Friday in the Wall Street Journal (7/24/09) Alan S. Blinder, a Princeton professor and former vice chair of the Federal Reserve Board, announced that, “The U.S. economy appears to be hitting bottom.” Mr. Blinder presents his message in a good news/bad news format, indicating that although economic growth will soon arrive, we still are in a very serious global financial situation.

Intrade.com participants believe U.S. unemployment will hit 10% by December, 2009. Click

One of the especially scary economic signs so far is that our major recession has been mirroring the 1930s Great Depression, especially on a global level. This suggests while the U.S. may lead the world out of the recession, it may take longer than expected to do it. Although at 7.5 % growth — a 19 year low — China is still not economically large enough to play this role.

World GDP decline has been tracking the Great Depression’s pace well. (From Eichengreen and O’Rourke, 2009) Click worldgdp.doc.

According to financial advisor John Mauldin this is serious business,

To sum up, globally we are tracking or doing even worse than the Great Depression, whether the metric is industrial production, exports or equity valuations. Focusing on the US causes one to minimize this alarming fact.

That’s why it’s so important that the U.S. economy finds the bottom and soon begins the recovery, which WSJ believes it has apparently done.

Despite this, Blinder states that,

Jobs will take longer, maybe much longer to revive … So even though the economy may be making a GDP bottom about now, the unemployment rate will probably keep rising for months … It will take years of strong growth to return to full employment.

Nobel prize winner and Berkeley economics professor George Akerlof and Yale economist Robert Shiller (Animal Spirits, 2009) see parallels between our current situation and the Panic of 1893 and the subsequent 1890s recession, “In the United States the obvious ‘trigger’ for the depression was the financial panic of 1893.”

The Panic of 1893 and the 1890s recession is a possible analog for our current financial situation and I’ve plotted U.S. unemployment for both; click 1890s1.doc.

In the plot, the 1890s revised unemployment data is from Christina Romer (1986) and cited in Akerlof and Shiller (2009). I have horizontally shifted the plots so that 1893 (the year of the panic) is directly above 2008 (the year of our panic); this allows the chronological trends of the unemployment data from both eras to be compared directly. (I assumed the unemployment for 2009 will be 10% but it might be higher.)

Although the dimensions of the global recession suggest that almost anything is possible, the apparent bottoming of the U.S. economy points to a more hopeful future. And if the 1890s are a descriptive model for today’s recession, it suggests an envelope for our current unemployment trends; i.e., nothing close to the peak of the Great Depression (~25%), although potentially one to a few years at or near 10%. This can be influenced by policymakers in Washington, DC and elsewhere around the world.

The 1890s model also suggests that unemployment should be well below 10% long before 2015, the expected opening date of our next Maslow Window. Keep in mind that the spectacular Maslow Window exploration and technology activities of the last 200 years were driven by a momentary, pervasive feeling of ebullience — not triggered by a high GDP, but by growth in real wages and declines in unemployment — because many people feel that they are really are getting ahead.

Despite the current major recession, these conditions are likely to be met prior to 2015. In fact, the feelings of euphoria generated by the end of the global recession itself are likely to trigger the initial ebullience that will rapidly accelerate into the spectacular 2015 Maslow Window. This would be a replay of what happened when the 1890s recession ended and gave birth to one of the most ebullient decades in U.S. history — the Peary/Panama Maslow Window.

The media continues to reverberate today with profound thoughts about Apollo 11’s 40th anniversary. For example, The Wall Street Journal is struck by how different things are now versus the 1960s.

The First Man had and still has “the right stuff.” Click .

It took eight years from the time John Kennedy declared we would go to the Moon to the day an American landed on it, 40 years ago this week. It was also eight years ago this September that terrorists struck the World Trade Center, the site of which continues to be a hole in the ground and a national disgrace. (Wall Street Journal, 7/21/09)

Messy New York politics aside, and using their version of, “If they can send a man to the Moon, why can’t they…”, the Journal wonders,

How much harder can it be to fill a hole in the ground with buildings of any kind than to master the ground-breaking science and mechanics of space travel over the same number of years?

We’ve long resisted the notion of American decline … But it’s hard not to see in the contrast between the Moon program and … Ground Zero a warning about America’s national will.

The issue is largely one of timing and program type. Over the last 200 years, there are brief, exceptional intervals — called Maslow Windows — when the public is momentarily very supportive of great explorations and large technology projects. Maslow Windows are ebullient, transformative times generally separated by about 56 years, that are fundamentally driven by major economic booms during upswings in the long wave. The last one was in the 1960s during Apollo. Despite our current global recession, which is like other major contractions that have preceded nearly all other Maslow Windows of the last 200 years, our next ebullient, camelot-style interval is expected between 2015 and 2025. Not surprisingly, timing and economic conditions have not aided Ground Zero.

