Marshes, Mars and Money: Reflections on Winning and Losing
I Have Lost More Than Most People Have Ever Tried to Win
What does a man have to do to become a winner? And what happens when he spends sixty-two years trying, accomplishes quite a few things, and still has remarkably little to show for it?
I have a confession to make.
I am a loser.
Not entirely, of course. I have won some things, earned some honors, enjoyed some remarkable experiences, loved and been loved, and occasionally managed to make a difference. I have also had the privilege of knowing some genuine winners and of being connected, through family, friendship, education and professional life, to people who accomplished things of considerable significance. While winning is a goal most of us share at least on occasion. There are more movies, poems, parties and toasts celebrating and appreciating losers that one might think at first.
But if the measure is money, fame, professional position, influence, or the ability to convert a lifetime of intellectual labor into an enduring enterprise, then I have to admit that my record is not impressive. I am blessed that my wife has compiled the
I am sixty-two years old. I have two university degrees, some awards and distinctions, a rather unusual collection of experiences, a beautiful wife whom I love, memories of a recent trip to Italy, and a head full of projects which might require several lifetimes and a few billion dollars to accomplish.
I do not have the billions. I do not have the millions. I do not even have the sort of comfortable financial independence which might allow me to pursue those projects without considerable anxiety.
I have been interested in the future of humanity in space for most of my life. I have written about the history and culture of Acadiana, the place where my roots run very deep. I have pursued business ventures, academic projects, intellectual properties, creative work, journalism, public affairs and various forms of service.
I have made money. I have lost money. I have made friends. I have lost opportunities. I have been published, invited, congratulated, ignored, rejected, forgotten and occasionally rediscovered.
There are things I have done which I believe were genuinely good. There are things I have done which were not very good at all. Some of my most useful work has had little to do with my deepest dreams. Some of my most passionate and ambitious work has attracted some attention and support in degrees, awards, publications and paychecks in the short term. But from a larger geographical and demographic perspective and over a longer term evaluation almost no meaningful support at all. .
I have played a great many rounds. If one can call education a game or use that metaphor of the educator as a player. I have played a great many rounds. If one can call writing a game or use that metaphor of the writer as a player. I have played a great many rounds. If one can call history a game or use that metaphor of the historian as a player. I have played a great many rounds. If one can call Space a game or use that metaphor of the space theorist and innovator as a player. I have played a great many rounds. If one can call the Christian spiritual journey a game or use that metaphor of the Christian disciple as a player.
I have won very few tournaments. If one wants to see signs and trophies that show my enduring impact and legacy in any of these areas. But I have won a few. What is enough?
Some, more successful than I, would argue that having four or five passions is one one of the main problems. The diletante cannot expect to be the champion. Maybe they are right. And yet, I still want to play.
That last sentence is perhaps the most important one in this essay.
Because this is not simply a story about an unsuccessful man, or about the decline of a coastal Louisiana community, or about the difficulty of making money from ideas. It is also about the peculiar relationship between winning and losing in a civilization which celebrates winners, depends upon losers, and often has very little idea how to distinguish the two.
It is about tennis and automobile racing, football and golf, the New Testament and the Roman Empire, the disappearing marshes of Louisiana and the possible cities of Mars. It is also about the impossibility of people in our era seeing the point in certain styles of writing and communication.
It is about my grandfather’s achievements at Freshwater City and my own largely unsuccessful attempts to create something of enduring significance in any number of areas of endeavor in which I have nonetheless persevered..
It is about the possibility that a man can be a loser by nearly every conventional measure and still have something important to offer. In that sense it is a critique of the American ethos of success and winning by a writer who is American and also a believer in an ethos of winning and success.
And, because I am not dead yet, it is also about money, fame and taking chances. About advantages sought from an area and position of disadvantage. I am still pursuing and trying to increase wealth. I still think a great deal about money,
Real money. Investment money. Business money. The money that turns an idea into an enterprise, a prototype into a product, a coastal ruin into a port, or a crater on the Moon into a human settlement.
I have not given up on winning. But I have begun to wonder whether our civilization understands how much it owes to people who lose.
1. The Astonishing Mathematics of Winning
Pete Sampras was one of the greatest tennis players of his generation and, by many measures, one of the greatest ever to play the game. He won fourteen Grand Slam singles titles, a record in men’s tennis when he retired. He spent 286 weeks ranked number one in the world. He was a champion whose career is remembered for winning.
Yet the mathematics of tennis contains a startling fact. Even the greatest champions lose an enormous number of points.
A player can lose nearly half the points in a match and still win the match. A player can win only a modest majority of the games and still dominate a tournament. The scoring system transforms relatively small advantages, sustained at critical moments, into decisive victories.
Sampras’s career is a particularly interesting example because his powerful serve, aggressive game and ability to prevail in important moments allowed him to win matches without overwhelming opponents in every statistical category.
One can lose thousands upon thousands of points and still become one of the greatest winners in the history of a sport.
Think about that for a moment.
A tennis champion is not a person who does not lose points. He is a person who wins enough of the right points, games, sets and matches. The distinction is not trivial. It is fundamental.
We often evaluate our lives as though every disappointment were a final score. Every rejection becomes evidence of personal inadequacy. Every failed venture becomes a verdict on our judgment. Every unrecognized achievement becomes something we are tempted to erase from our own account of ourselves.
