Freedom's frontier: from the ocean's depths to outer space, private entrepreneurs have pioneered world-changing technologies. What more could be done if government got out of the way?

The S.S. Central America, a side-wheel steamship carrying nearly 600 people, was seven days out of Panama when it was overtaken by a hurricane on September 10, 1857. Two days later it would be at the bottom of the Atlantic, along with the mortal remains of its captain, crew, and more than 400 passengers.

Commissioned five years earlier as the George Law, the three-masted, 272-foot ship had made scores of trips between New York City and Panama. Many of the 472 passengers on this particular voyage had traveled to California to seek their fortune in the Gold Rush and were returning with their personal fortunes. In addition, the ship's cargo bays contained roughly 21 tons of gold--ingots, bars, and coins, including 5,200 newly minted $20 "Double Eagles." By some estimates the Central America carried nearly one-third of the Gold Rush's entire output.

Sometime on the morning of Friday, September 11, as the sturdily built ship pitched and tossed on the roiling sea, a leak was sprung below decks, and water began to fill the bilge.

Within hours the steam engine's boilers had gone out, the fire rooms were flooding, and the ship began to list.

Four nights earlier, Captain William Herndon had "turned the dinner conversation from shipwrecks to topics more pleasant by declaring that if his ship ever went down he would be under her keel," observes author Gary Kinder in his book Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea. Herndon's assurance had been prompted by talk of a previous steamship wreck three years earlier during which the captain and crew "had commandeered the lifeboats, and 259 of the 282 passengers, including all of the women and children, had perished."

As the crisis engulfed the Central America, Captain Herndon and his crew performed their duty honorably and unflinchingly. A smaller vessel, the Marine, had been spotted Saturday morning. The two-masted brig was less than half the size of the Central America--which meant that most of those aboard the stricken steamer would almost certainly perish. Understanding this dreadful reality, Captain Herndon and his crew, as well as the male passengers, worked to save as many of the women and children as possible.

Male passengers (along with several women) formed a bucket brigade to help crewmen bail out the ship; the other women and children were outfitted with life preservers. The ship was equipped with a total of six lifeboats, one metal and five wood. Two of the wooden lifeboats were reduced to spars and splinters when waves dashed them against the ship. Using improvised rope chairs, crewmen carefully lowered women and children into the boats.

Among the families separated by the tragedy were two newlywed couples: Ansel and Addie Easton had embarked on the journey immediately after exchanging wedding vows in San Francisco, and Billy Birch, a noted San Francisco entertainer, and his wife Virginia had been married the day before. Both Easton and Birch remained behind, eagerly enlisting in the effort to keep the mortally wounded ship seaworthy long enough to evacuate the women and children.

For hours, male passengers, wealthy first-class tourists and grubby '49ers alike, desperately bailed water. Captain Herndon changed into his dress uniform and continued to preside with an air of stoic nobility: he refused to leave his command as long as a single soul remained aboard.

At around 8:00 p.m. on September 12, the sea consummated its grim triumph over the Central America:

   The stern sank below the
   waves, and the graceful arc of
   her bow aimed into the dark
   heavens, as she struggled, almost
   desperate to keep her
   proud head above water, and
   then as the hoarse screams of
   five hundred men rose, she
   began a slow watery spin, the
   water turning faster and faster
   and faster and faster, until the
   swirling vortex sucked the
   men into a suffocating darkness,
   deeper and deeper, cracking
   their ears, ripping the life vests from
   their bodies, tearing from their hands
   the planks and spars, sucking them
   deeper and deeper into the darkness
   ... their lungs filling, the last thoughts
   racing across their minds before the
   final darkness set in ....

Some were fated to survive the murderous whirlpool and were left clinging desperately to any buoyant article they could find. Among those who were subsequently plucked from the sea by rescuers was Ansel Easton, who was reunited with his bride Addie in Norfolk, Virginia.

Finding Nemo

Obviously, the sinking of the Central America was a horrible human tragedy. But the economic consequences of the disaster radiated far beyond the families immediately affected by it. With the gold in the vessel's cargo hold at the bottom of the Atlantic instead of inside vaults in New York City, a string of bank failures ensued, precipitating the "Panic of 1857." British investors pulled their money from American banks. Manufactured goods began to accumulate in warehouses, triggering a round of layoffs. Grain and land prices collapsed, spreading misery throughout rural America. Struggling railroads went out of business.

The shipwreck also vividly illustrated the lethal dangers attendant to crossing the newly continent-spanning United States. Steamship travel--one vessel traveling east from California to Panama, a brief overland voyage, and then a second cruise from Panama to the eastern U.S.--was considered faster and safer than taking the overland route. Ironically, aboard the Central America at the time of the disaster was James Birch (no relation to Billy), former president of the California Stage Company, the first transcontinental stage line.

