In last month’s column I discussed the recent resurgence of interest in space exploration, kicked off by the successful landings on Mars in January of two roving vehicles, followed by President Bush’s call for manned missions to the Moon and eventually to Mars. All this is well and good, after a long period of pseudo-activity in space centering around such go-nowhere projects as the shuttle program and the international space station.

But while we are waiting for the new Moon and Mars enterprises to negotiate the hazardous shoals of the political process, there are other things we can be doing in space, and with the twenty-first century ticking along, it seems appropriate to talk about them here, in what is, after all, a science fiction magazine devoted to speculation about the future of technology (among other things.) For instance–

1. Another Hubble Space Telescope. The first one, launched in 1990 and much improved by a later tweaking, has sent back fantastic pictures from space. The particular one that I have in mind, which was the subject of a column here in 1996, showed three newborn stars, eight or ten times as massive as our own sun, in the Eagle Nebula, M16 in the constellation known as Serpens, seven thousand light-years distant from Earth. I said at the time that it was the most awesome photograph ever taken.

We have since launched three other space-based telescopes in what we call the Great Observatory series. The Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, up there from 1991 to 1999, did yeoman work in its time in a high-energy area outside that of conventional telescopes. The Chandra X-Ray Observatory, placed in orbit in 1999, has worked in yet another segment of the electronic spectrum to study radiation from supernovas and black holes that is blocked from earthbound telescopes by our planet’s atmosphere. The third, launched in August 2003, is the Space Infrared Telescope Facility, now known as the Spitzer Space Telescope in honor of the great Princeton astrono-mer Lyman Spitzer, Jr., who first proposed launching telescopes into space in 1946. The Spitzer, which operates at minus 450 degrees Fahrenheit, is able to give us a look at objects inaccessible to conventional telescopes. The first images from the Spitzer, released in December 2003, were startling. Among them are pictures of a vast cloud of gas called the Elephant Trunk nebula, a stellar nursery where new stars are forming 2,500 light-years away that until now has been hidden from us by cosmic dust; of a young star called HH 46, from which curved shock-waves of gas are emanating; of a galaxy 3.25 billion light-years away, invisible to other types of telescope, that glows with an energy a thousand times that of the Milky Way; and much more.

This formidable array of telescopes allows us to perceive the universe across the whole spectrum of visible and invisible light. But it is already doomed. The Spitzer will cease to function in six years. The Compton is already gone. The Chandra’s time is running out. And now, with spectacularly bad timing, NASA has announced a death sentence for the Hubble itself: it is canceling a planned shuttle trip to the orbiting telescope to replace its batteries and install two hundred million dollars’ worth of new instruments, because shuttle travel is now deemed too risky after the Columbia disaster. Somewhere in the next few years, probably in 2007, the Hubble will cease to function.

That will leave us with no space-situated telescopes at all, at least until the planned James Webb Infrared Telescope is launched in 2011. This is a Bad Thing: these telescopes are bringing us a treasurehouse of information about how the universe works. The only silver lining I see in the killing of the Hubble is that perhaps the bureaucrats’ intention in writing it off is to create momentum for the launching of a Hubble II, ten or fifteen years down the line, employing advanced technologies already well along in development that will make its predecessor seem like a Kodak Brownie. (The capacity to examine in detail the planets orbiting other stars, perhaps even to detect whether there is water on them, for instance.)

2. Fund research in teleportation. I’m not kidding. In a column published here last year, I pointed out that the universe is probably full of inhabited worlds, but we won’t ever know about them because they are so far away that the nasty old limiting-velocity rule, which makes the speed of light the absolute fastest we can travel, renders contact with them impossible. Of course, science fiction writers have sidestepped that problem with all sorts of warp drives, wormhole routes, and other non-Einsteinian gimmicks. In a story of my own called "We Are for the Dark," published in this magazine in 1988, I even posited a system of faster-than-light travel involving transmission via matter-antimatter annihilation. But none of us ever took any of our faster-than-light stuff seriously except as a glib means of getting on with our tales of galactic exploration.

Now, though, I hear that actual experiments in matter transmission have been going on since 1997. Not much matter: the first experiments, kicked off by IBM researcher Charles Bennett, involved transporting photons–particles of light–which are very small items indeed. The idea is to use "quantum entanglement," in which a laser beam is subjected to stress in such a way that it creates two particles of light at once. A strange linkage, apparently, connects these particles, so that even when they are at a great distance from one another a disturbance to one will affect the other. (Einstein, it seems, knew about this and called it "spooky interaction.")