Program type is also important. Apollo was a Great Exploration that for the first time took humans to another world. Apollo was also a $ 150 B macro-engineering project (MEP) that captured the imagination of this world; no one who ever saw (or felt!) a Saturn V launch ever forgot it. Although there had been Great Explorations (e.g., Lewis and Clark) and MEPs (e.g., Panama Canal) before, this was the first time they were ever unified in one grand project. Ground Zero is associated with a surprise terrorist attack on the U.S. in which 3000 people died. Given Ground Zero’s timing and history, it seems that Apollo is not a fair comparison.

On the next page (WSJ, 7/21/09), Bret Stephens compares “the right stuff” of the astronauts to our current celebrity culture and sees great disparity.

I detest anti-Americanism but I’ll concede this: It’s hard to watch American celebrity culture at work and not feel revolted … We make a fetish of uninteresting, detestable, loud or unaccomplished people: Paris Hilton, Princess Di, Keith Olberman, Michael Jackson.

By contrast, the 1960s Apollo astronauts were modest, private, patriotic, etc. For example, Neil Armstrong — the first man on the Moon — “never fails to mention the 400,000 people who worked to get him there,” and Gene Cernan, Commander of Apollo 17 the last lunar mission, marvels that, “One day you’re just Gene Cernan, young naval aviator, whatever…And the next day you’re an American hero. Literally. And you have done nothing.”

Stephens wonders if America makes men like Cernan and Armstrong anymore. And of course America still does — in the military, fire-fighters, police and others who often risk their lives so that ours can go on relatively unthreatened.

It reminds me again of Sarkar’s social cycles that I first read about in a book by SMU economist Ravi Batra. Sarkar believed there are 4 types of people and social classes: 1) Adventurer/Warriors, who are strong physically and mentally and willing to take risks, 2) Intellectuals, who are interested in ideas, 3) Acquisitors, who have a nose for money and enjoy accumulating it, and 4) Laborers, who lack the skills of the first 3 groups and who, while essential to society, are sometimes exploited by them.

At any time in history, society as-a-whole takes on the characteristics of one of these 4 groups. You can tell which group is ascendant by the types of people that are most celebrated. For example, the 1960s were a brief throwback to Adventure/Warrior times because Apollo astronauts were globally admired for their courage and explorations. But over most of the 20th century, according to Batra, society has been dominated by the Acquisitor mindset, as evidenced by the types of celebrities mentioned by Stephens above.

In Cordell (1996), I speculated that a major episode of social change might soon result in a sociopolitical climate favoring grand explorations.

Although seemingly farfetched, this is exactly what economist Ravi Batra expects based on Indian scholar P.R. Sarkar’s law of social cycles. Batra sees our current social malaise as leading to a social revolution in which wealth ‘acquisitors’ will be replaced by ‘adventurer/warriors’ as the dominant group in society. The adventurer/warrior spirit is what led the USA to send people to the Moon and could be expected to focus on the endless space frontier again. Based on the timing of Sarkar’s cycles over the last 2000 years, this revolution could occur sometime between now and 2010.”

Today Tom Wolfe (New York Times, 7/19/09) added his name to the growing list of commentators who are frustrated and puzzled by the Apollo Moon program’s abrupt end almost 40 years ago, and even more so by the fact that no human has traveled beyond Earth orbit since 1972!

Tom Wolfe asks today if we’ve lost the “right stuff.” Click .

1972 was a LONG time ago. If you’re over 40 years old, think about where you were then and what you were doing. (Those under 40 are excused from this exercise.)

Most of my reply to Wolfe’s op-ed has already been published at “The Secret of Why Apollo Was a ‘Giant Step, Full Stop’” so I won’t repeat it here. But because Wolfe did write The Right Stuff (1979), the celebrated story of the Mercury 7 astronauts (made into a movie in 1983), his take is interesting.

Although it was a small step for Neil and a giant leap for mankind, the first Moon landing was “a real knee in the groin for NASA,” according to Wolfe.

The American space program, the greatest, grandest, most Promethean — O.K. if I use “godlike”? — quest in the history of the world died in infancy … the moment the foot of Apollo 11’s Commander Armstrong touched the surface of the Moon.

How did this uber downer happen?

Maybe because he’s a writer, Wolfe thinks “the answer is obvious. NASA had neglected to recruit a corps of philosophers.” By the mid-1970s the only philosopher who could explain the real importance of Apollo was the developer of the Saturn V, Wernher von Braun, who was dying of cancer. But according to Wolfe, Von Braun’s “heavy German accent” and former WW II nazi connections limited his use.

In fact, based on the last 200 years of Great Explorations and MEPs, the moral of the story appears to be: “Great leaders help, but the economy rules“. It is very unlikely Von Braun himself or even an army of Von Brauns could have changed the course of 1970s macroeconomic history or the related decay of Apollo ebullience that began as early as 1966. As they have for every Maslow Window of the last 200 years, these fundamental factors initially enabled and eventually terminated the Apollo program and have kept humanity trapped in Earth orbit since 1972.