For decades as the mortal remains of Captain Herndon, his crew, and the ill-fated passengers were washed away by tidal currents, the Central America's treasure remained untouched --and apparently untouchable --in its resting place, nearly 8,000 feet below the ocean's surface. The shipwreck became wreathed in romance and legend, most of it earned by the spontaneous heroism of those who remained aboard, but some of it generated by the mystique of the ship's vast, and apparently unreachable, fortune.

But on September 11, 1988 a team of private explorers led by 36-year-old Tommy Thompson located and positively identified the wreck of the Central America off the coast of South Carolina. Thompson, founder and director of the Columbus-America Discovery Group (CADG), is an immensely gifted and largely self-taught engineer, often described as the kind of person who wanted to know why two plus two is four. A wide-ranging curiosity developed as a child led Thompson to become fascinated with deep-sea exploration and treasure hunting, and his independence of mind and entrepreneurial bent led him to organize CADG.

From the deck of the Arctic Discoverer, a rebuilt Canadian icebreaker, Thompson and his crew deployed a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) called "Nemo," an undersea robot designed to Thompson's specifications. They had spent more than a year of painstaking and exasperating searches and endured two confrontations at sea with unscrupulous, predatory competitors intent on jumping CADG's claim. On this day, exactly 131 years after Central America had been fatally stricken, Nemo's cameras spied the steamer's huge side-wheel embedded in the ancient mud of the Atlantic floor.

Nemo, the 12,000-pound, privately constructed ROV, had the capacity to recover "items as large as a 1,000 pound anchor or as small as a dime," noted a Washington Post account of the discovery. Immediately after the initial discovery, Nemo was used to retrieve a few key artifacts, such as the ship's bell, a handful of gold coins, and a 25-pound gold bar. After the recovered coins were appraised at "gem value," Thompson and his team refined Nemo's retrieval mechanism even further, in order to avoid even the slightest damage to the pristine coins.

In 1995, after years of litigation, CADG was awarded more than 90 percent of the treasure, with the rest given to insurance companies descended from firms that had indemnified the original shipment. "We are in no sense offended that a salvor who has 'boldly gone where no one has gone before' ... might be entitled to the lion's share of a long-lost treasure," wrote Federal Circuit Judge Richard B. Kellam in the decision. But apart from the fortune in gold--which was quickly purchased by private collectors--the feat accomplished by Thompson and his colleagues laid open a treasure trove of previously inaccessible knowledge about the trackless depths of the sea.

As Kinder points out, at the time Tommy Thompson became intrigued with sea exploration "we knew far more about other galaxies than we knew about a world that began at the edge of our beaches." At its deepest point, "the ocean ... could swallow the twenty-nine thousand feet of Mount Everest and still have more than a mile to spare." Yet relatively little had been done to explore the ocean to any significant depth, in large measure because such ventures were seen as the province of government, and the government had little success in devising the appropriate technology, despite hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars spent in the effort.

Thompson was not content with the prevailing definition of "impossible." He and about a dozen colleagues--gifted people similarly disinclined to work within artificial limitations--devised and built Nemo. They also organized a group of 161 private investors, venture capitalists and wealthy treasure-hunt enthusiasts, to underwrite the search for the Central America. After doing extensive historical research to define a search area, Thompson and his colleagues retained the services of a young attorney well-versed in maritime law to help guide them through the intricate process of protecting their claims. All of this had to be done very discreetly, since rumors of a lucrative find would spread quickly through the treasure-hunting subculture.

Most remarkable of all is the fact that this "impossible" task was accomplished in roughly three years.

Kinder puts the accomplishment in perspective. "Many scientists and engineers consider the challenges of exploring and working in the deep ocean equal to the challenges of exploring and working in outer space," he points out. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy committed the U.S. government to the task of landing a man on the moon before the decade's end. To meet that challenge, the federal government hired nearly half a million people and spent almost $100 billion (in current dollars) over eight years. By way of contrast, Thompson and his associates--a core of roughly 30 people, and 161 investors--spent no more than $12 million of private funds to accomplish, in three years, what was generally considered impossible: exploring the hintermost depths of the Atlantic and recovering artifacts from the Central America.

"No one had done it; no one knowledgeable thought it could be done without the full force of the United States government and unlimited resources," comments Kinder. "Even then, some were skeptical, because the government had already spent hundreds of millions trying" to develop the appropriate technology.

