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

by Stephen J. Pyne

  Each era of exploration mingled new discovery with rediscovery. The First could celebrate Madeira, previously unknown, and the Canary Islands, known to the Ancients as the Happy Isles, and even included in Ptolemy’s Geographia and Pliny’s Natural History. But before becoming a critical platform for launching the Great Voyages, the isles had to reestablish contact. Both Madeira and the Canaries were later rediscovered yet again by the voyaging naturalists of the Second Age, as the Enlightenment redefined what was interesting and important about them and how a rational nature might be understood. Joseph Hooker and Alfred Wallace saw the isles with very different eyes than those of Amerigo Vespucci and Pedro Cabral.

  That was how it went: the reexploration that blossomed into the Second Age had learned its craft in Europe, and then propagated throughout Europe’s emerging imperium, and beyond. But it had a special catalyst, and it may be well worth pausing to examine it. Much as the Voyagers coasted in orbit in order to reposition themselves properly for the final thrust of the Centaurs’ RL-10 engines, so historical narrative needs to resituate itself from time to time. The final propulsion for the Third Age came from the International Geophysical Year, which blasted the era into a trajectory the Voyagers followed across the solar system.

  Meanwhile, the two spacecraft sped past the nominal lunar orbit and so broke the bonds of imagination and political bureaucracy that had shackled the early years of space travel and that subsequently tethered NASA to an orbiting shuttle that, like a parodic Moon, only went in circles around Earth. One of the three pairs of hands that had held high the embryonic space program in that canonical photo of Explorer 1, von Braun’s, was dropping out, and with him the vision of the Voyagers as robotic scouts blazing a Martian trail for migrating pioneers.

  THE GREAT GAME

  Exploration, like war, was politics by other means. Especially when grafted to science, exploring ventures provided a cover for the more devious endeavors of the twentieth century’s version of the Great Game. Yet that had been no less true for Kipling’s Kim, who had found himself dodging Russian “geologists” in the Himalayas, as each imperial contestant sought less an understanding of mountains than the high ground of geopolitical advantage.

  The American space program began under military sponsorship, and then was laundered through participation in the overtly civilian IGY and the creation of NASA; but by the time Voyager commenced its long trek, the program was seemingly returning to something like military oversight. In 1982, while Voyager 2 flew between Saturn and Uranus, military spending on space outstripped civilian by a widening margin. If the planetary program escaped this trend directly, as the space shuttle did not, it was a segregation more apparent than real, because so many indirect costs and breakthrough technologies built upon an infrastructure erected with military monies. The Soviet space program remained squarely under military command.

  Exploration has long and often hybridized civilian and military personnel, vessels, and purposes. Most expeditions went armed, and most of those that enjoyed government sponsorship—which was the great majority of them—relied on naval vessels or army escorts and had an implicit military liaison if not an overt military purpose; overwhelmingly, expedition leaders had some military background. Not least among expeditionary goals was national security, and not least among the reasons that the peoples encountered by explorers proved so often hostile was the indigenes’ suspicion that exploration proclaimed in the service of untrammeled curiosity could segue seamlessly into spying, which might announce a future invasion of soldiers, prospectors, settlers, and officials—and often did. While colonization remained the ambition of many enthusiasts, it had lost momentum in an age of earthly decolonization. Even Star Trek has imagined its exploring adventures as a benign arm of the United Federation of Planets’ defense force, Star Fleet, while discarding imperialism and keeping its military in check with a “prime directive” that makes noninterference a standing order.

  The uneasy alliance of military and civilian has taken many forms. One is simply that exploration can be a reconnaissance in force. Since exploration in the early days had to pay for itself, exploring parties had to trade or fight, or both. The “voyages of discovery” down the coast of Africa orchestrated by Henry the Navigator, the titular inspiration for the opening age of discovery, were, as Malyn Newitt observes, “openly and explicitly a series of raids designed to obtain slaves for sale or important ‘Moors’ who might be ransomed.” When Vasco da Gama met resistance to his plans, he seized ships, bombarded cities, hanged hostages, and otherwise intimidated both potential enemies and trading partners. With sure martial instincts, Afonso de Albuquerque directed his voyages to precisely those pressure points that regulated traffic through the Indian Ocean—Aden, Hormuz, Molucca—all patrolled out of fortified naval bases such as Goa. Portugal remained in open war with Morocco and a cold war with Castile, and it is no surprise that members of military orders commanded its expeditions; its coastal fortresses were the military-industrial complex of their day. That sentiment extended even into the more scientifically ambitious surveys of the Second Age. The wide-traveling Russian explorer of central Asia Nikolai Przhevalsky openly declared himself a conquistador. “Here,” he exulted, “you can penetrate anywhere, only not with the Gospels under your arm, but with money in your pocket, a carbine in one hand and a whip in the other.” Here, “the exploits of Cortez can be repeated.”3

  Of course not everyone went with rifle and whip. Missionary priests fanned out along ancient routes of travel, established themselves even in venerable centers of learning such as China, became fluent in local languages, and reported on terrain, customs, and exotic curiosities, all done with the hand on a cross instead of a carbine. The Jesuits were founded as a missionary order, roughly the same year Coronado returned from his entrada across the American Southwest; and they targeted the new lands unveiled in the Indies. Francis Xavier preached in India and Japan and was preparing to visit China when he died; appropriately he was buried in Goa. When Charles-Marie de La Condamine readied for his descent along the Amazon, recording exact coordinates by latitude and longitude, he was handed a map of the region by Father Samuel Fritz, a Czech Jesuit who had successfully traced out its major hydrography and settlements. Jesuit fathers, at immense personal cost, recorded the contours of the Great Lakes and Mississippi River.