Wolfe alludes to the short-lived effect of ebullience without using the term, “Everybody, including Congress, was caught up in the adrenal rush of it all. But then, on the morning after” they began to wonder about it’s real meaning. This effect is graphically portrayed in the riveting 1960s political history, The Liberal Hour.

According to Wolfe, the answer is Mars. “For 40 years, everybody at NASA has known that the only logical next step is a manned Mars mission…” However, current plans — the U.S. returning to the Moon by 2020 — ignore historical trends of the last 200 years which point to closure of our next Maslow Window by 2025 or before, leaving little time for Mars. Unless we change the plan, such as Buzz Aldrin has proposed lately, our next shot at Mars may be delayed until 2070.

It’s understandable that there’s concern now about why Apollo didn’t continue. Indeed, 40 years ago humans first landed on the Moon. But after five more reps, it — i.e., human spaceflight beyond Earth orbit — was all over. What happened?

According to Miles O’Brien, “We did something truly great, but then walked away from it.” Click .

Thomas Mallon, in his New York Times (7/12/09) review of two new books on Apollo, displays a frustrated reaction to the lack of post-Apollo action. For example, “Walter Cronkite’s prediction, that after Apollo 11 ‘everything else that has happened in our time is going to be an asterisk,’ wound up playing out backward…Apollo is the footnote, an oddball offshot…”

Miles O’Brien (Space News, 1/22/09) agrees, “Truth is, we have done nothing to equal (much less top) the accomplishments of Apollo. And even worse, we haven’t tried. We did someting truly great, but then walked away from it.”

Mallon suggests maybe too much science was the problem. “With less geology and more ontology, they might have kept the public fired up for further space exploration.” And Commander of the first Apollo mission to circle the Moon (Apollo 8), Frank Borman, concurs, “Whether we found a rock there or not was of no importance.” Neither Mallon nor Borman are scientists so they are forgiven, but isn’t the origin of the Moon and early history of Earth one exciting reason for Apollo? Is it that easy, too much science did it to Apollo?

O’Brien rejects everyone’s favorite excuse for not going to Mars! For those who want to spend the money on Earth fixing our problems here first, he has some advice, “If you don’t want to mention the cost of the wars, if you would rather not get into Wall Street or Detroit bailouts, or if you don’t want to tell them the money we spend on the space program is about the same as our annual expenditure on coffee — why not mention India?…Calcutta can afford it — and Cleveland can’t?” He’s absolutely right…it’s clearly not about our ability to pay.

O’Brien laments that, “I have heard people say the accomplishments of Apollo cannot be replicated — that the historical dominoes lined up perfectly for all the events to fall into place with such precision and success…’It won’t happen again,’ they say wistfully,” (italics mine).

In the early 1990s I began wondering about exploration. Not just space, but all human exploration, particularly the type that fired up the planet’s population. Surprisingly, these “Great Explorations” — like Lewis & Clark and the early 20th century polar expeditions — are not random or flukes. Over the last 200+ years, they are typically separated by 55 to 60 years (see 200 Years; Cordell, 1996). The same is true of spectacular macro-engineering projects (MEPs) like the Panama Canal and the Apollo space infrastructure.

The “dominoes” do seem to be lined up somehow, and if you extrapolate forward from Apollo 11, it’s easy to calculate that the next pulse of Great Explorations/MEPs should culminate near 2025. But why the pattern?

Marveling about Apollo during the 1960s, O’Brien concludes that, “Those were audacious times — hard to imagine it all happening today…” (italics mine). In his pursuit of The Secret, O’Brien is starting to get warm…

About this time I stumbled across one of the more obscure, but fascinating books you’ve never heard of by economist Hugh Stewart (1989), Recollecting the Future: A View of Business, Technology, and Innovation in the next 30 Years, in which he describes the well-documented 56 year energy cycle and how it relates to society. Stewart’s energy cycle is correlated with long business cycles like the Kondratieff Wave discovered in the 1920s; e.g., peaks in the energy cycle are preceded by major economic booms.

By this time, I’d begun to think of 56 years — the typical time between Great Exploration/MEP pulses — as a magic number, and when I realized that 1969 — the year the Apollo program culminated — was an energy peak, I suspected the pulses might be fundamentally driven by long waves in the economy (see Cordell, 2006).

So what do O’Brien’s “audacious times” have to do with The Secret of why Apollo died? The greatest economic boom of its time produced a generally ebullient feeling in society, known as Camelot; if you can’t remember the 1960s, you’ve never experienced this. Momentarily liberated from typical money issues, many individuals responded to their ebullience by ascending Maslow’s hierarchy where their expanded worldviews made Great Explorations seem not only intriguing, but almost irresistible. “Ebullience” and “audacious times” are similar to the “animal spirits” that drive business cycles according to economist John Maynard Keynes of the 1930s.

