While celebrating the first manned Moon landing 39 years ago, Sunday’s USA Today (7/20/08, by Dan Vergano), painted a bleak picture of a NASA in transition and human trips to Mars as far-future things. Unfortunately, it fits the profile of a world still 5 – 7 years from the next Maslow Window (see below).

Our long-term approach to 21st Century space forecasting is based on the concept of a “Maslow Window”, in which major, rhythmic, twice-per-century economic booms do two things: 1) each fuels the societal affluence required to spur large-scale technology and engineering activities, and, more importantly, 2) each creates widespread ebullience by briefly elevating society to the higher levels in Maslow’s hierarchy. Ebullience briefly creates an atmosphere of social well-being and confidence vital to undertake and support large, complex, risky, expensive, multi-year programs and explorations.

This powerful confluence of affluence and ebullience is seen only infrequently over the last 200 years, when major economic booms triggered the four great explorations: Lewis and Clark, Dr. Livingstone in Africa, the Polar Expeditions, and Apollo Moon.

But we’re not there yet.

NASA’s Vision for Space Exploration — featuring a return to the Moon by 2020 and Mars later –is a reasonable strategy, but according to John Logsdon (George Washington University), at this point, “Neither the White House nor Congress … seems to care!”

Well surprise…surprise, we have a lame duck president, an active presidential campaign, and a variety of other issues (e.g., budget, war) that are attention grabbers. And also, the economic stresses are still with us and are interrupting the “greatest global economic boom of all time” as described by Fortune magazine in July, 2007. When the boom returns in a few years — which it always does, over the last 200 years — the 2015 Maslow Window will start to swing open.

Speaking of the campaign, according to USA Today neither candidate is leading the charge into space, yet. Obama wants a debate on NASA’s goals, and McCain officially supports human Mars missions, but wants to freeze federal spending. But it’s not really fair to attack either of them. We should ask ourselves: In the 1960 presidential campaign, what did John F. Kennedy say about sending people to the Moon? And he rapidly became the greatest exploration and technology president of all time … so far.

International space powers will help the U.S. resolve the issue of what to do next in space — either by a Sputnik-like shock or by forming a global space agency — and then the new president (either candidate) will step up to the plate. However, long-wave timing suggests this may not happen until 2013 – 2015.

In the meantime, Lennard Fisk (University of Michigan) hits a homerun when he states, “The real problem is that NASA needs to be tied to a real, overriding national priority, such as protecting the planet from asteroids…Otherwise, NASA will just limp along.”

That’s the way life is when you’re 5 – 7 years from your Maslow Window…!

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