But tennis does not work that way.
Neither does golf.
Neither does automobile racing.
Neither, for that matter, does much of human civilization.
Consider the late Dick Trickle, a name that became familiar to many Americans for reasons quite apart from the extraordinary racing career behind it. Trickle was a legendary short-track stock-car racer. He won an enormous number of races in the regional circuits where he made his reputation, but he never won a race in NASCAR’s premier Cup Series. He nevertheless enjoyed a long career at the highest levels of the sport and earned recognition that thousands of aspiring racers could only dream of.
Was he a winner or a loser?
The answer depends upon which scoreboard we choose.
A professional golfer might play for twenty years, earn millions of dollars, travel the world, compete against the best players alive, and never win one of the major championships. Indeed, a golfer may earn a comfortable living and achieve a distinguished professional career without winning very often at all. There is no contradiction here.
In a tournament with a hundred competitors, only one can finish first. Ninety-nine must finish somewhere else.
If we call all ninety-nine losers in the absolute sense, then we have created a rather peculiar definition of success. And yet, in an important sense, all ninety-nine really did lose.I do not want to eliminate that distinction. I do not believe that everyone deserves a trophy simply for appearing, nor that a person who finishes last has somehow accomplished the same thing as the champion.
Winning matters. It matters tremendously. But so does competing.
And the institutions which make winning possible depend upon large numbers of people who will never be champions.
The Colleges That Must Lose
Nowhere is this clearer than in American college sports.
Every autumn, millions of Americans watch football teams compete for conference championships, national rankings, bowl appearances, playoff positions, money, prestige and institutional identity.
A handful of schools enjoy enormous success. Many others do not.
Some football programs have spent generations absorbing losses against better-funded, more talented and more famous opponents. Yet without those opponents, the great winners could not accumulate their victories.
The University of Alabama cannot defeat an empty stadium. Louisiana State University cannot win a football game against a university which does not field a team. The great programs require schedules, conferences, opponents, institutions willing to compete, and supporters willing to keep believing even when the record is disappointing. The schools that lose are not merely unfortunate accessories to the success of the schools that win.
They are part of the structure which makes the winners possible. They recruit students, employ coaches, educate athletes, build traditions, sustain communities, attract donors, sell tickets and preserve the possibility that next season might be different. And occasionally the underdog wins.
That possibility is essential to the drama. If the winner were known with absolute certainty before the contest, the contest would lose much of its meaning.
The losers make the winners possible, and the possibility of winning makes the losers willing to continue.
There is a great deal of economic, political, religious and philosophical significance in that observation. For one thing, it raises the question of how we ought to treat those who compete seriously and repeatedly without reaching the summit. For another, it raises a more uncomfortable set of questions:
What happens when the institutions that are supposed to allow people to compete begin excluding them from the game? What happens when the loser does not merely lose the contest, but loses the opportunity to contend? Because it is one thing to be defeated and it is another thing entirely to be denied a place on the field.
That is a set questions to which I shall return. It is a set of questions that resonate very much with me.
2. Saint Paul Was Not Against Winning
Christianity is often presented as a religion which reverses ordinary human ambition. THAT IS A VERY FLAWED ANALYSIS WHEN IT IS THE PRINCIPAL OR ONLY POINT OF VIEW ABOUT THE FAITH.
There is a scandal and sign of contradiction in the Cross and in Christ that is expressed in certain teachings. Those teachings are well known: “The meek shall inherit the earth”. “The last shall be first”. “Those who humble themselves shall be exalted”. Theme rooted in the Old Testament understanding that Yahweh is (among other titles) the God of the Oppressed and the Protector of Widows and Orphans. The poor and suffering are blessed in ways that the rich and powerful may not be. “it is easier for a camel to enter the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
All of that is important. Those who know any of Christian history also know how important it is for Christians to remind themselves of that commitment to those who are losers in the eyes of the World. It is at the heart of the Gospel. But it is not the totality of the Gospel.
But it would be a serious mistake to conclude that Christianity has no place for competition, excellence, discipline, ambition or victory. I will leave aside the misinterpretations of the Gospels and the early traditions which are virtually inescapable but never easy to discuss. Let’s discuss the epistles which are less in dispute.
Saint Paul certainly did not think that Christianity has no place for competition, excellence, discipline, ambition or victory. In his First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul uses the athletic competitions familiar to the Greek and Roman world as an illustration of the Christian life. He reminds his readers that many runners compete in a race, but only one receives the prize. He urges them to run in such a way as to win.
The passage is 1 Corinthians 9:24–27. Paul describes athletes training with discipline and accepting restrictions upon their lives in order to obtain a perishable crown. He contrasts that prize with the imperishable crown for which Christians strive. He also describes his own conduct in terms of purposeful competition. He does not run aimlessly. He does not box as though merely striking the air. This is not a celebration of mediocrity. It is not an invitation to surrender ambition. It is a demand that ambition be disciplined and directed toward something worthy of the effort. Paul knew that winning required sacrifice. He knew that the pursuit of victory imposed obligations.
St. Paul knew and taught that a serious competitor could not simply do whatever he pleased and expect to prevail. He taught Christians to play to win.