In actuality, these “Maslow Windows” do not collapse directly because of an economic downturn; they are terminated by the decay of ebullience. This supports O’Brien’s previous point about our being able to afford space almost anytime we want to. In this model, it’s not lack of money that precludes us from going to Mars right now, it’s our lack of ebullience — over the last 200 years, exclusively the hallmark of a Maslow Window.

History of the last 200+ years also shows that financial panics and major recessions (like the current one) are a typical feature of the decade just before the opening of a Maslow Window. An interesting analog for now is the Panic of 1893 and 1890s major recession that were closely followed by one of the most ebullient decades in U.S. history: the Peary/Panama Maslow Window (1903-1913).

Mallon marvels that “the speed with which the Apollo program was realized is unimaginable to anyone young enough only to have seen the manned space program shuttle only through its later elephantine circles.” President Kennedy had to complete the Apollo program “before this decade is out” because the 1960s Apollo Maslow Window started closing by 1966. This will also be a challenge for the unprecedented Great Explorations and MEPs that will materialize between 2015 and 2025 — our next Maslow Window.

This is an updated mid-month list of our readers’ favorite posts, based on the number of times each post was visited during the times indicated below. The lists below include both Daily Wavelet posts and State of the Wave posts.

Timeframes of the readers’ lists below are: I) Favorites over the Last 30 Days, and II) All-Time Favorites (the first daily post was published on 5/11/08).

To see readers’ favorite posts for each previous month, click HERE.

The lists below give only the top 5 favorites in each category in order of reader preference.
All posts below are clickable and their publishing dates are given.

Updated 7/15/09

I. THE LAST 30 DAYS — Readers’ Favorites

1) 10 Lessons the Panama Canal Teaches Us About the Human Future in Space — 5/18/09
2) Was the 1960s Apollo Moon Program an Anomaly? — 2/3/09
3) 10 Spiritual Connections of the Human Exploration of Space — 5/31/09
4) Buzz Aldrin — A Man for all Maslow Windows! — 7/5/09
5) Nereus, Mohole, Apollo and the New Race to Space — 6/12/08

II. ALL-TIME — Readers’ Favorites

1) Economic Crisis Supports Maslow Window Forecasts — 10/20/08
2)10 Lessons the Panama Canal Teaches Us About the Human Future in Space — 5/18/09
3) State of the Wave — 10 Space Trends for 2009 — 1/17/09
4) Was the 1960s Apollo Moon Program an Anomaly? — 2/3/09
5) 10 Reasons Why China is Good for Space — 6/22/08

Welcome to the Carnival of Space #111.

This week we celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the civilization-altering launch of Apollo 11 “One giant leap for mankind” on July16.
Click .

Although we start by focusing on lunar lore – including an exclusive interview with the Moon itself – our star trek illuminates many cosmic mysteries, from the core of the Earth to dark matter.

Enjoy the show!

The target on July 16, 1969. (David Haworth)
Click .

MOON

Kenneth Murphy
of Out of the Cradle, arranged for EVA Interviews to go off-world this week to conduct an interview with our Moon as we approach the 40th anniversary of our first visit there and ponder our return, this time for the longer term.

Stuart Atkinson
of Cumbrian Sky wonders if NASA’s LRO probe will finally kill off the ridiculous “Apollo Hoax” conspiracy Theory . Stuart looks at why NASA couldn’t possibly have kept such a huge secret – especially for so long! – from some new angles.

Earthrise on Christmas Eve, 1968 from Apollo 8.
Click .

EARTH

David Portree
of RobotExplorers.blogspot.com describes how MIT Professor Paul Sandorff taught the Interdepartmental Student Project in Systems Engineering in Spring 1967 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston. Sandorff noted that the asteroid Icarus and Earth would pass each other at a distance of four million miles on June 19, 1968. He then asked his students to suppose that, instead of missing Earth on that date, mile-wide Icarus would strike in the Atlantic Ocean east of Bermuda with the explosive force of 500,000 megatons of TNT. Debris flung into the atmosphere would cool the planet and a 100-foot wave would inundate MIT. Sandorff gave his class until May 27, 1967 to develop a plan for averting the catastrophe. Guess what the students proposed to do…

Ivan Pankov
at ScienceAround.com has a new blog and this is his first submission to the Carnival. Congratulations Ivan! It’s about different models for Earth’s internal heat.

Alice Enevoldsen
of Alice’s AstroInfo has a puzzle for you over on her blog this week, if you like thinking about the motions of the sky.

Totality from Kenya in 1980. (Wendy Carlos)
Click .

