Voyager: Exploration, Space, and the Third Great Age of Discovery

by Stephen J. Pyne

  The pressures, both internal and external, got worse with each year. The internal pressures were many: to reengineer the Mariner spacecraft to accommodate the best features of TOPS; to create sufficient reservoirs of power and propulsion for the vehicle; to upgrade the means of communication through the Deep Space Network with its receivers in Spain, Australia, and California; to harden electronics after Pioneer 10 had its circuits fried by the gargantuan radiation around Jupiter; to create an onboard computer at a time when even simple personal computers did not exist; to absorb administrative regime changes as Bruce Murray replaced William Pickering and John Casani succeeded Bud Schurmeier; and to affix some kind of permanent message to the spacecraft beyond the plaques created for Pioneers 10 and 11. In October 1974 some 116 “concerns” remained before the Final Spacecraft System Design Review scheduled for March 1975 could determine if the spacecraft could meet launch dates.39

  The external pressures were no less daunting: the constant downsizing of a post-Apollo NASA determined to retain Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz, and the shuttle, all major tributaries to the budget drain; the cost-accounting for work done by other NASA labs and the Defense Department; the need for contractors, though overseen by JPL; the awkward siting of JPL within the NASA bureaucracy as both an agency branch and a part of Caltech; and not least, the potential crisis over a launch vehicle. Planners had assumed from the onset that it would launch with a Titan IV (of which NASA still had two); but NASA’s subservience to the shuttle had decreed that it be the agency’s primary launcher, a decision that threatened to eliminate any prospects for outer-planet exploration. Yet throughout, the hope for a resuscitated Grand Tour remained embedded in the design. As John Casani remarked, “We knew what the strategy was; we knew what we were going to do; we knew what the decision points were.”40

  In February 1976 NASA granted final approval for “Mariner Jupiter/Saturn 1977 Planetary Exploration (Outer Planets Missions).” The mission called for two spacecraft that would journey for a scientific reconnaissance of the nearest of the outer planets and their moons. Launch would occur in 1977. But the enabling authorization included two prospects for an extended mission, provided the designated goals at Jupiter and Saturn were satisfied and the spacecraft were still performing well beyond their warranty (“a miracle,” as Casani himself put it). One allowed for “retargeting” the second spacecraft to go to Uranus. The other imagined the trek of the spacecraft to the edge of the solar system, to the shores of interstellar space, the Third Age’s Sea of Darkness.41

  By month’s end NASA had accepted in principle an extended mission, first to Uranus and, ultimately, beyond the solar system. The official Voyager Project Plan allotted one spacecraft, “as long as it continues to function,” to break through the heliopause and into the interstellar medium. It allotted the other, if it, too, was still working, to “permit an encounter with Uranus,” with objectives similar to those for Jupiter and Saturn. And implied, but left unsaid, was the prospect for an encounter with Neptune.42

  Again, software—the dominance of guidance over hardwiring, the power of ideas and culture, the self-capacity to adapt—had proved critical. The will had found a way.

  As the parts assembled, the official name, Mariner Jupiter/Saturn 1977 Planetary Exploration (Outer Planets Mission), or, in shorthand, MJS 77, seemed inadequate to the reality of the spacecraft and the half-submerged ambitions of the mission. Or at least it did to John Casani, who announced a competition for a new name. He had recently come on board as project manager, thought the label lame, awkward, and overly bureaucratic, and despite the fact that a contest had recently settled on an MJS 77 logo, he reopened the issue, with a case of champagne promised to the winner. It appeared that names no less than visions might be reborn.43

  Candidates bubbled up: Nomad, Pilgrim, Pioneer, Antares, and a name that had surfaced for missions twice before but had never stuck, Voyager. It had most recently attached to the ambitious Mars mission that got scrapped before being resurrected as Viking. After a superstitious hesitation—the previous project had, after all, been canceled—a counter-consensus emerged. Voyager Mars had failed because of costs, not because it was a doomed idea, and it had spawned a marvelous replacement. “Voyager” thus seems to have careened around the bureaucracy and the imaginations of JPL designers in a kind of noumenal Grand Tour of its own. A general vote approved it. In March 1977, five months before liftoff, NASA agreed.44

  There were three spacecraft constructed. The first (VGR 77-1) was trucked to Florida in March, feeling its way over highways and through the perils of overland traffic. The others arrived on April 21 and May 19.

