Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
part 1 - THE BEGINNING OF BEYOND: JOURNEY OF AN IDEA
part 2 - BEYOND THE SUNSET: JOURNEY ACROSS THE SOLAR SYSTEM
Beyond Earth
Beyond the Inner Planets
part 3 - BEYOND THE UTMOST BOND: JOURNEY TO THE STARS
Beyond Bow Shock
Beyond Narrative
Beyond Tomorrow
Afterword
Appendix
Notes
Sources
Index
ALSO BY STEPHEN J. PYNE
Voice and Vision: A Guide to Writing History and Other Serious Nonfiction (2009)
Awful Splendour: A Fire History of Canada (2007)
The Still-Burning Bush (2006)
Brittlebush Valley (2005)
Tending Fire: Coping with America’s Wildland Fires (2004)
Smokechasing (2003)
Fire: A Brief History (2001)
Year of the Fires (2001)
How the Canyon Became Grand (1998)
Vestal Fire: An Environmental History, Told Through Fire, of Europe and Europe’s Encounter with the World (1997)
America’s Fires: Management on Wildlands and Forests (1997)
World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth (1995)
Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia (1992)
Fire on the Rim (1989)
The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica (1986)
Introduction to Wildland Fire (1984, 1996)
Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (1982)
Grove Karl Gilbert (1980)
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin,
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Copyright © Stephen J. Pyne, 2010
eISBN : 978-1-101-19029-6
1. Voyager Project. 2. Astronautics—United States—History. 3. Aeronautics—United States—History. 4. Planets—Exploration. I. Title.
TL789.8.U6V5275 2010
919.9’204—dc22 2009046305
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To Sonja
a polestar, as always
and Lydia, Molly, Karlie, Ashley, Lindsey, Colten, Julie, and Ivy
a new constellation in the heavens
An age will come after many years when the Ocean will loose the chains of things, and a huge land lie revealed; when Tethys will disclose new worlds and Thule no more be the ultimate.
—Seneca, Medea (ca. AD 40)
Throw back the portals which have been closed since the world’s beginning at the dawn of time. There yet remain for you new lands, ample realms, unknown peoples; they wait yet, I say, to be discovered.
—Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations,
Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1587)
Come, my friends, ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
—Alfred Tennyson, “Ulysses” (1842)
There are no more unknown lands; the new frontiers for adventure are the ocean floors and limitless space.
—J. Tuzo Wilson, I.G.Y.: The Year of the New Moons (1961)
Mission Statement: Voyager of Discovery
On August 20 and September 5, 1977, two spacecraft, Voyager 2 and Voyager 1, respectively, lifted off atop Titan/ Centaur rockets from Cape Canaveral, Florida, to begin a Grand Tour of the outer planets. Some 33 years and 21 billion kilometers later, having surveyed Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, their moons, and the interplanetary medium, and sent back enough digital information to fill a Library of Congress, they find themselves within the diaphanous heliosheath that divides the Sun from the stars. They have sufficient power for another ten years of operation, and racing at 440 million kilometers a year, that should grant them enough stamina to sail beyond the reach of the solar gases altogether and enter the interstellar winds before they expire.
The Voyager mission culminated what many of its contemporaries have come to regard as a golden age of American planetary exploration and what the future may well identify as the grand gesture of a Third Great Age of Discovery, the most recent revival of geographic journeying and questing in a chronicle that, for Western civilization, traces back to the fifteenth century. Yet what it has done for geography, the Voyager mission also does for history: the saga of the Voyagers’ trek is carrying the inherited narrative of exploration to its outer limits, and perhaps beyond.
The countdown for the Grand Tour began twenty years earlier when, within the context of the International Geophysical Year (IGY), the Soviet Union lofted Sputnik 1 into orbit on October 4, 1957. The feat caused a sensation. Orbiting every ninety minutes, it sent out a beep that broadcast both triumph and taunt. The United States failed in its counter-launch of Vanguard 1 before succeeding with Explorer 1, on January 31, 1958. Thereafter, the two rival superpowers of the cold war began a long volley of launches that extended their geopolitical rivalry beyond the confines of scientific competition and the gravitational reach of Earth, and that, whether they intended the outcome or not, helped birth a new epoch of geographic exploration. Modern rockets had breached an ancient barrier to beyond.