SUN+

DJ
of OrbitalHub.com notes that on June 30, 2009, the Ulysses mission came to an end, one year after the predicted end date. Ulysses is one of the longest space missions to date, and holds the record for the longest running ESA operated spacecraft, with a total mission duration of 6,842 days (18 years, 8 months, and 24 days).

Steve Nerlich
of Cheap Astronomy delivers a podcast on the ‘classic’ tests of Einstein’s relativity which are all about astronomy and all about good scientific method.

Click . Mars vs the Moon — A 40+ year debate. Click .

MARS+

Alan Boyle
at Cosmic Log checks into the practice sessions for getting the Spirit rover unstuck from its Martian sand trap, and points to some cool movies of a Red Planet sunset and Earth’s motion through Martian skies.

Nancy Atkinson
at Universe Today wants you to help find the Mars Polar Lander. Using images from the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, see if you can locate the lander that went missing years ago.

Ryan Anderson
at The Martian Chronicles has a post about a handy spreadsheet that he made that calculates the surface temperature, surface gravity, and key orbital parameters of planets
automatically! He also goes into detail about how the temperature calculation is done. Curious about how hot the earth would be if the sun were twice as bright? Or if Earth was where Mercury is? Go play around with the spreadsheet to find out!

Io…the exception that “proves” the rule.
Click .

JUPITER

Amanda Bauer
highlights Approaching Jupiter from her Astropixie blog. She describes a great animation created by adding images taken by one of the Voyager space crafts, as it approached the planet Jupiter in 1979. Also included is an update of the current status of Voyager 1, the most distant human-made object in space!

Jason Perry
of The Gish Bar Times comments on “Heat Flow from Io’s Dark Lava Flows“,
a paper estimating the contribution of dark volcanic flow fields to Io’s total heat flow

Actual angles subtended for both Andromeda and the Moon. (Barista)
Click .

GALAXIES

Kimberly Kowal Arcand
offers this beautiful image from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope that gives a new look at Stephan’s Quintet. This compact group of galaxies was discovered about 130 years ago and is located about 280 million light years from Earth.

Yoo Chung
features “Positrons from Normal, Not Dark Matter, which talks about
the recent work suggesting that gamma-rays observed by Integral did not come from dark matter annihilation.

A man for all Maslow Windows!
Click .

FUTURE SPACE

Brian Wang
NextBigFuture provides the latest details on the development of nanoFET propulsion. Nanoparticle field extraction uses tiny thrusters that work much like miniaturized versions of massive particle accelerators. The device uses a series of stacked, micron-thick “gates” that alternate between conductive and insulating layers to create electric fields. These small but powerful electric
fields charge and accelerate a reservoir of conductive nanoparticles, shooting them out into space and creating thrust. NanoFET’s potential for high efficiencies, lower thruster specific mass, effiecient ISP from 100 to 10,000 and longer operational lifetimes are both mission enhancing and enabling.

And here at 21stCenturyWaves.com,
we honor Apollo 11’s Buzz Aldrin by featuring his stunning vision of the human future on the Moon and Mars: “Buzz Aldrin – A Man for All Maslow Windows!”

Thanks to Aron Sora, a recent high school graduate who blogs at habitationintention.blogspot.com for his intriguing comment about his and other young people’s future:

I’m going to graduate from college in 2013, just in time for the Maslow window. I want to be an active participant in the next window … I just feel really lucky about my birth date since it will lead to me having a undergrad degree two years before the window or a doctoral degree about mid-way.

The next Maslow Window should open near 2015, and trigger a New Space Age for young people! Click .

1) Let me reiterate that there is every reason to believe that the 2015 Maslow Window will open approximately on time, based on the last 200 years of Maslow Window timings and current data. I’ll give a brief summary here with more to come soon.

U.S. unemployment recently reached 9.5% and the prediction market Intrade projects, at the 80% level (up from 50% in April), that it will surpass 10% by December, 2009. Although “casting doubt on prospects for the U.S. economy to soon rebound,” (Wall Street Journal, 7/3/09), this is still a long way from the devastating unemployment rates during the Great Depression (25% in 1933 to 17% in 1939).

Although Jeffrey Frankel, a Harvard economist, is “expecting the recovery to be a slow one,” (WSJ, 7/3/09), another Harvard economist — Robert Barro — who has examined data on recessions back to 1870 for the U.S. and 33 other countries, says there is only a 20% chance that our current crisis will result in a GDP decline of 10% or more (a major depression has 25% decline).

Akerloff and Shiller (2009) see current parallels with the Panic of 1893 and its major recession; e.g., “U.S. unemployment rose to 12.3% in 1894, peaked at 12.4% in 1897, and did not fall below 10% untill 1899.” However, the 1890s recession was followed by a time of “sustained prosperity” (Fischer, 1996) that we know of as the Peary/Panama Maslow Window (~1903-1913), one of the most ebullient decades in the history of the United States.