But there is another passage in the same letter which presents an almost shockingly different image. In 1 Corinthians 4:9, Paul describes the apostles as men placed last, condemned to death, and made a spectacle before the world. The imagery recalls the defeated prisoners displayed in Roman triumphal processions and the condemned men exposed before public audiences.
Think about that contrast.
In one passage, Paul tells Christians to run to win. In another, he portrays the apostles themselves as defeated captives in the public theater of imperial victory. The men who were helping to establish what would become one of the greatest religious civilizations in history appeared, in their own time, to be losers.
They were not senators commanding legions. They were not victorious generals receiving triumphs. They were not wealthy patrons controlling the commerce of the Mediterranean. They were frequently imprisoned, beaten, driven out of cities, misunderstood and rejected. Paul himself would eventually die as a condemned man under Roman authority, according to the ancient Christian tradition.
Yet his letters would outlive the Roman emperors. His words would be read in churches across continents unknown to the people who first heard him preach. The defeated prisoner would become one of the most influential writers in human history. The empire which condemned him would eventually adopt the faith he proclaimed.
There is an irony here which no serious discussion of winning and losing should overlook. But there is also a danger in interpreting it too comfortably. Not every defeated man is Saint Paul. Not every rejected idea is destined to transform civilization. Not every failed enterprise is an unrecognized masterpiece.
The Christian answer cannot simply be that losing is winning.
That would empty both words of meaning.
Some people lose because they make poor decisions. Some lose because their ideas are bad. Some lose because they lack discipline, capital, skill, judgment or perseverance. Some lose because they encounter obstacles which might have defeated almost anyone. Some lose because the institutions controlling opportunity are unfair, indifferent or corrupt. And many lose because human life contains more uncertainty than most theories of success are willing to acknowledge.
Rather, Christianity presents us with a more difficult challenge: to compete seriously for worthwhile objectives while recognizing that the final judgment upon a human life may differ radically from the judgment of the spectators.
I am a Catholic Christian. I believe in a final judgment, although my beliefs may contain more ambiguity and respect for the sovereignty of God than is popular and easily seen as orthodox these days.
I also believe in paying the electric bill, insurance bills, deductibles, car repairs and the survival of local nonprofits. Money is seldom far from my mind.
The relationship between those two convictions has occupied a surprisingly large portion of my adult life.
3. The Marshes: A Kingdom My Grandfather Built and I Could Not Keep
There was a time when the marshes of southern Vermilion Parish seemed to offer an almost unlimited range of possibilities. Oil, natural gas, fisheries, trapping, navigation, transportation, coastal commerce and land development were all part of a regional economy which was never quite as simple as outsiders imagined. The marshes were not merely picturesque wetlands inhabited by alligators, mosquitoes and people speaking an unfamiliar variety of French.
They were working landscapes. They were connected to the Gulf of Mexico, the oilfields, the ports, the agricultural prairies, the towns of Acadiana and the wider commercial world. My maternal grandfather, Cecil Gremillion, was one of the men who saw opportunity there.
He was involved in building something substantial at Freshwater City, near the coast of Vermilion Parish. He also had a camp at Pecan Island, a place associated in my memory with a distinctive way of life, a particular regional economy and a world that seemed capable of continuing. His enterprise belonged to an era in which men could look at a remote coastal location and imagine a port, a business, an industrial opportunity and a future.
Freshwater City was not simply a name on a map to me. It was part of a family story. It was evidence that ambition could take physical form. My grandfather did not merely discuss economic development as an abstraction. He participated in creating it. But the start he made has long been in decline. Spacex will be starting in place mostly inhabited by ruins andghosts of his dreams and efforts and bits of the community that predated his efforts.
In the course of my historical research, I have also written about his business connections with the oilman and chemical entrepreneur Revis Sirmon, including their involvement in Riptide Investors of which my Grandfather was once CEO, when he also owned a furniture store chain, a real estate company, rental properties and was president of a growing savings and loan. and the development of Freshwater City. He brought a lot to the battle but before Spacex recently committed to Starbase, Louisiana there was every sign that all those efforts were fading into ruin.
The history of the oil industry in Acadiana is full of such relationships. Farmers, pilots, businessmen, investors, landowners, engineers, politicians and workers combined their skills and resources to create an economy which transformed the region.
Those in the oil industry were and are a varied lot. Some became very wealthy. Some became influential. Some built things that endured. Others built things that did not. some created a lot of damage and limited value others created a lot of value without doing much harm.
My grandfather had a chance to play a serious round in the development of that coastal world. He was a big player in Freshwater City where Elon Musk and governor Landry recently met to discuss the development that is to become Starbase. Perspectives on that event vary. The arrival of the inscrutable hero is one. The speeches of those who planned this process are another perspective. Artistic dreams are yet another perspective. The perspective of those who follow an extraordinary corporation is yet another perspective. I have left out the pieces put together by journalists seeking out those with criticisms, warnings and fears at the expense of other narratives. However, the part of the original recordings that meant the most to me was cut out. It was the exchange where the name of Starbase, Louisiana was announced to the world.
But
Freshwater City was a huge part of my life but I never really got the chance to play a round in keeping my grandfather’s achievement going. That is one of the losses which has remained with me. I do not mean that I personally owned a flourishing port and foolishly allowed it to collapse. Nor do I mean that the entire decline of the coastal region can be attributed to one family, one business decision or one generation.