From 1962 to 1978 America launched a flotilla of spacecraft—Pioneer, Mariner, Viking, and Voyager—to orbit the inner planets and survey the outer ones. In an outburst comparable to that of the sixteenth-century Portuguese marinheiros into and across the Indian Ocean or the eruption of eighteenth-century circumnavigators into the Pacific, American spacecraft would visit all the major bodies of the solar system save Pluto. But even as Voyager was wending through the asteroid belt, the institutional apparatus that launched it was collapsing. Less than a year after Voyager 1 launched, the Pioneer Venus Orbiter fired off, and then, for eleven years, no other American spacecraft trekked beyond the bonds of Earth. Throughout those years the Voyagers defined the American planetary program.
For some participants, those years bracket the acme of
American space exploration. For others, the borders of a golden age are more elastic, reaching back to Explorer 1 or even to the lonely experiments of Robert Goddard and extending onward to the recent journey of Cassini to Saturn and the brave sojourn of New Horizons to extraplanetary Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. Others scorn so American an emphasis and insist that the circle include such visionaries as Hermann Oberth and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the relentless outpouring of Soviet spacecraft, the proliferating efforts of the European Space Agency, and the satellites of Japan, India, and China, all of which expand the scope of the undertaking. For a few observers—the most visionary or fanciful—the epic begins in evolutionary mists, when marine life first crawled onto land, or when early Homo of an unquenchable curiosity acquired fire; and for such prophets, the tale can end only when humanity, perhaps genetically self-engineered beyond recognition, wanders outside the solar system altogether.1
But all seem to agree that what lifted off from launchpads at Tyuratam and Cape Canaveral was something both novel and inevitable, and that it portended a fabulous new era of discovery, a journey beyond anything humanity had known before. In the past, geopolitics had repeatedly projected rivalries internal to Europe outward onto a wider world. With the launches of Sputnik and Explorer the cold war prepared to do the same, and this time the competition would transcend Earth itself. It would reach beyond sordid politics and the blinkered ambitions of its originating time and place. Those who meditated on the launches believed they were witnessing a transit of history that would define the dimensions of human time, like the transit of a planet across the Sun that demarked the dimensions of space. They did not know what lay beyond, or how they might reach it, only that they were determined to go.
After the launch of Explorer 1 in 1958, a press conference led to one of the canonical images of the ensuing space age, as three men—Wernher von Braun, James Van Allen, and William Pickering—hefted a mock-up of Explorer 1 over their heads. That tableau made visible the competition that drove the launches, a cold war that refused to be bound by Earth and carried its geopolitical jousting into space. But there, too, in the personality of each man and the cultural ambitions he represented, were the internal rivalries, both institutional and intellectual, behind the launch. Each man stood for a competing vision of what space might represent.
Wernher von Braun was in the tableau because he had overseen the development of the rocket that launched Explorer 1, and was the most prominent advocate for space as an arena for extraterrestrial colonization. He represented a tradition that identified far journeying with human settlement; he promised, in particular, to project the American experience outward to the Moon, then to Mars, and ultimately beyond. The von Braun narrative was one in which explorers were simply the vanguard of colonizers. It built on a heritage of European expansion since the Crusades.
James Van Allen was there because he had developed the instrument package for the satellite, and he became a public voice for space as a new laboratory for science. He stood for a tradition of systematic inquiry that had happily looked beyond Earth since the pre-Socratics, one that Galileo had refurbished and bonded to modern science with his invention of the telescope and, through that instrument, his questioning of the Ptolemaic model of the solar system. Rockets promised to take proxies of scientists—robots with instruments—beyond the limits of earthbound telescopes. The Van Allen narrative was one of an ever-searching science, always pushing against the limits of what was possible to know, an inquiry that had easily allied itself with geographic exploration.
The third man was William Pickering, then director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the institution responsible for getting rocket and satellite together and on trajectory, and he would argue that Explorer 1, as its name indicated, was a vehicle for interplanetary discovery. Its larger purpose was to continue an erstwhile legacy of exploration—one certainly outfitted with the instruments of modern science, and one that would likely lead someday to outposts staffed with humans, if not to outright colonization. But sending robotic spacecraft was in and of itself a worthy exercise in an honored tradition of exploring. Of course that sentiment was never alone sufficient to justify such costly enterprises, which had to acquire other ends as well; but ultimately America should explore because that is what America had always done and what made America what it is. The Pickering narrative was one organized around half a millennium of geographic discovery by Western civilization and its rambunctious offspring, not least the United States.