The fact that — over the last 200+ years — no Maslow Window has ever been delayed or in any observable way diminshed by a financial panic or recession, plus the special parallels with the “1893 to 1913 Panic – Recession – Maslow Window” experience , suggest the 2015 Maslow Window will open on time. (More to come in future posts.)

2) 1930 was a good birth year for future Apollo astronauts. What about the first Mars explorers?

It’s true. The entire Apollo 11 crew — Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins — was born in 1930, as were many others. An incomplete list includes Tom Stafford (Apollo 10), Pete Conrad (Apollo 12), Ed Mitchell (Apollo 14), Jim Irwin (Apollo 15), and John Young (Apollo 16), etc.

The irony is that they had to be born during the Great Depression to be chronologically positioned for the long wave as it ascended into the unparalleled economic boom of the 1960s Apollo Maslow Window. These and most other Apollo astronauts were born about 40 years before they went to the Moon (1969-72).

Using this model, and assuming the 2015 Maslow Window will culminate near 2025, the Apollo astronaut analogs — possibly the first Mars explorers — were born near 1985; they’re called “Millennials.” They graduated from high school near 2002 and college near 2006; some will get PhDs soon.

Like their Apollo analogs, the Millennials are positioned for their approaching Maslow Window (near 2015) but have less in common with them than you might expect. For example,
a) the Millennials have not experienced a major international war as destructive as WW II or Vietnam, and
b) the Millennials are affected by the Panic of 2008 and the current major recession in the decade before their Maslow Window, which did not occur prior to the 1960s Apollo Maslow Window.

Thus it’s interesting that the Millennials’ general life experience, as we approach their Maslow Window during a major recession, may have some key elements more in common with the polar explorers of the Peary/Panama Maslow Window than with the Apollo explorers of the 1960s. Remember also that although pre-Maslow Window financial panic/recessions are the rule over the last 200 years, they are not required to produce a Maslow Window as shown by the 1960s Apollo Maslow Window.

3) When’s the best time to be born?

Many good things and bad things happen near peaks of the energy cycle, about a decade after the Maslow Window begins. The exact timing varies with the specific Maslow Window over the last 200 years but, in general, Maslow Windows are usually terminated by a rapid decline in the economy and/or a major war.

The biggest challenges will be experienced by young people who leave school and come into the world looking for their first real economic opportunity (i.e., job) near the culmination of the Maslow Window. That often occurs around the age of 20. So based on this Maslow Window model, a good rule of thumb is: Think twice about being born about 20 years before an energy cycle peak.

At the most vulnerable time in your professional life, you will be impacted by the abrupt end of a major economic boom and you may be caught up in a major war. Although many are able to “turn lemons into lemonade” you should be aware that these twice-per-century challenges can be formidable. Perhaps the worst aspect is that you’ll be too young to personally participate in the great explorations or MEPs of your Window. And after 10 years of watching them, when you finally are old enough to join the fun, it will all end. We’re talking here about people born between about 2000 and 2010 (they may not be reading this yet!), between 1945 and 1955, and between about 1888 and 1898 (also probably not reading this).

It’s much better to be 20 years or older as the Maslow Window begins. As you emerge into the economic world the long boom will be fully warmed up. Almost anything you do will be profitable. And the ebullience of the Maslow Window will make you feel like it will never end. Of course it always does in about 10 years, but by then you’ll be better established in your career and less vulnerable to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune — of the economy and the world. Remember the Apollo astronauts were about 30 as their Maslow Window opened, and as more mature people go into space, even being 40+ might be OK; e.g., in 1971 Alan Shepard became the oldest person to walk on the Moon at 47, and in 1998 John Glenn became the oldest human to fly into space at 77. To optimally participate and prosper from the last 3 Maslow Windows (including the 2015 Window), it was best to be born between about 1975 – 2000, 1920 – 1945, and 1863 – 1888.

Although these rules of thumb are broadly consistent with the last 200 years of macroeconomic data and historical trends, they are only approximate and are subject to many exceptions. For example, if you were born during “sub-optimal times,” having supportive parents or being a resourceful person can make up for many challenges associated with the long wave.

But if you’re secretly holding out hope that the lessons of the last 200+ years regarding Maslow Windows and long waves will magically melt away, don’t bet on it. For example, the stunning MEP trio of the Panama Canal, Apollo program, and the International Space Station illustrate the power of the long wave. Amazingly, neither Ferdinand de Lesseps nor President Ronald Reagan — both brilliant leaders about 100 years apart — could make their MEPs materialize during unfavorable portions of the long wave. While Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and John Kennedy became heroes for successfully initiating the Panama Canal and Apollo program during their respective Maslow Windows. And even the Clinton/Bush ISS has recently become known as an “international marvel” as we approach another Maslow Window. The moral of the last 200+ years regarding great explorations and macro-engineering projects is: “great leaders help, but the economy rules.”

