Today M.ammoth pointed me toward an article in the New Atlantis by Rand Simberg, an aerospace engineer and blogger.  Simberg lays out the fallacies as he and many in the aerospace community in NASA’s re-tread of the Apollo program.  In short, he calls the space agency and government to task for its monolithic bloated-ness, declaring NASA a stagnant protector of jobs in crucial congressional districts that needlessly monopolizes human spaceflight.  As an alternative, he suggests aggregating an orbiting and deep space fueling infrastructure, supplied and maintained by the private sector.  Thus the burden of lifting all of a mission’s fuel (read: weight) at the time of launch is eliminated, and the marginal cost of getting into orbit is drastically reduced.

Simberg loves his metaphors.  He likens his scheme for the exploration of space en-masse by any private citizen or organization that can foot the now lower launch costs to the way the “old west” was settled.  He begins:

The critical requirement of a reusable space system is refuelability. Consider a thought experiment from an earlier frontier. Imagine that, on the settlers’ hard trek to the western United States, there had been no vegetation along the way for the wagon-pulling horses or oxen to eat. To get across the country, each Conestoga would have to carry enough hay to feed the animals (not to mention supplies for the pioneers for months). The wagon would have been so large that the animals wouldn’t have been able to pull it.

And presses the metaphor into service to describe his own vision:

…we should explore the solar system the way we did the West: not by sending off small teams of government explorers—Lewis and Clark were the extreme exception, not the rule—but by having lots of people wandering around and peering over the next rill in search of adventure or profit.

To me, though, the real gem of Simberg’s article is a throw-away line. He asserts that NASA’s job should be to make it possible for any group, be it “the National Geographic Society, or an offshoot of the Latter-Day Saints, or an adventure tourism company”  to colonize Mars  (the emphasis is all mine).

The Mormons as interstellar pioneers!  It makes so much sense.  Consider:

a) Proven track record. In 1847, Brigham Young let a group of Mormons onto what is now Salt Lake City, Utah.  Only back then it was Mexican territory.

b) Plural marriage. Undoubtably,  the Mormon settler’s success in Utah owes something to this strong family structure developed for the rapid production of children.

c) Fastidious record keeping. An obsession with geneology has inspired a vast collection of birth and death certificates, kept within a mountain in Utah, and tended to by impeccable Mormon archivists.  Exploring new planets demands a fair amount of data collection, indexing, and storage, I’d imagine.