As Thompson and his associates demonstrated, the full force of government is no match for innovative genius freed from artificial restraints and driven by strong economic incentives.

Privatizing Space Travel

On August 22, pilot Brian Binnie sealed another triumph of private innovation by piloting SpaceShipOne, a privately constructed reusable spacecraft, to an altitude of 71 miles. This was SpaceShipOne's second voyage within a week, thereby earning the $10 million "X Prize" for the spacecraft's development team, headed by aviation pioneer Burt Rutan.

"Today we have made history," exulted X Prize Foundation co-founder Peter Diamandis as he awarded the prize to Rutan's team. "Today we go to the stars. You have raised a tide that will bring billions of dollars into the industry .... We will begin a new era of spaceflight."

Hoisted aloft over California's Mojave Desert by a turbojet mothership called the White Knight, SpaceShipOne made a total of three sub-orbital jaunts: one in June, two in August. The light but sophisticated one-man craft was propelled by a mixture of nitrous oxide and rubber, a combination yielding thousands of pounds of thrust. The first flight on June 21 pierced the 62-mile limit that is internationally recognized as the threshold of Outer Space. The craft improved its performances in each of its subsequent flights, the third of which easily surpassed the previous altitude record of 67 miles set by the military's X-15 spacecraft in 1963.

During the first two flights, pilot Mike Melvill--the world's first commercial astronaut--experienced, and dealt with, various in-flight emergencies, including wind shear, a jammed tail control, and unexpected rolls. Rutan's team was able to analyze and correct those problems quickly and effectively.

SpaceShipOne's success presents a striking contrast to the disasters and delays that have plagued the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). In 2003, the Columbia space shuttle, a 21-year-old relic that was essentially obsolete during its first mission in 1981, disintegrated during re-entry, killing its five-man, two-woman crew. The Shuttle, presently NASA's only man-rated launch system, was taken out of service for at least two years. This forced inaction was damaging because the Shuttle was expected to play a critical role in construction of the International Space Station (ISS)--which is itself mired in cost overruns, production delays, and design troubles.

Last summer, while the private SpaceShipOne was soaring triumphantly into space, NASA's much-hyped Genesis probe crashed ingloriously to Earth in southern Utah. The probe, which cost taxpayers $260 million, had been sent to collect samples of the "solar wind"--highly charged particles emitted by the sun that, according to mission specialists, would help scientists decipher clues to our solar system's origins.

NASA planned to retrieve the probe by sending helicopters to snag its parachute line as the capsule gently plummeted toward the earth. But this elegant plan was rendered moot because four "gravity switches," delicate instruments intended to trigger the craft's parachute, had been installed backward. This was not an error on the part of an inattentive technician; as Scientific American points out, the alignment of the faulty gravity switches was "a simple design error that went undetected despite many layers of review."

"One of the questions we have to answer," commented Michael Ryschkewitsch, head of NASA's Genesis Mishap Investigation Board, is "how did we not catch this?" Cynics might observe that NASA's Mishap Investigation Board has had plenty of experience tardily catching critical details after hundreds of millions have been spent--on the myopically mis-designed Hubble Space Telescope, the ill-fated Mars Polar Lander, and the orbital money pit called the International Space Station.

Originally proposed by President Ronald Reagan 20 years ago as "Space Station Freedom," the ISS was conceived as a grand orbital city of the sort depicted in the science fiction visions of Arthur C. Clarke. It would be a permanent outpost devoted to research and commercial production (such as the manufacture of perfect ball bearings and the development of pharmaceuticals). It would also serve as a launch platform for spacecraft headed to the moon, Mars, and beyond.

A little more than 10 years ago, Congress appropriated $13 billion for the ISS, which had been scaled down and repackaged as a glorious joint venture between the U.S. and "post-Soviet" Russia. Since then "costs have soared while ambitions faded," notes William Tucker of The American Enterprise. "When completed, the ISS will hold six astronauts. The two in residence now spend 85 percent of their time on construction and maintenance. In essence, the U.S. is spending billions so that two astronauts can build a space shed."

To the Stars Through Liberty

When federal agencies have "unlimited resources" to work with, failure generally doesn't mean an end to funding, as it would for private research and exploration ventures. This may be why mishap management, not exploration, is now NASA's primary mission. Burt Rutan and other private aerospace pioneers have grander visions --a "Golden Age of Space Flight" akin to the "Golden Age" of aviation that blossomed following the Wright Brothers' December 1903 heavier-than-air flight.