The decline of southern Louisiana’s coastal communities is a complicated story. It is one I have written about in this blog. It involves land loss, subsidence, erosion, hurricanes, changing industrial practices, altered transportation patterns, environmental problems, public policy and the movement of people and capital. The loss is widespread and impacts many people. But there is something painfully personal about seeing a place associated with your family’s ambition reduced to a ruin. There is a difference between reading about economic decline and standing in the landscape where the decline has occurred. There is a difference between studying abandoned enterprises and remembering the people who believed in them. And there is a difference between inheriting wealth and inheriting a story about wealth which has largely disappeared. I inherited the story. Not the small emerging marshland empire with lots of potential.
A Ruin at the Edge of a New Space Age
Now comes one of the strangest turns in this entire account. The very region where my grandfather helped build a commercial future, and where so much of that future has disappeared, is being reconsidered in connection with the space industry. The coastal world of Vermilion Parish, with its industrial experience, access to the Gulf, maritime culture and history of ambitious engineering, has begun to attract attention in discussions of space-related development. That is not a small beginning, it is a huge leap of investment in the hundreds of billions.
I have been passionate about human expansion into space for most of my life. I have spent years thinking about the Moon, Mars, transportation systems, settlement architecture, space commerce and the legal structures which might govern a future interplanetary civilization. And now, at sixty-two, I find myself contemplating the possibility that the landscape of my grandfather’s achievements might become relevant to the industry which has dominated so much of my own intellectual life.
It is almost too neatly ironic to be believable. But it is familiar to me to have a personal narrative that is very rare and improbable. This narrative in particular is as follows:
- My grandfather helped build something on the Louisiana coast.
2. The coastal economy changed.
3. The enterprise declined.
4. I spent much of my life thinking about commerce beyond the Earth.
5. The space industry seems to be creating a future for the same coastal region as a place of hope and progress.
I do not claim that a great spaceport has already arisen at Freshwater City, or that any proposed development is certain to succeed. There is an enormous difference between an announcement, an expression of interest, a feasible project, a financed project and a functioning industrial enterprise. I have lived long enough to appreciate every one of those distinctions. But I also know that history sometimes brings old places into new economic systems in ways that earlier generations could scarcely have imagined. The port that served one industrial age may have a role in another. The coastal infrastructure developed for petroleum, marine transportation and heavy industry may prove useful to businesses serving the space economy. The engineering culture of Acadiana may find new opportunities in an industry which demands difficult work, practical ingenuity and extraordinary ambition.
I would like to be part of that transformation. Not merely as a spectator. Not merely as a man who once wrote about space travel. Not merely as the grandson of a man who helped build something there. I would like to play a meaningful round. I would like to help create something, and yes, I would like to make some money doing it.
I have no qualms about trying to make money because there is no shame in wanting a worthy enterprise to be profitable. Profit is not the whole measure of human achievement, but neither is it an irrelevant detail. An enterprise which cannot sustain itself financially will usually have difficulty sustaining the people, facilities, institutions and commitments upon which its larger purposes depend.
The money matters.
So does the marsh.
And so does Mars.
I have some inventions that I am trying to develop but there is another lifelong preoccupation for me that relates to the Spacex goal of making human life interplanetary.
That is my Space Economy Plan: Creating Wealthy and Autonomous Space Communities: The Key to Realizing Our Space Economy Potential
The space economy is not a distant dream—it is the next logical extension of human commerce, innovation, and resilience. Estimates from the OECD and NASA project its value reaching trillions of dollars by 2040–2050 through resource extraction, manufacturing, tourism, and interplanetary trade. Yet this potential remains unrealized if we treat space merely as an outpost or research station dependent on constant Earth subsidies. True economic transformation demands relatively wealthy, autonomous communities on the Moon, Mars, and beyond—self-sufficient enough to produce surplus goods and services for export back to Earth, creating a virtuous cycle of mutual growth.
My Craterite Colony System™ and Lunar Founders Prospectus provide the architectural and economic blueprint. Natural craters are capped to form sealed biospheres, delivering massive habitable volume with minimal imported materials. Local production of oxygen, water, soil, glass, and structural elements achieves resource independence. Robotic systems extract helium-3 and volatiles from regolith for industry, atmosphere management, and export markets. Population scales sustainably at 75 cubic meters of breathable volume per person, ensuring safety while enabling rapid growth from initial crews of 20–100 to settlements exceeding one million.
Autonomy is the multiplier. Autonomous communities generate internal revenue through energy exports, manufacturing, shipbuilding, and fuel production. Phase I lunar industrialization alone projects $500 billion–$1 trillion in output over 30 years; Mars expansion scales to tens of trillions. Helium-3 fusion fuel, rare-earth metals, and deuterium exceed Earth’s reserves, creating export streams that fund further expansion. Transportation via a permanent pilot corps operating under an airline model slashes costs and opens markets.
Wealth follows. These communities trade with Earth—selling helium-3 for clean fusion, manufactured goods, scientific data, and tourism experiences—while importing specialized items they cannot yet produce at scale. Trade prevents dependency and stimulates innovation on both worlds. Earth gains affordable energy and resources; space gains capital, technology, and markets. This mirrors historical precedents of resilient diaspora communities (such as Acadian networks in Louisiana) that preserved identity, adapted governance, and contributed decisively to larger economies through cohesion and local leadership.