All three visions shaped the evolving American space program, although each sought to point it in a different direction. Von Braun looked to the Moon and Mars, both potential sites for settlement. Van Allen sought to place instruments beyond the obscuring atmosphere, whether in wide Earth orbit or through interplanetary space. Pickering ( JPL) wished to send spacecraft to other planetary worlds; the journey itself was a medium for the message; the enterprise was, literally, a voyage of discovery. When money was flush, all three ambitions could claim more or less what they wanted. But when money became tight, the program had to choose among them; and while some tasks could overlap—the visions were not mutually exclusive—not every project or launch could satisfy each ambition equally, and consensus could fray and unravel.
This internal competition, separate from any geopolitical rivalry, was not solely about money. It was also about meaning; it was about what the Voyagers might do, what they signified, and why we should care. Explorer 1 could hold the space clans together, for each party could project into future launches what it hoped would happen. But that was possible because Explorer 1 first raised the curtain; twenty years later it was not possible to stage from a collective script. The forced unity among contestants could no longer heft a common project. In reality, one purpose or another would tend to dominate.
Voyager chose the journey; or rather, it passed through all of the purposes, as it did regions of the solar system. It began as part of cold war saber rattling little distinguishable from geopolitics, or at least the squabbling for spheres of influence if not outright imperialism that had so shaped the history of both the United States and the USSR. But in bypassing the Moon and Mars, Voyager left that purpose behind. It then became more purely science as its Grand Tour subjected the miniature systems of the outer planets to instrumented scans, one stunning encounter after another. Still, it continued, and as it has persisted it has become more and more the expression of an earlier genre of exploration, the quest, for which the narrative itself is a purpose and product. As the Voyager twins pass outside the solar system, pushing well beyond their engineered limits, they have seemingly transcended their origins and the received story by which to explain their mission.
The Voyagers are among exploration’s purest expressions, and among both its strangest and its most revelatory. For more than five hundred years the West has relied on exploration to shape its encounter with a wider world, and to seek newer ones. That process has alloyed with adventure, curiosity and colonization, wanderlust, greed, war, pilgrimage, slavery, trade and missionizing, technological innovation, sheer animal instincts for survival, and moral imperatives, a vast historical cavalcade that has morphed and trod across, below, and beyond Earth, yet has organized itself in ways that align with the ambitions, the understandings, and the hopes of its sustaining society.
That chronicle has been neither random nor unbroken. It tacks and veers with changes in the technologies of travel and in modes of inquiry, with the opening of previously unknown lands, with the onset of fresh competitors and aspirations—in brief, with the core values and understandings of the culture that propels it. There are periods of quickening and of slackening; times when enthusiasm flames, and times when it smolders; eras when aggressive expansion seems irresistible, and eras when it appears to intellectuals as quaint, repugnant, or laughable. Twice in the past, geographic discovery as a project had been so reorganized in its fundamentals as to constitute an identifiable phase; call it a Great Age. This happened with the
Great Voyages of the Renaissance, and it happened again as the Enlightenment dispatched Corps of Discovery to resurvey the old lands and to inventory whole continents with the sharpened eyes of science. Such eras rise from the general chronicle like mountain ranges, between which lie valleys of exhaustion or indifference. Beginning with the International Geophysical Year, another such Great Age has come into definition, drawn to new domains of geographic discovery, equipped with robots and remote sensors, and outfitted with a very different cultural syndrome, what might be termed a Greater Modernism. The Voyager mission nests within this narrative, and it may serve for this latest phase as a defining gesture of what it is about.
Yet a certain uneasiness hovers over this latest phase. It’s dehumanized in sometimes unsettling ways. It has dispatched expeditions to new worlds, yes, but worlds inoculated against life, where no natives can guide and enlighten explorers, where no explorer can possibly live off the land, and where colonization is a fantasy. And perhaps most fundamentally the Voyager mission and its kind do not rely on human discoverers. The mantle of explorer rests on robots. How is this exploration? In what respects is this age continuous with and distinct from those that went before? In what ways does this new era of discovery recapitulate old ones, and in what ways does it exhibit new conceptions as well as technologies? How might its own enterprise be a novelty as spectacular as anything its journeys have unveiled? What has the era meant to the half-millennial saga of geographic exploration by Europe and its cognate civilizations? And why might that matter?
Voyager: Exploration, Space, and the Third Great Age of Discovery Page 1