Objectivism Is Out of This World

After the tragic destruction of the space shuttle Columbia, Dennis Tito, a self-made millionaire and the first private citizen-explorer to pay his own way to space, called together an elite group of some forty experts, space advocates, and businessmen to consider the future of man in space. One of the co-chairmen of that summit in Los Angeles was Buzz Aldrin, the second man to step onto the Moon. Ed Hudgins, whose new book Space: The Free-Market Frontier contains chapters by both Tito and Aldrin, was asked to participate.

Speaking to the question of why men should go into space, Hudgins quoted from his recent op-ed "We Must Reach for the Stars": "It is only by choosing to exercise that most human and wonderful rational capacity . . . that we fulfill our spiritual need to know . . . whether there are other worlds, and what is on them. It is only by choosing to think that we discover how to build telescopes to study other worlds and build spaceships to travel to them." Others at the space summit also stressed the importance of man the explorer, as well as the commercial potential of space that can be exploited by man the producer.

Hudgins offered what became the five consensus principles that were agreed to by all the summit participants. These principles emphasize that the new frontier of space must ultimately be developed by private enterprises and initiatives, unhindered by government. In short, Hudgins continues to advocate reason, individualism, and freedom as the proper philosophy for living on Earth—and other planets as well! His efforts in this regard received attention from Newsday and the Christian Science Monitor, and a Spanish-language version of his op-ed on the Columbia disaster was published in La Nación.