Without autonomy and wealth creation, space remains a costly government program. With it, the lunar and Martian economies become engines of global prosperity. My political division model (Summers Formula v0.1) allocates shares fairly—UN stewardship, founding consortiums, corporate developers, national points pools, and protected parks—ensuring governance supports commerce rather than stifling it.
The choice is clear: build dependent outposts, and the space economy stagnates at billions. Build wealthy, autonomous, trading communities, and humanity unlocks limitless growth. The Crater Cap architecture, resource independence strategy, and population scaling model stand ready. Investment, partnership, and implementation now will secure participation in history’s largest civilizational expansion. The stars are not a frontier for conquest alone—they are a marketplace for the bold. Let us build communities rich enough to trade, autonomous enough to thrive, and visionary enough to make the space economy humanity’s greatest achievement.
None of these thoughts are getting effectively into the discussion in the way that I had hoped they would . I was invited to speak at Mars Society Conference later this month. Then, when corresponding about the details I was disinvited. QUite the insult in a life filled with insults and slights.
Mars, the Conference Invitation and the Door That Closed
The Moon is not the end of my interest in space settlement. Mars has occupied a very substantial part of my imagination and intellectual work. I have thought about the settlement of Mars not merely as an engineering project but as a civilizational undertaking. How should land be allocated? What forms of government might emerge? How can the interests of nations, corporations, settlers and humanity as a whole be reconciled? What legal institutions might protect property without allowing a small number of early participants to monopolize an entire planet? How might settlements become economically productive? What sort of relationship should exist between Earth, the Moon and Mars? How might communities develop from small scientific and industrial outposts into societies capable of sustaining families, schools, commerce, religious institutions, political life and cultural traditions?
The last paragraph ends with a set of questions that could fill a page as a large print bulleted list. These are not questions which can be answered by calculating the payload capacity of a rocket. They are questions about civilization. And civilization has been one of my principal intellectual interests for most of my life.
I have worked on proposals involving crater-centered settlement, the eventual development of very large Martian communities, resource allocation, transportation systems, and legal and political arrangements intended to give an emerging interplanetary civilization some reasonable chance of survival.
I prepared a presentation entitled To a Legally, Politically and Economically Survivable Mars.
The title was deliberately ambitious.
I do not believe that humanity can create a durable civilization on Mars merely by transporting enough machinery and people to the surface. The settlements must have laws. They must have legitimate institutions. They must have economic foundations. They must have ways of resolving conflicts. They must be able to develop relationships among people whose interests, loyalties, cultures and resources differ.And they must somehow avoid reproducing every destructive pattern of terrestrial expansion while retaining enough of humanity’s ambition to make the enterprise possible.
I received an invitation to present at the Mars Society Convention scheduled for this month. That mattered to me. It represented an opportunity to place my work before an audience with a serious interest in the future of Mars. It offered the possibility of meeting people whose professional, technical, intellectual and commercial activities might overlap with my own.
It was not a Nobel Prize.
It was not a multimillion-dollar contract.
It was not the founding of a city on Mars.
But it was a place on the field.
Then the invitation was withdrawn.
I was disinvited.
I will have more to say elsewhere about the circumstances and what I believe they mean. For now, I want to emphasize the personal and philosophical significance of the experience.
It is one thing to submit an idea and have it rejected.
It is another to receive an invitation and then lose the opportunity to participate.
At sixty-two, after decades of thinking about the subject, I found myself once again confronting a familiar situation. I had done the work. I had prepared the argument. I had received some indication that the work deserved a hearing. And the opportunity disappeared. I cannot pretend that such experiences do not hurt.
But the history of technological development is not a history in which every worthwhile idea emerged fully formed from an established institution and proceeded smoothly to commercial success.
It is a history of failed experiments, abandoned prototypes, rejected proposals, neglected inventors, unexpected discoveries, courageous investors and people who kept working after almost everyone else had lost interest.
The failures do not prove the value of the ideas. But neither do they prove that the ideas are worthless. That distinction matters.
4. The Strange Career of a Man Who Wanted to Write About Acadiana and Colonize the Moon
Some people find a vocation early in life and follow it through a reasonably recognizable sequence of stages.
They earn a degree, enter a profession, build a career, develop a reputation, accumulate assets and retire.
I have never been very good at that sequence.
My interests have been broad, and they have not always been compatible with one another.
History, theology, law, literature, business, politics, journalism, education, technology, space exploration and the development of new intellectual properties have all competed for my attention.
At times I have been able to connect them.
At other times they have competed so effectively that none received the uninterrupted attention necessary for conventional professional success.
There is a price to be paid for having too many interests.
There is also a price to be paid for living in a society whose institutions are organized around increasingly narrow forms of specialization.
A person who has devoted forty years to a single professional field may acquire a reputation that is relatively easy to describe.
A person who has devoted forty years to a dozen overlapping fields may find that no one knows quite what to call him.
I have been a student, teacher, writer, journalist, researcher, businessman, inventor, insurance producer and participant in a variety of other pursuits.
I have held jobs that paid the bills without advancing my principal intellectual ambitions.
I have pursued projects that absorbed years of work without paying the bills.
I have sometimes been useful to institutions which had little interest in the ideas that mattered most to me.
And I have sometimes discovered that the credentials I possessed were sufficient to get me into a room but insufficient to make anyone listen once I arrived.