  There they underwent rigorous prelaunch checks. When the second (VGR 77-2) revealed fatal flaws, it was left behind as a bed for spares and as a model on which engineers could test reported glitches. It could make explicable in a lab what signals from the others might indicate were problems in space. VGR 77-3 took its place. The differences between the two launched spacecraft were minor. Voyager 2 included, for example, a slightly greater power source and several more robust sensors (and camera), since it might, just might, pivot around Saturn and go to Uranus. The Voyager triplets had become twins, and the greatest tag team in planetary discovery.

  EXPLORING POLITICS

  The Voyagers’ journey from vision to launch—through the vacuum and hazards of mind, institutions, engineering, and politics to the materialization of ideas and ambitions—was itself a daunting, extraordinary trek. It took as long to move from Flandro’s 1965 insights to the actual launch in 1977 as it took the Voyagers to travel from Florida to Neptune. Political hazards could be as fatal as radiation, and Congress as dangerous as asteroid belts. But it had always been so.

  Few private entities could afford the cost of exploring over the Ocean Sea or across new worlds, and as soon as they appealed for public support, they became subject to public control. When private companies dispatched exploring parties, they did so under the political cover of letters patent or charters, and even private persons could not evade the political context of their travels and required letters of transit or risk charges that they were spies. John Ledyard’s daffy ambition to walk from Europe to America ended in 1788 when the Russian empress Catherine had him arrested and deported. Alexander von Humboldt had to seek permission from Carlos IV in 1798 before he could tour New Spain.

  To fanatics aflame with their vision quest, the goal is so self-evident, so tantalizingly palpable, so urgent, that they can imagine any question or impediment only as crude harassment. To those less addled by such schemes, the expenditure of public money must satisfy public interest, and having foreign nationals wandering about the world can loose political conflicts that others will have to clean up. A traveler seized or killed becomes a traveler politicized, a hostage that demands rescue, a national honor besmirched and crying out for retribution, a cause célèbre. Voyager’s long, troubled gestation is more norm than exception.

  Conviction is not knowledge, resolve not rightness; and vision is only as good as the times it lives in. Five centuries before Voyager, Portugal waited ten years after the return of Bartolomeu Dias before it sent Vasco da Gama to India; yet the route was there, needing only the will to send vessels; and no other prize so dominated the imagination of the Great Voyages as the passage to India. Still, Portugal procrastinated, obsessed with more immediate crises and opportunities, not least a change in monarch and court. Exploration existed to promote Portugal, not Portugal exploration.

  Today’s partisans for the colonization of space had their counterpart in proponents for the development of the spice trade. The latter were loud, pesky, persistent, and they enjoyed an alliance of convenience with a claimant to the throne, Manuel I, who finally assumed the crown in 1495. All this makes reasonable the suggestion that da Gama’s first voyage was a political bone tossed to appease a noisy distraction while the court attended to the important affairs of state, notably its enduring tensions with Castile and endless wars with Morocco. “The
low priority given to this expedition, the appointment of a minor fidalgo to the command, and the fact that the mission carried with it so little in the way of diplomatic gifts or trade goods,” suggests Malyn Newitt, indicate it was a “minimal gesture” to “silence” a marginal cabal, while providing the young monarch with a symbolic means of maintaining what had become a nearly century-long tradition.45

  The politics could go both ways. While the obvious might lie rotting at anchor, the idiotic might set sail. Captain Thomas James found sponsors in his quest to discern a route to the South Seas through Hudson Bay. John Cleves Symmes inspired a republic skeptical of intellectuals to outfit ships to explore a “hole at the pole” that he argued was a mathematical certainty and would lead to the center of the Earth. Christopher Columbus and his brother hawked his ideas for a western voyage to the Indies—flawed, as it turns out, but lucky—for years. In the 1830s the United States could find no senior officer willing to command its great Exploring Expedition to the South Seas and around the world. It all depended on tide and time.