In any case, if you’re thinking about having kids this year, and plan to be supportive parents … go ahead!! The economic recovery should begin next year and, although it may be followed by a few years of sluggish growth, we should return to the rapid growth levels of 2007 relatively soon. The long-awaited 2015 Maslow Window will open on time. And remember, history shows that whether you do experience a financial panic/recession just before your Maslow Window (e.g., 1903-1913; or 2015-2025) or whether you don’t (e.g., 1959-1969), your Maslow Window will be spectacular.

As for Mr. Sora, who just graduated from high school and was born in 1991, he is a Millennial and is well chronologically positioned to be about 24 when the next Maslow Window begins. Nice birthdate Aron, work hard and enjoy your Maslow Window!

I. Welcome to the Carnival of Space #110 at Kentucky Space.
If you’d like to sample a number of excellent space-related weblogs, please click HERE

The Carnival is run by Fraser Cain, publisher of Universe Today.

II. Interest in Panama Canal Continues to Surge
Over the 4th weekend, “10 Lessons the Panama Canal Teaches Us About the Human Future in Space” (5/18/09) moved up to #2 on the All-Time Readers’ Favorite List.

Special thanks to Eric Rybarczyk for his interesting emailed comments on Maslow Windows and for suggesting that I take a closer look at Buzz’ comments.

In addition to being the 2nd man to walk on the Moon in 1969, Dr. Buzz Aldrin is one of the most intelligent, energetic individuals you will ever meet, and recently, he became a “Man for All Maslow Windows!” Click .

Congratulations to Buzz for his brilliant synthesis of a stunningly positive vision of the human future in space. In today’s world of major global recession, asymmetric conflict, and a brewing new Cold War, a positive vision is hugely important. As pointed out at the beginning of the 1960s Apollo Maslow Window by Dutch sociologist Fred Polak in The Image of the Future,

The rise and fall of images of the future precedes or accompanies the rise and fall of cultures. As long as society’s image of the future is positive and flourishing, the flower of culture is in full blossom. Once the image of the future begins to decay and lose its vitality, however, the culture cannot long survive.

Although the details of his plan are certainly open for debate, Buzz — truly an icon of the 1960s — has provided us with an ebullient vision worthy of the 2015 Maslow Window.

The Maslow Window Model

About twice per century over the last 200+ years there are extraordinary pulses of great explorations (e.g., Lewis and Clark) and macro-engineering projects (e.g., Panama Canal) that resonate around the world. These “Maslow Windows” are times of extraordinary affluence-induced ebullience similar to “animal spirits” theorized to drive business cycles by British economist John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s. In response to ebullience, many in society ascend Maslow’s Hierarchy and, as their world view expands, find that great explorations and MEPs are not only intriguing, but seem momentarily irresistible. This captivating, but short-lived ebullience is triggered by major, twice-per-century economic booms over the last 200+ years that were first described by Kondratieff in the 1920s.

Thus the classic ideas of Maslow, Keynes, and Kondratieff — synthesized into this Maslow Window model — can explain the transformative pulses of great explorations and MEPs over the last 200+ years, including our 1960s fascination with Apollo and its rapid demise in the early 1970s. This model also points to the 2015 Maslow Window as the most likely time that visions like Buzz Aldrin’s will to come to fruition and revitalize society.

The Phobos Connection

I first met Buzz Aldrin in the late 1980s at General Dynamics in San Diego. He would come down from LA to share ideas about manned Mars missions, and the morning briefings would usually culminate with lunch at a local restaurant. His interests centered on Earth-Mars Cyclers — a concept for routine interplanetary transportation that he was developing with JPL — and mine were in using Phobos and Deimos (moons of Mars) as service stations for interplanetary vehicles and as manned orbital science stations.

Buzz now advocates a manned station on Phobos by 2025 to “monitor and control the robots that will build the infrastructure on the Martian surface, in preparation for the first human visitors.” I suspect his Phobos thrust is partly driven by the Russian Phobos mission scheduled to be launched in October, 2009, but now possibly delayed 2 years. In any case, Buzz’ manned Phobos base (or even an international lunar base) is exactly what we need before the 2015 Maslow Window slams shut on or before 2025. If we cannot achieve a human outpost in deep space by that time, we could be trapped in Earth orbit as the global economy slides for decades to the long wave trough (e.g., like ~1975-1995) and eventually recovers for the next Maslow Window near 2070. Keep in mind that nobody’s been beyond Earth orbit since the last Apollo mission in 1972, and that could occur again after 2025 unless we begin to colonize space.

Instant Martians

Some may be surprised that Buzz suggests one-way missions as a way of jump-starting the colonization of Mars. In fact, during the 1960s, according to historian Matthew Hersch, competition with the Soviets for Moon firsts became so desperate that some suggested 1-way suicide missions, just so the first man on the Moon wouldn’t be a Soviet. But not surprisingly, NASA wasn’t interested.