The Tulane Law School Chapter
I did the difficult work of gaining admission to Tulane Law School.
That was not an insignificant achievement.
I was interested in law partly because I believed that legal institutions would play an essential role in the future of human civilization, including the development of space commerce and settlement.
Space law was among the fields that attracted me.
So were other areas of law that might have allowed me to combine intellectual interests with a viable professional career.
But I did not graduate.
That is a simple fact.
There are explanations, circumstances, qualifications and reflections which could be added to it, but the central fact remains.
I entered law school.
I did not leave with a law degree.
In the conventional professional accounting, that is a loss. The years of preparation and study did not produce the credential that would have permitted me to practice law. The opportunity to build a conventional legal career did not materialize. And yet the interests which drew me toward law did not disappear.
I continued thinking about legal systems, property, economic development, institutions and the problems of governing human communities. Indeed, I have become increasingly convinced that many of the greatest problems in space development will not be solved by rocket engineers alone.
They will require lawyers, historians, economists, political theorists, entrepreneurs, theologians, architects and people capable of understanding the relationships among those fields.
I did not become a lawyer.
But I never stopped thinking about the law.
That may be a poor consolation prize in the marketplace.
It may still have some value in the larger human enterprise.
Published, Presented and Forgotten
I have presented work at peer-reviewed academic conferences.
I have written a monthly column for a local journal.
I have produced feature stories about Acadiana, its history, its people and its contemporary life.
I have devoted considerable attention to the historical transformation of Cajun and Acadian identity and the relationship between local culture and the larger American experience.
Among the subjects I have studied is the extraordinary documentary project undertaken by Standard Oil of New Jersey in the 1940s, including the production of Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story.
That film, which premiered in Abbeville in 1949, is an important part of the history of the region.
It also offers a fascinating opportunity to examine the relationship between corporate power, artistic ambition, economic change and the representation of a regional people.
My paper, Emerging Views: The Reemergence of American Identity in Postwar Acadiana and the SONJ Documentary Projects, explored these relationships.
It was not a casual opinion piece.
It was the product of substantial historical research, involving documentary sources, local newspapers, the history of the oil industry, the work of important filmmakers and photographers, and the complex question of how the Cajuns understood themselves as Americans.
In another piece of scholarly writing, I reviewed F.D.R.’s Moviemaker: Memoirs and Scripts, by Pare Lorentz, examining the documentary filmmaker’s work, his connection to the New Deal, and the relationship between artistic ambition and social reform.
That review appeared under my name and my affiliation with Louisiana State University.
These are real pieces of work.
They are not imaginary achievements invented to console myself for failure elsewhere.
They represent intellectual effort, publication, public presentation and some degree of acceptance within scholarly institutions.
But I cannot say that they have made me a recognized authority.
When journalists seek commentary on the history of Acadiana, I am not usually the person they call.
When institutions assemble experts to discuss subjects upon which I have spent years of research, I do not generally find myself among the invited authorities.
When a new publication, documentary or public program revisits subjects I have studied, my work rarely appears in the discussion.
But there is something peculiar about spending a large portion of one’s life contributing to a public conversation and discovering that, for most practical purposes, the conversation can continue indefinitely without anyone noticing whether one is present.
5. The Hollywood Career That Ended on the Cutting-Room Floor
There is another small episode in my life which seems almost designed to illustrate the peculiar relationship between participation and recognition. I appeared as an extra in the 1988 remake of The Blob, starring Kevin Dillon and Shawnee Smith. The movie was filmed in part in Abbeville, Louisiana. Film matters and it has never stopped mattering to me.
Before I wrote about Louisiana Story or FDR’s Moviemaker I was an extra in a white coat with a gun in the remake of The Blob, For a young man with broad interests in film, science fiction, local culture and the wider world, it was a memorable experience. The film involved a terrifying biological threat, with a plot that ultimately connected the monstrous organism to a secret government weapons program. In other words, it was not entirely disconnected from some of the themes that have interested me throughout my life. I wore a decontamination suit. I carried an automatic weapon as part of the production. My photograph appeared in the local newspaper.
For a brief moment, I had a visible connection to a Hollywood production filmed in my hometown. Today, even the pictures of the paper in the online version are not recognizable. Only I and a very few people even remember the picture. Unfortunately, the best scene in which I appeared was cut. The original newspaper photograph was not particularly flattering, and the archival reproduction does it no favors. So now I see myself in various guises but not that one published on page 8 of the the June 28, 1988 issue of the Abbeville Meridional.
No one watching the film is likely to recognize my contribution. No one discussing the movie’s place in science-fiction history is likely to mention my name. No one tracing the history of Hollywood productions in Acadiana is likely to discover that a young man who would spend much of his life thinking about space development and biological possibilities once stood on a film set portraying a heavily armed participant in a science-fiction crisis.
It is a small thing to be an extra who got a little contract work outside the main scope of his work. Who also had a costume and weapon of some cost. who got covered in the paper. Who did a few hours of stand in work and got called up for one brief incomplete scene. It is less than the least role of an actor at union scale on a film set. I do not pretend otherwise than that is was just a little something.
But it is also a nearly perfect metaphor. I was there on a film with fairly big stars at the time. I participated in many aspects of the filming. At my zenith. I had a scene.
The scene was cut.
The movie survived.
