And I didn't just float trial balloons. Despite not being the most healthy person or personally having much resources, I have tried to get things to critical mass on my own, but it's really slow-going alone. Right now I have about a dozen pans on the stove, and I have seen little to no help on offer for them. I can't blame people for that. The skills and means just aren't there. I've now hit bottom. I am now routinely proposing project ideas in this forum on the level of hobby, craft, and DIY home improvement and that's still too difficult for you people. If our community can't handle activity on the level of scout troop crafts, what the hell can we realistically ever hope to accomplish? So while this Cousteau Paradigm is a perfectly suitable approach, I no longer believe we can cut it. There simply aren't the people here who can and will do anything at all. It is the core members responsibility to get projects to critical mass, but bear in mind that we come from the exact same tribe of Milton Waddamses as the rest of you lot. We have no better competency than the rest of you. Almost no one in the entire space advocacy community can be called exceptional in this. This is why everything that this group has ever marginally accomplished has been the product of solitary individuals who, in frustration, just throw up their hands and start doing things by themselves. And one of the problems with that is that these poor sods routinely bite off more than they can chew because they foolishly think getting the ball rolling will inspire the rest of you to help carry things through. Nope. If you have any means and skills for anything, odds are you are the only person in this group with those means and skills and no one else will step up.

Even in the recently emerged Maker community--the one community actively cultivating practical skills among the public and probably our best chance to find capable people today--the philosophy is Demo or Die. I've been involved in the Maker community for many years now. I was the first person to try and found a native American Fab Lab in the southwest--before most people at NASA even knew what a Fab Lab was. (an effort which died due to scandal-ridden New Mexico politics) Most of the time I can get a patient hearing-out of ideas there, but it's all just words to them. Because there's so much more vitality and capability in that community, no one is short of project ideas of their own to pursue and are disinclined to hop aboard any other trains that aren't already moving. There is little interest in Space among Makers because the perception of the space program is of a colossal rusting Cold War era anachronism. There already is an open source space movement, but it has almost no connection to the space advocacy community. How many people in this forum have ever heard of Open Luna?

I just don't know what 'better organization' alone can hope to do for such very fundamental problems. What can some meager force of numbers with nothing else do? At this point, organizing people in this group is like taking a classroom full of developmentally disabled children out into an empty field, dropping the blueprints for a Victorian style townhouse in front of them and saying; "OK, kids. Let's start building!" What are they going to do? I think it now must come down to some outside source of competence and means--and all it might take is just one person of truly practical professional skill. One exceptional industrial designer with a passion for space and the future would be more valuable to us than Marshal Savage himself and every member of our group to date combined. But we've been waiting for that sort of person to show up for twenty years.

I desperately wish I was wrong. I challenge everyone reading this to prove me a fool. I'm just about out of ideas. Maybe this is just the wrong country at the wrong time in history. Forget organization. Forget the party-favor executive titles. Our only hope is to get out of the cargo cult mentality. Does it really matter who's in or out of step when you're just doing the Ghost Dance?

Eric Hunting
erich...@gmail.com





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