  The Second Age secularized these tendencies, substituting the proselytizing naturalist for the missionary friar, and found more private sponsors as old-money aristocrats and new-money industrialists occasionally funded expeditions as they might museums or universities. Some, such as John Ledyard or Thomas Nuttall, simply traveled, untethered to anything beyond their own wanderlust or obsession for plants or birds or beetles. Some accompanied private expeditions or had the wealth to sponsor themselves, such as Prince Maximilian of Wied into Brazil and later the upper Missouri. A few mounted major expeditions, of which Alexander von Humboldt’s remains the exemplar and Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition a fitting valedictory. But expeditions that could not claim an attachment to national security or quick plunder were not likely to attract much support from national treasuries or commercial sponsors. Most serious expeditions had somewhere in their chain of causation at least a nudge, if not something more substantial, of military assistance.

  The United States was no exception. It was a nation whose origins coincided almost precisely with those of the Second Age and whose national epic, an expansion westward, occurred through explorers outfitted with guns as well as sextants. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were of course army officers, and their Corps of Discovery operated under military discipline. As the country grew, especially by war, the nation turned to its military to help wrestle those unknown lands into understanding if not control. The Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, organized in 1836, oversaw much of the grand reconnaissance that mapped out the bulk of America west of the Mississippi. The Corps of Engineers geared up for more in the aftermath of the Ci
vil War, sponsoring two of the four so-called great surveys (with one under nominal civilian leadership). Moreover, in antebellum America, the United States launched fifteen major oceanic expeditions, which, however many “scientifics” they carried, were fleets under the command of naval officers.4

  But equally significant is the peace that follows conflict. The immediate effect is a surplus of equipment and officers. The vessels will be mothballed, sold, or junked, and the officers cashiered, confined to dismal barracks duties, or placed on impossibly long lists for promotion. An obvious solution is to put them all to the service of exploration. The British Admiralty after the Napoleonic Wars sponsored globe-circling surveys for several decades. As second secretary to the Admiralty John Barrows put it: “To what purpose could a portion of our naval force be, at any time, but more especially in time of profound peace, more honourably or more usefully employed than in completing those details of geographical and hydrographical science of which the grand outlines have been boldly and broadly sketched by Cook, Vancouver, and Flinders, and others of our countrymen?” The resulting outpouring scouted from the Great Lakes of Africa to the Ross Sea of Antarctica.5

  The United States had surpluses following the Civil War, some of which it redirected to western exploration. After World War II it donated a goodly portion of its otherwise dry-docked fleet to the service of earth and oceanographic sciences. Perhaps the most astonishing expression was the U.S. Navy Antarctic Developments Program, Task Force 68, otherwise known as Operations Highjump and Windmill, in 1946-48, in which the navy dispatched thirteen ships, including an aircraft carrier and a submarine, ostensibly to survey an unmapped Antarctica, but equally to test its fleet against polar conditions that replicated those they might face against the country’s Arctic rival, the USSR.6

  The fact is, exploration by itself cannot long command the political will and cultural commitment it needs unless it can rally deeper justifications than curiosity, appeals to a genetic imperative, hyperspace rhetoric, or very expensive (and often arcane) science. The relationship between civilian exploration and military reconnaissance, that is, has been symbiotic. Exploration has repeatedly been a means of beating swords into plowshares, and ICBMs into vessels of discovery. But a perceived need for national security, and a military infrastructure, has often proved a useful and necessary incentive to encourage exploration. It is a strategy the military has repeatedly recognized and even sought. Those plowshares can serve as sheathed swords.

  There was no direct military involvement with Voyager: no funds, no seconded personnel, no secret experiments. Its singularly civilian control places it within a small fraternity of major expeditions that have been wholly autonomous from the military. But there was plenty of covert context, beginning with JPL itself.

