Dwayne Day’s recent article about “space fetishism” (
“Space fetishism: space activism’s obsession with technological and ideological saviors”, The Space Review, December 21, 2009) deserves a serious response. His constructive criticism is not being deliberately derogatory to activists, and on some points, his analysis is correct. However, while he has given lots of examples, he has not defined what he is describing. He has described as fetishism support for the entire spectrum of pro-space issues including space solar power, rapid launch technology, microsats, heavy lift vehicles, space elevators, nuclear rockets, the VASIMR rocket engine, propellant depots in orbit, ISRU, solar sails, and so on. It’s fair, then, to ask the question, “Is there anything an activist can support that is
not fetishism in Day’s book?”
I proudly plead guilty to being an advocate of many of the items listed above. However, I think a large part of whether an activist’s actions could be classed as fetishism or not is the approach taken rather than the issue chosen:
how support for a topic is conducted. In other words, is the supporter looking beyond a narrow technical or ideological arena in expressing their support? It is also clear that in any topic arena—space or otherwise—that depends on complex technology, you will find a bunch of half-baked ideas being proposed, both by newcomers and inexperienced long-term enthusiasts who do not have enough “real world” experience to be wary of all claims. The credulous university student excitement over the “discovery” of cold fusion and the real breakthroughs in high-temperature superconductivity many years ago come to mind as good examples. The former has never been substantiated, and the latter has still not been implemented on a large scale due to the extreme difficulty of trying to make wires out of what is basically a ceramic! More basic physics work is obviously needed here.