  To those enthralled by the Grand Tour, the politics of authorization was tedious, perverse, and needless, an encumbrance and an embarrassment, a monarch-in-waiting begging alms in the sordid corridors of Washington. But over the centuries, while politics has erred in both omission and commission, it has remained the preferred medium for discourse. Occasionally it has financed the foolish, and not infrequently it has dismissed the savvy, but whatever else exploration was or aspired to be, it could not divorce itself from the politics of court and congress and especially not from the geopolitics of competing empires. The quirky trek of Voyager through NASA bureaucracy, scientific commissions, congressional committees, partisan critics, and prophetic seers places the mission squarely within a tradition harking back to the very origins of exploration as a systematic enterprise.

  Because of politics, the expedition almost didn’t happen, and because of politics, it finally did.

  3. Great Ages of Discovery

  The Voyagers left Earth atop Titan/Centaur rockets. The Titan had two stages, to which the Centaur, with its own propulsion system, added a third. Titan put Centaur into rough orbit; then the Centaur’s rocket fired twice to bring it into cruise orbit. Finally the Voyagers’ own propulsion modules sent them on their prescribed trajectories.

  As they moved beyond the limits of Earth-orbiting satellites, the Voyagers also moved beyond the limits of earthbound exploration. Yet that past lifted them as surely as their Titan/Centaur rockets, whose stages of propellants might well stand for the three great ages of discovery of which the Voyagers were a culminating payload.

  EXPLORATION, LUMPED AND SPLIT

  Why three ages? There are those who see many more, and those who see none at all, for exploration history, too, has its lumpers and splitters.

  The lumpers view the long saga of geographic exploration by Western civilization as continuous and thematically indivisible. The Viking landers on Mars are but an iteration of the longships that colonized Greenland. The Eagle, the Command Module orbiter, and the Saturn V rocket that propelled the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon are avatars of Columbus’s Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria. The “new ocean” of interplanetary space is simply extending the bounds of the old. The ur-lumpers would go further. The origins of all exploration, including Europe’s, reside in the genetic code of humanity’s inextinguishable curiosity. Even more, space exploration, they insist, shares an evolutionary impulse. Through humanity, life will clamber out of its home planet much as pioneering species crawled out of the salty seas and onto land. The impulse to explore is providential; the chain of discovery, unbroken; the drivers behind it, as full of evolutionary inevitability as the linkage between DNA and proteins. The urge, the motivating imperative, resides indelibly within our character as Homo sapiens sapiens.46

  The splitters see it differently. Exploration pulses, expanding and contracting. Ming China launched seven dazzling voyages of discovery, and then outlawed all foreign travel and prohibited the construction of multimasted boats. Medieval Islam sponsored great travelers before shrinking into the ritual pilgrimage of the haj. The Norse spanned the Atlantic, then withered on the fjords of Greenland. Plenty of peoples have stayed where they were: they lacked the technological means, the fiery incentives and desperate insecurities, or the compelling circumstances to push themselves to explore beyond their homeland. Like Australia’s Aborigines, they were content to cycle through their ancestral Dreamtime, and felt little urgency to search beyond the daunting seas or looming peaks. A walkabout was world enough.