And the world went on without the slightest awareness of what had been lost. It was nothing compared to the role of Kevin Costner that was cut from The Big Chill. But it was quite a thing for me I suppose. I have occasionally wondered whether the cutting-room floor is not the natural habitat of a considerable portion of my life’s work.
Perhaps I should have developed a professional interest in editing. But actually I have done a great deal of editing of video — just not very profitably.
6. I Tried to Write the Future. Then the Platform Disappeared.
My literary ambitions have not been confined to history. Not only to sports writing and feature stories and a column. It is all too true that unpublished and even unfinished novels litter my path through life.
I have also written science fiction, one of those novels was actually published. I should say that one of my science fiction novels and two of my other novels ere published after a fashion.
.
One of my efforts was Culkathadreil: Life and Times of the Prophet King, a work which connected Acadiana with a much larger futuristic story involving humanity and space travel.
It was an attempt to bring together several worlds that have occupied my imagination for decades. The cultural world of my Louisiana roots. The spiritual and philosophical world in which I have lived and thought. The technological world of humanity’s possible future. And the literary world in which those realities might be combined into a narrative larger than any one of them. I did not simply write the work and wait for fame to arrive. I bought advertisements in local newspapers. I promoted the project. I devoted time, money and effort to giving it an audience or readership or both.
I attempted to make the work visible in a world where the sheer volume of published material makes obscurity the normal condition of almost every writer.
The result was not a great commercial success. That alone would have been disappointing but hardly unusual. Most books do not become bestsellers. Most writers do not become wealthy. Most independently promoted literary projects never acquire the kind of audience their authors hope to reach. But my experience acquired an additional irony. The platform on which I had published the work, Kindle Vella, was itself discontinued.
I had managed not merely to produce an unsuccessful literary venture. I had attached that venture to a publishing platform which also failed to endure. There is a certain grandeur to that kind of defeat.
One might almost be tempted to admire that level of failure as exceptional. My story is a bit worse than average:
The writer struggles to find readers.
The writer pays to advertise.
The writer works to promote the story.
The writer discovers that the audience is small.
And then the platform itself disappears.
Success requires more than good work.
It requires a functioning system through which that work can reach people who value it. It requires some combination of access, credibility, timing, capital, relationships and luck. The quality of the work matters. But the quality of the work is not the only thing that matters. I have learned that lesson repeatedly.
I wish I could say that learning it had made me wealthy or even very wise.
7. The Moon Had No Water — Until It Did
Now we come to one of the more consequential disappointments of my intellectual life.
For decades I have been interested in the possibility of permanent human settlements on the Moon.
Not merely flags and footprints.
Not merely a scientific outpost occupied by a rotating handful of astronauts.
I have thought about real settlements, with substantial populations, productive economies, agricultural systems, transportation networks, local industries, civic institutions and eventually generations of people who would regard the Moon as home.
In the early 2000s, I founded the Crater Cap Colony Group.
The central concept was that lunar craters might be enclosed or capped to create substantial protected environments for human habitation and economic activity.
There were enormous technical difficulties to consider.
Atmospheric pressure.
Radiation shielding.
Thermal management.
Structural loads.
Water supply.
Energy production.
Agriculture.
Transportation.
Manufacturing.
The relationship between surface facilities and underground installations.
And the question of how a settlement could become something more than a very expensive scientific campsite.
The group was not famous.
It did not become a major aerospace corporation.
It did not attract the capital necessary to develop a lunar settlement.
But it was part of the broader conversation about how humanity might move beyond short visits to the Moon and begin to live there.
One of the most important questions involved water.
Today, discussions of lunar settlement routinely include the possibility of exploiting water ice in permanently shadowed polar regions.
Water is potentially valuable for drinking, agriculture, industrial processes, oxygen production and rocket propellant.
It can affect the entire economics of lunar development.
But there was a time when the presence of usable lunar water was much more controversial.
Some people in significant technical and institutional positions treated the Moon as essentially dry.
There were indications and hypotheses suggesting that water might exist, but the evidence, its interpretation and its practical significance remained subjects of debate.
I was among those who insisted that the possibility deserved serious consideration.
In the Crater Cap Colony discussions, the question of lunar water was not an incidental curiosity.
It was central to the architecture of settlement.
If water existed in useful quantities, the possibilities for human habitation and industrial development would be transformed.
If it did not, the economic and logistical burdens of settlement would be much greater.
I helped stimulate discussion of that question in the circles where I was active.
Then came the era of increasingly persuasive evidence.
The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite mission, LCROSS, and other missions helped establish that water was indeed present on the Moon.
The scientific picture became more sophisticated, and lunar polar resources assumed an increasingly prominent place in planning for future exploration.
The issue which had once been controversial became part of the ordinary vocabulary of lunar development.
I was delighted by the scientific progress.
I was also disappointed.
Because when the announcements came, when the media discussed the discoveries, and when institutions began treating lunar water as a serious planning consideration, nobody called me.
Nobody mentioned the Crater Cap Colony Group in the coverage I encountered.
Nobody publicly acknowledged my role in the discussions in which I had participated.
I do not claim that I discovered lunar water.
I did not.
I do not claim that LCROSS was inspired by me, or that scientists owed their findings to my arguments.
That would be an entirely different and unsupported claim.
But I had spent time and effort encouraging attention to a question which proved to be important.