However, Buzz isn’t suggesting 1-way Mars suicide missions, he’s advocating 1-way “pilgrim” missions. This makes more sense for Mars than the Moon because while it takes 3 days to get to the Moon, a manned Mars mission may take 3 years.

According to Buzz,

One-way tickets to Mars will make the missions technically easier and less expensive and get us there sooner. More importantly, they will ensure that our Martian outpost steadily grows as more homesteaders arrive.

Instead of explorers, one-way Mars travelers will be 21st-century pilgrims, pioneering a new way of life. It will take a special kind of person. Instead of the traditional pilot/ scientist/engineer, Martian homesteaders will be selected more for their personalities—flexible, inventive and determined in the face of unpredictability. In short, survivors.

Buzz’ Mars pilgrims would also have several other positive effects:
1) They would prevent the “Apollo-ization” of Mars. A dreaded effect that space advocates used to fret about where the “been there…done that” syndrome after a few landings would preclude our ever going back.
2) They would provide a planetary beachhead in space that would stimulate multi-decade plans for colonization of the Solar System even between Maslow Windows, when human spaceflight beyond Earth orbit has never occurred (see “The Phobos Connection” above). And…
3) They would provide an incentive to eventually develop interplanetary vehicles for routine transportation between Earth and Mars (e.g., Earth-Mars Cyclers) including the establishment of an interplanetary economy.

Going to Mars Together
I am on record for over 20 years as advocating an international approach to manned Mars missions, including even a specific macro-management concept for a global space agency (“Interspace”).

However, Buzz appears to be advocating a more-or-less U.S.-alone program for manned exploration of Mars, although he does propose an international program for the Moon.

This appears to contradict our spectacular foreign policy success with the International Space Station, known as an “international marvel.” As a major participant in the race to space during the Cold War, Buzz appears to favor an Apollo model for Mars over the more recent ISS experience. And there are fundamental differences between the two programs: Apollo was about space transportation and lunar exploration, while ISS is an Earth orbit MEP devoted to laboratory and space science. To be bluntly honest, the geopolitical impact of ISS is much lower than it was for Apollo.

As I’ve often written here and elsewhere, I would still like to see the U.S. achieve a “Grand Alliance for Space” with all other nations, including plenty of opportunities for cooperation and competition built in to the human expansion into the cosmos. But I have to admit, history doesn’t support such optimism. It isn’t just the story of the 1950s International Geophysical Year and the surprise Soviet launch of Sputnik, it also includes Amundsen’s deliberate deception of Scott so he could be the first to the South Pole in 1911. When the historical and/or geopolitical stakes are high, humans sometimes will deceive their competition to reach their goal first.
Near-Term Issues

Buzz has conceived a vision for the near-term human future in space that is thrilling and highly motivating, but it’s certainly not without issues. These include continuing Shuttle to 2015, abandoning lunar science to a commercial-only emphasis, human rating of Atlas V, canceling Ares I, China joining ISS, and several others.

These would have to be worked out, but Buzz’ basic idea is compelling. He believes that the next major space initiative should be Goal-oriented, not focused on Infrastructure. As in the days of Apollo, if we can agree on a compelling enough goal in space, the public support and required infrastructure will quickly follow. On the other hand, bureaucrats usually favor an infrastructure approach because it’s more like a regular government program.

However, the last 200 years — including especially the 1960s — suggest that things happen fast because Maslow Windows seem to open unexpectedly (unless you understand the Maslow Window model above) and evolve quickly. Indeed, Maslow Windows don’t leave much time for extensive infrastructure development and are subject to wildcards (e.g., Vietnam).

Buzz’ genius is to apply an Apollo model for a 21st Century Mars Initiative to a multipolar space world. It’s certainly more consistent with the typical ebullience exhibited during Maslow Windows of the last 200 years than working hard to repeat a 40-year-old space feat on the Moon.

Lunar commercial development begins, Mars is reached and colonization starts, and everybody gets to play. All by 2025. It’s exciting and historically realistic.

Sounds like a lot of fun!

Hope everyone has a wonderful 4th of July!

It was on this day in 1776 that the Continental Congress issued the United States Declaration of Independence — the founding document of the American republic. It was signed by its principal author Thomas Jefferson and fifty-five others including Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and, of course, John Hancock.

John Trumbull’s famous 1819 painting of the drafting committee of the Declaration of Independence presenting their work to the Congress in 1776. Click .

In its second sentence is this profound assertion of human rights:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

As you pursue your happiness today, please keep in mind the ideas that conquered the world, as expressed by Johns Hoplins University’s Michael Mandelbaum; these ideas point to prosperity on Earth and in space as humans expand into the cosmos: peace, democracy, and free markets.