"I absolutely have to develop a space tourism system that is at least 100 times safer than anything that has flown man into space, and probably significantly more than that," declared Rutan after receiving the X Prize. British airline mogul Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Atlantic and the newly created Virgin Galactic, shares that ambition. At the completion of SpaceShipOne's third mission, Branson announced a deal to license the technology to build a fleet of commercial spacecraft. According to Branson, it could be possible to fly 3,000 people into space on private craft within five years. (Appropriately, the waiting list for Branson's private space flights includes actor William Shatner, known to millions as Star Trek's intrepid Captain Kirk.)

In fact, using the "Golden Age" of aviation as a model, the "Golden Age of Space Flight" should have arrived long ago. Greg Maryniak of the X Prize Foundation points out that prior to World War I, the progress of civil aviation was spurred by prizes and competitions sponsored by private interests. In pursuit of those private awards, aviators (with the French leading the pack) set and broke records for distance, duration, and speed. It was in pursuit of a $250,000 prize offered by French expatriate Raymond Orteig that Charles Lindbergh, a gifted college dropout with little formal flight training, but a wealth of barnstorming experience, piloted the Spirit of St. Louis from New York to Paris in 1927.

In 2001, as humanity marked the fourth decade of the age of manned space exploration, "fewer than 500 men and women have experienced space flight," comments Maryniak. "Two nations, the United States and Russia, have demonstrated the ability to fly people into space"--a list that has been expanded to include Communist China. Prior to the advent of the private SpaceShipOne, a total of three manned space vehicle systems were in use.

"By contrast," continues Maryniak, "almost 200 makes of aircraft were available worldwide by 1912, nine years after the Wright brothers' ... first flight and the year the U.S. government first appropriated money for military aviation. Between 1908 and 1910 approximately 1,000 new pilots were trained worldwide. By 1910 there were 70 different power plants available to aircraft designers." Once again, this all took place without government intervention or direction of any kind.

"The fundamental difference between early aviation and early space flight is that the public acquired the expectation that space was the sole province of governments," he concludes. Indeed, the government's spectacular, and frequent, failures reinforce that monopoly on space flight.

"The perception that all space [travel and exploration] has to be expensive is difficult to change because businesses and investors look to the federal government, NASA, and the aerospace industry for almost everything to do with space," notes investment adviser David Livingston. "In addition, the public is constantly reminded by the government and the media just how expensive and risky space is, especially with failed NASA missions to Mars, Shuttle [disasters], and ... ISS cost overruns."

In fact, NASA actually sabotaged an effort by a private consortium, the MIR Group, to rescue and privatize the aging and decrepit Soviet/Russian space station. In 2000, as the MIR space station began to lose altitude, RSC Energia, the Russian firm that produces that nation's rockets and space hardware, entered into an agreement with a group of American investors to create MIR Corp. The venture was "formed specifically to exploit the commercial markets MIR could support, including passenger travel," recalls attorney James E. Dunstan, head of the Space Law Group.

A lease agreement was worked out, and one MIR rescue mission was undertaken --funded entirely by private investors. But NASA withheld an export permit for a key piece of hardware needed to supply the ailing, aging station with electricity --until after the Russian Space Agency, increasingly dependent on NASA for subsidies, decided to bring down the space station. As author Richard Klerkx pointed out in his book Lost In Space: The Fall of NASA and the Dream of a New Space Age: "NASA did everything it could to frustrate the Americans' effort [to rescue and privatize MIR]. It doesn't like private competition in its domain."

Get Out of the Way!

As demonstrated by its shameless obstructionism regarding the MIR Group, NASA's prime directive is institutional self-preservation, rather than promoting space exploration. But this is to be expected, given that NASA is an appendage of the Leviathan State.

As economist Bob Murphy observes, "the free market is perfectly capable of funding space exploration. Remember that the government can't produce anything on its own; whatever money it spends is ultimately stolen from taxpayers." In a very real sense, NASA's signature accomplishment, the Apollo moon mission, actually impeded technological and intellectual progress by channeling money and re sources into a government-decreed enterprise, rather than allowing them to flow to private sector visionaries and investors who may very well have accomplished the same feat much more efficiently and for a fraction of the cost.

"Several years ago," recalls Murphy, "I predicted to my bemused brother that before I died, I would stand on the Moon. If the government would just get out of the way, my prediction will easily come true."

The achievements of "maverick" entrepreneurs like Tommy Thompson, Butt Rutan, Orville and Wilbur Wright, Charles Lindbergh, and many others offer mere hints of what could be accomplished if our innate capacity for innovation were unshackled. What miraculous developments in exploration, medicine, transportation, energy, and information technology are being frustrated because of government intervention? We cannot answer that question, and won't be able to, until government is reduced to its properly modest role in our lives.