The Bennett proposal called for putting a third "message" particle into the package, thereby transferring its properties to both sets of particles. Through some sort of hocus-pocus that I will unashamedly tell you I don’t begin to understand, the "message" winds up both at the sending and receiving ends of the deal simultaneously, even if the receiving end is halfway across the galaxy. Experiments have now been made involving "qubits," which are units of information ("two-dimensional quantum systems"). Scientists at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, and the University of Geneva in Switzerland succeeded late in 2003 in transporting qubits via photon teleportation a distance of 178 feet by sending them through a mile and a quarter of standard fiber-optic cable.

Whether this will lead us to the stars, I can’t say. As far as I’m able to unpack the research report, it seems to indicate that in the present state of the art, teleportation will apply only to photons, and some sort of conventional transmission system is required, which means that the speed of light is still the limiting velocity and nothing bigger than a particle of light can be shipped. That still leaves us some distance from having the gizmos that allow us to step into a box here and instantaneously step out of an identical box on Betelgeuse IX. But who knows what a few trillion additional dollars of research can produce? Those of you who find the idea of teleportation across the galaxy exciting can find more information about all this at cool-tech.iafrica.com by asking about "quantum teleportation," and good luck to you in your travels.

3.Privatizing the Moon. The Bush let’s-build-a-base-on-the-Moon scheme is already in budgetary hot water, with the usual politicians raising the usual outcry about taking money away from starving babies and deserving elders in order to fund foolish space adventures. (As though the money spent on space travel is simply packed aboard a rocket and shipped off to nowhere, instead of being spent on salaries for hundreds of thousands of engineers and technicians right here in the U.S.A.) So perhaps the only way we’re ever going to get off the dime here is to turn space exploration over to the greedy, heartless corporations and let them go searching for profit in the darkness of the interplanetary vacuum.

Robert A. Heinlein said it all in a story written more than fifty years ago, "The Man Who Sold the Moon," in which a hard-nosed, unscrupulous, conniving tycoon named D.D. Harriman whips up a free-enterprise space program all by himself. Here is how Heinlein, prescient as usual, starts things off:

"You’ve got to be a believer!"

George Strong snorted at his partner’s declaration. "Delos, why don’t you give up? Maybe someday men will get to the Moon, though I doubt it. In any case, you and I will never live to see it. The loss of the power satellite washes things up for our generation."

D.D. Harriman grunted. "We won’t see it if we sit on our fat behinds and don’t do anything to make it happen. But we can make it happen."

"Question number one: how? Question number two: why?"

"‘Why?’ The man asks ‘why’? George, isn’t there anything in your soul but discounts and dividends? Didn’t you ever sit with a girl on a soft summer night and stare up at the Moon, and wonder what was there?"

But Harriman sees more than romantic yearnings in going to the Moon. He sees hard dollars-and-cents return. "This is the greatest real estate venture since the Pope carved up the New World. Don’t ask me what we’ll make a profit on; I can’t itemize the assets–but I can lump them. The assets are a planet–a whole planet! And more planets beyond it. If we can’t figure out ways to swindle a few fast bucks out of a sweet set-up like that, then you and I had both better go on relief."

And so, by hook and by crook, D.D. Harriman sells the idea of going to the Moon to a band of rapacious venture capitalists, and they build a ship and send it up into the sky. Maybe the Harriman option is the one we should go for. Wind up NASA, turn space over to the cold-eyed entrepreneurs, and devote the Federal budget to succoring the unfortunate and paying the medical bills of the senior citizens (a group to which I happen to belong.) Then run an auction for lunar real estate, with the proceeds going to the UN to devote to worthy humanitarian and environmental causes, and let the high-bidding hotel chains and mining companies and power combines plaster Luna with their advertising billboards.

If we don’t, I’m afraid, those billboards will get there anyway in the next half century, but they’ll be in Chinese. The Chinese pretend not to be capitalists, but they could teach D.D. Harriman a thing or two about exploitation, and they definitely have their eyes trained on space.

So there you are: on beyond the shuttle program to newer and better space telescopes, expanded research in teleportation, and the privatization of space exploration. It’s worth thinking about, anyway.