Nader Elhefnawy has a sort-of interesting, but ultimately confused and confusing piece about the political inclinations of space activists over at The Space Review today.

I’ll have more to say about this later (it really needs a longer essay than Elhefnawy’s itself), but I’m too busy with a deadline to respond immediately. It’s confusing because he uses the terms “liberal” and “conservative” as though there is some common consensus on what these words mean, despite the fact that he shows examples where they are the opposite of conventional thinking (e.g., post-modernists as pre-modern “conservatives” and “nineteenth-century” (which I would call classical) liberals). Also, as I note in comments over there, there can hardly be more of an oxymoron (excluding the obvious ones like jumbo shrimp and congressional intelligence) than “left-libertarian.”

Also, I wonder if he is aware that it was H. G. Wells himself who coined the phrase “liberal fascism”?

There is also some (perhaps inadvertent, and again, confused) slander of the community as well. But go read for yourself, and I’ll try to tackle it later.

[Update in the afternoon]

At least with regard to the straw men and blatant misrepresentation of the views of the alternate space community, Clark Lindsey has responded:

The broad consensus certainly does not predict anything as ridiculous as “Earth-to-low orbit costs being slashed to $100 a pound by 2012”. The expectation is in fact that low transport costs will be achieved over time via incremental development of reusable systems of increasing robustness and reliability. The incremental approach keeps development costs down while robustness provides for low operations costs. The time scale for this process will depend on the parallel growth of markets like space tourism to pay for the hardware development and to drive flight rates higher.

Elhefnawy implies that all the “experts” hold to his views on these matters. However, I can easily point to people with decades of experience and solid records of accomplishment in the space industry who are now participating in NewSpace companies and who believe that large cuts in the cost of space access are achievable. There are, in fact, a number of examples of projects already, such as the Bigelow habitats, the Surrey Satellite GIOVE-A, the SS1, etc., that were accomplished for costs dramatically below what they would have been if carried out by a government agency or a conventional aerospace industry firm.

Apparently Professor Elhefnawy has a pretty restricted circle of “experts.” Perhaps he should attend Space Access in a couple weeks and broaden both his technical and political horizons.