I had participated in the intellectual environment in which possibilities for lunar settlement were being discussed.
And when the broader world moved in a direction I had long advocated, I remained almost entirely invisible.
This is a peculiar kind of defeat.
Your idea does not necessarily lose.
The general proposition you supported may even gain acceptance.
But you do not gain the recognition, resources or position which might allow you to participate more fully in the next stage.
In some respects, this is worse than being proved wrong.
If you are proved wrong, you can revise your ideas and move on.
If you are broadly vindicated but remain excluded from the opportunities created by that vindication, you are left wondering what the victory was worth to you.
There is a distinction between being right, being recognized as right, and being able to do something useful because you were right.
I have had more experience with the first possibility than with the latter two.
And the Moon remains there, waiting.
I have a wife I love.
We have recently returned from Italy, where we enjoyed experiences that reminded me of the extraordinary richness of the civilization we have inherited.
I have memories of remarkable people, beautiful places, demanding intellectual adventures and moments of genuine happiness.
I have a home in a region whose history has shaped my understanding of the world.
I have an education which continues to serve me, even if it has not made me wealthy.
I have some ideas which I believe deserve another look.
And I still have the desire to work.
That is not nothing.
It is not enough to make me a winner by the usual standards.
But it is not nothing.
The Question I Want to Ask You
Perhaps you have never heard of me before reading this essay.
Perhaps you know me as a relative, friend, former student, colleague, neighbor or acquaintance.
Perhaps you have read something I wrote years ago and forgotten the name of the author.
Perhaps you have no interest in lunar colonies or Martian constitutions.
Perhaps you care deeply about Louisiana’s coastal future but have never considered how the space industry might become relevant to it.
Perhaps you are an investor, entrepreneur, engineer, scholar, lawyer, journalist, filmmaker or retired professional who has wondered whether your own career has left something important unfinished.
Perhaps you have lost more often than you have won.
If so, I would like you to consider a proposition.
The world does not merely need more winners. It needs better ways of recognizing, organizing and making productive use of the people who have spent their lives competing without winning very much.
The participation trophy is much derided in comedy. when I was young such trophies were unknown. But losers are part of the record. But the record is not yet closed. Pete Sampras lost an astonishing number of points on the way to becoming a champion. Dick Trickle raced for decades without winning at NASCAR’s highest level. Saint Paul urged Christians to run to win while describing the apostles as condemned captives displayed before the world.
These and a thousand other varieties of nonwinning and lack of success have mad much of what matters in the world. But they all raise a question which I believe deserves more attention than it receives.
When the final score is not in your favor, how do you decide whether the game was worth playing?
And there is another question, one which matters more to me today than it did twenty or thirty years ago.
If you still have something to contribute, who will let you back onto the field?
I intend to keep looking for an answer.
And if you are reading this, perhaps you have some part to play in finding it.
Partial Bibliography
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Ten Scholarly Articles by Economists on New Areas of Economic Growth and Specific Issues (2020–2026)
Akpan, Joseph, et al. “Artificial Intelligence in Biofuels Production.” In Artificial Intelligence in Biofuels Production, Woodhead Series in Bioenergy, 2026. (Addresses AI scaling issues in green energy growth.)
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Chalmers, D., N. G. MacKenzie, and S. Carter. “Artificial Intelligence and Entrepreneurship: Implications for Venture Creation in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice 45, no. 5 (2021): 1028–53. (Issues: inequality and access in AI-driven growth.)
Herman, E. “Sustainable Agriculture and Its Impact on the Rural Economy.” Land 13, no. 7 (2024). (Issues: rural economic transitions in green agriculture.)
Islam et al. “A Survey on Artificial Intelligence in Cybersecurity for Smart Agriculture.” Mesopotamian Journal of Cybersecurity (2022). (Issues: security risks in ag-tech growth.)
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Ten Books and Articles on the Space Economy
NASA. “Growing the Lunar Economy.” April 2025. https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/growing-the-lunar-economy/.
NASA. “Economic Growth and National Competitiveness Impacts of the Artemis Program.” 2022.
“Placing Lunar Resources Research in the Context of Mining Feasibility Studies.” Acta Astronautica (2025). ScienceDirect.
“Space Economy Research Trends for Foresight Analysis.” Journal of Aerospace Technology and Management (2026).
“Space Resource Extraction: Overview and Issues for Congress.” Congressional Research Service Report R48144, July 2024.
“The Space Economy: A New Frontier for Economic Growth and Innovation.” ResearchGate publication, 2025.
“The Space Economy: Review of the Current Status and Future Prospects.” In Springer volume, 2024.
“Toward the LEO Economy: A Value Assessment of Commercial Space Stations.” Acta Astronautica (2024). ScienceDirect.
U.S. Geological Survey. Assessment of Lunar Resource Exploration in 2022. Circular 1507, 2023.
NASA, USGS, and Other Online Sources on Resource Assessments (Moon, Mars, Solar System)
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U.S. Geological Survey. “USGS Prospects the Future of Harvesting the Moon’s Resources.” 2023 summary.
Interlune / USGS references on helium-3 concentrations (2.4–26 ppb in regolith) and processing requirements (100,000–1,000,000 metric tons per kg).
NASA. “Lunar Resources” overview and Mars resource utilization reports (ISRU for water, minerals,