  To the splitters, what determines the cadences of exploration are the cultural particulars—the social conditions that prompt and sustain discovery. What is commonly called “geographic exploration” has been, in truth, a highly ethnocentric enterprise. It will thrive or shrivel as particular peoples choose. There is nothing predestined about geographic discovery, any more than there is about a Renaissance, a tradition of Gothic cathedrals, or the invention of the electric lightbulb. From such a perspective, the European era of exploration that has dominated the past five centuries is simply another in a constellation of cultural inventions that have shaped how peoples have encountered a world beyond themselves. It is an institution, and it derives much of its power because it bonds geographic travel to cultural movements, because it taps into deep rivalries, and because its narrative conveys a moral message. It can accordingly be parsed into historical eras.

  For Western civilization, these fall most easily into three grand eras. Each had its primary geographic domain, each bonded with its prevailing intellectual syndrome, each tapped a moral energy. Each had its own peculiar dynamic of geopolitical rivals and cultural enthusiasms. Each found a gesture that came to express its character. And each stage had to be rekindled. A successful launch only appears continuous in broad-brush retrospect; on closer inspection, it shows a rhythm of spark and extinction.

  GREAT VOYAGES: THE RENAISSANCE EXPLORES

  The Great Ages of Discovery opened with centuries of false dawns. Part of the difficulty is disentangling exploration from other forms of travel—from migration, walkabout, exile, wars of conquest, enslavement, trading expeditions, reconnaissance, long hunts, great treks, missionizing, pilgrimage, tourism, and just plan wanderlust. Roman merchants had contact with the Canaries and Cathay. European pilgrims trekked from Hibernia to the Holy Land. Franciscan scholars trudged to the court of the Great Khan. Each age of expansion, every expansionist people, experienced a burst of discovery about a larger world.47

  What made events of the fifteenth century special was that these exploring contacts did not end in a rapid contraction. They became welded to a revived expansion of Europe that would stretch over half a millennium; they bonded with revolutionary epochs of learning and political reform. Exploring became institutionalized. Exploration became the outward projection of internal unrest that would not let the momentum long languish.

  That Portugal pioneered the Great Voyages should alert us to the process’s uncertain origins and its often desperate character. There was little in Portuguese history from which someone might predict, in 1450, that the nation would leap across whole seas and over unknown continents, establish the world’s first global empire, and create the raw template for European expansion, whose outposts would survive until the twenty-first century. Yet that is precisely what happened. For several hundred years, exploring nations sought to emulate the Portuguese paradigm. Within a generation, it came to be said that it was the fate of a Portuguese to be born in a small country but to have the whole world to die in.

  Why Portugal led remains an exercise in historical alchemy. One can find reasons for its ingredients, but not a simple explanation for why they mixed as they did. There is a certain logic embedded in Portugal’s geographic setting. Here, at Europe’s land’s end, the two major traditions of boat construction converged, the Mediterranean with the Baltic. It was a place on the edge. Its isolation forced it to take to the sea;
its smallness compelled it to find nimble ways to outflank rivals and enemies; its precarious politics surrounded it with competitors. In particular, it waged a ceaseless dynastic war with Castile that left those two states as the drivers of European expansionism during the late Renaissance; and it fought endlessly with Morocco. Under Henry the Navigator it had discovered and colonized Atlantic isles from 1420, a cameo of what it would attempt with its passage to India. Yet if the causes seem feeble, the outcome was unmistakable. More than anyone, Portuguese sailed the Great Voyages, whether as sponsors or pilots in the service of others, and they plotted out the terms of European imperialism. Columbus learned his trade on the Portuguese circuit. Magellan sailed for Spain only after his native Portugal had rejected his scheme.

  Exploration became—directly, or indirectly through charters—an organ of the state, and because no single state dominated Europe, many joined the rush. Geographical exploration became a means of knowing, of creating commercial empires, of outmaneuvering political, economic, religious, and military competitors—it was war, diplomacy, proselytizing, scholarship, and trade by other means. For this reason, it could not cease. For every champion, there existed a handful of challengers. This competitive dynamic—embedded in a squabbling Europe’s very fabric—helps explain why European exploration did not crumble as quickly as it congealed.