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Open journal. September 3 2010.

It was soon after my visit to Malenfant’s experimental site in the Mojave that the news broke about Bootstrap’s true purpose – that is, to assemble a private heavy-lift vehicle with Space Shuttle technology, to send some kind of mining mission to an asteroid.

I don’t know if Cornelius Taine had anything to do with that. Presumably yes, if it served his shadowy organization’s purposes. But it wasn’t impossible the leak had come from elsewhere; Bootstrap is surely as porous as any large organization.

Anyhow, I find myself being sucked into the project. Somehow, through the leak and my covert involvement – the fact that I didn’t blow the whistle immediately I got back from the Mojave – I’m becoming seduced into considering not just rocket engine firings, not just a private launch system, but the NEO mission itself.

This seems to be Malenfant’s modus operandi: to build up an unstoppable momentum, to launch first and answer questions later.

The usual forces of darkness are already gathering in Congress to oppose this. It’s going to be a struggle.

But I already know I’m not going to walk away from Malenfant, despite his outlandish, covert scheming.

You see, I happen to think Reid Malenfant is right. For the cost of one more space launch – which is undisputed, financial and environmental – it might be possible to reach a near-Earth object, actually to start exploiting one of those sun-orbiting gold mines, and so, just as Malenfant’s corporate title suggests, bootstrap a new human expansion into space.

I think we’ve all become desensitized to the state of our world.

We live in a closed economy, an economy of limits. Grain yields globally have been falling since 1984, fishing yields since 1990. And yet the human population continues to grow. This is the stark reality of the years to come.

It seems to me our best hope for getting through the next century or so is to reach some kind of steady state: recycle as much as possible, try to minimize the impact of industry on the planet, try to stabilize the population numbers. For the last five to ten years I have, in my small way, been working towards exactly that goal, that new order. I don’t see that any responsible politician has a choice.

I must say I entered politics with rather higher hopes of the future than I enjoy now.

But even the steady state, our best-hope future, may not be achievable without space.

Without power and materials from space we are doomed to shuffle a known – in fact diminishing – stockpile of resources around the planet. Some players get rich, others get poor. But it’s not even a zero sum game; in the long term we’re all losers.

It isn’t just a question of economics. It’s what this does to our spirit.

We are frightened of the future. We exclude strangers, try to hold on to what we have, rather than risk the search for something better. We spend more energy seeking someone to blame for our present woes than building for a better future. We’ve become a planet full of old people – old in spirit, anyhow. Speaking as a sexagenarian I know what I’m talking about.

The point is that if we could open up the limits to growth, then we can all be winners. It’s as simple as that.

That is why I’m prepared to back Malenfant. Not, you’ll note, because I like his methods. But the ends, I suspect, in this case justify the means.

However all this is going to take some extremely delicate opinion management. Especially over what Malenfant is doing at Key Largo …