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REVOLUTIONARY PATIENCE: There’s a new Spacefaring Web essay out. This week, McKnight explores the differences in approaches towards revolutionary change, and what lessons the space advocacy community should draw from past experience:

We do know how to rouse the troops for the big push. If anything, the bloody, collectivist 20th Century taught us that. But revolutionary patience? Working today, and tomorrow, and a day at a time endlessly towards a goal we might never see? That we have precious few examples to guide us towards. We can talk of cathedral building, but it’s really not a thing we know how to do. The scientists among us would seem to have it a bit easier: science is such an incremental accumulating of very small, inglorious bricks of effort. This is why the hacker ethic, of shared incessant tinkering, the engineering counterpart to the scientific method, embodies the values critically needed to build a spacefaring civilization. The rest of us – business people, project-focused engineers, activists, organizers and weekend warriors – have a lot to learn in order to contribute meaningfully to this long-term incremental undertaking.

I too have come to this conclusion over the past several years, and despite “Mars Direct” (which, as the name implies, is a “big push” mission architecture), this seems to be a major undercurrent in the efforts of the Mars Society as well. It’s understandable to want to see something big happen in space exploration within one’s lifetime, but it’s more important to have that something — whatever it may be — come about in the right way. I think this is what the Mars Society is trying to demonstrate, by exploring and developing the technologies involved, proselytizing to the public, and encouraging the government to spend its space resources incrementally with an eye on Mars in the long term (the 1% Initiative, vs. an all-out push to Mars).

Perhaps the most important of these is the public outreach effort, which will help build a deeper, broader base of interest than that enjoyed even by Apollo. Imagine in the future a public which reacts to the first Mars landing with “We’re there at last!” and the sense that it is a new beginning, rather than “Hm, cool. What next?” and a flip of the channel to the next titillating “show”.

I’ll say it again: this McKnight guy is great. I just hope is resignation from the Space Frontier Foundation doesn’t mean he will no longer write these essays.