  The Jet Propulsion Laboratory that designed and oversaw Voyager could not have thrived only as a dedicated laboratory for civilian spacecraft. Its origins lay in amateur and academic enthusiasms, but it became permanent when the army endowed it as a facility for experimenting with jet propulsion and then with rockets, and its future depends on a partial rerooting in that same soil. When it transferred to NASA, funding became more episodic, which left staffing unstable and technological know-how far from cutting-edge. Repeatedly, the lab has sought outside support, almost always governmental and eventually military as the only large and relatively reliable pool of money. While defense funding never dominated the budget, it was a thumb on the scale that made the final weightings balance. JPL could assemble Voyager without military money; but beyond the Grand Tour, it could not likely survive, particularly with changes in national administrations hostile to aerospace outside Pentagon control. Military funding frames the JPL story before and after Voyager, but the plucky Voyagers slipped through unscathed, as they did the Van Allen radiation belts .7

  As it showed with IGY and NASA, and as it had done with the U.S. Geological Survey a century before, America preferred where possible to segregate its civilian from its military institutions. When scientific inventories had greater claims than absorbing new conquests, the nation gladly turned to civilian agencies. It sublimated the cold war into an International Geophysical Year and tweaked military rocketry into NASA. By such maneuvers the Third Age relocated the Great Game from the Pacific Ocean to the Sea of Tranquility, and from the Khyber Pass and the Himalayas to the Valles Marineris and Olympus Mons. Almost always there was some military money in the chain, if only covertly.

  The cold war concentrated its rivalries on Earth and its Moon, and secondarily on Venus and Mars; and by avoiding all of those bodies, Voyager seemingly escaped the implicit militarization of space. Yet it was there, its presence a perturbation in the political field, like those massive if invisible bodies that ripple through and bend gravitational fields. Voyager felt the tugs of them all. But it could bypass the ideological fixations of the inner planets, and it could escape the Sun-like attraction of the cold war. It had the pull of the Grand Tour and the push of momentum from a golden age that with an assist from Jupiter, would give it an escape velocity to take it beyond its own times.

  LOOKING BACK

  On September 18, two weeks after launch, some 11.65 million kilometers from its home planet, Voyager 1 turned its cameras back to its origins and took a photo of Earth and its Moon together. It was the first of the Voyagers’ stunning images, and it reminded observers that however far the Voyagers traveled, whatever new worlds they might discover, they always looked homeward as well and spoke ultimately to Earth. By so doing they challenged not only the bounds of our understanding and ambition, but also our sense of what exploration itself might be.

  That haunting image recalled how much Voyager shared with other exploits of its era, and how much it differed. The earliest images of Earth from space were photographic maps from weather and surveillance satellites and lunar missions. A breakthrough moment occurred with Surveyor’s first lunar orbiter. While it circled the Moon to photograph potential sites for Apollo, controllers adjusted the camera to take two shots that had the Moon as foreground and Earth behind. The images were not part of mission orders, and required tinkering with the spacecraft’s attitude to reorient the lens. The maneuver was a “calculated risk,” and when it worked, it impressed officials powerfully. This was something the public could understand. We could see ourselves from the Moon.8

  Apollo 8 repeated the Surveyor shots in color and created one of the genuinely iconic images of the space age. But a required change in attitude was not restricted to the spacecraft: the Apollo program to the Moon went nowhere, withdrawing to the virtual solipsism of the space shuttle and a near-Earth space station. The great images of Apollo had been scenes of self-reference. That majestic earthrise was one, the blue and white gem of a living planet looming over the horizon of a dead Moon and capturing precisely the closed-circuit character of the enterprise. From the beginning the point of discovering new worlds had been to improve the old one.

  Yet the Voyagers did something different, even as it remains a truism that their messages were for us and that even their gold-plated records with a greeting to some hypothetical Other beyond the solar system were in reality a dispatch to ourselves about how we wanted to be seen. Voyager widened the perspectival field. It put Earth into a planetary context, pushed beyond the range of rediscovery, and promised a reference outside our self-image, of ourselves seeking to portray ourselves as exploring. Voyager could not take pictures of itself, nor bring back images others had made of it. When it was represented for public display, the constructed field of vision typically came from behind the spacecraft as it looked toward its discoveries, not from the discovered scene looking at a spacecraft posturing as an explorer.

  That first look back was a gamble, if a benign one. It might cause an instrument failure or jam the scan platform (as a test a few months later did) in ways that could compromise the mission before Voyager even reached the edge of the Grand Tour. But perhaps the greater hazard was the potential for narcissism, that the
mission might look too far inward instead of outward. This peril also passed. What spared Voyager from preciousness and self-absorption was the sheer immensity of its geographic sweep—a trek too vast to remain within the frame of Earth and its Moon—and its existence as a robot, which shifted the focal plane of its cameras from itself.

  Voyager compelled us to move beyond ourselves—that is what great exploration has always done. If it occasionally turned around, the intent was to measure how far it had come and to shift our perceptual frames. Eventually it would move so far away that Earth could no longer be seen at all.

  DAY 29 -94

  7. Cruise

  Their journeys were chronicles of spasms and calms. The flurry of launch and the frenetic bustle of planetary encounters were mere moments amid long lulls in the effective void of space, ruffled only by gusts of solar wind, the stray meteorite, and the subtle nudges of gravity. The interplanetary seas probably consumed 98 percent of the voyage, and beyond Neptune, all of it. Magellan’s crew had found the wearying calm of the ocean they accordingly named “the pacific” to be maddening; but the weeks of Pacific tedium were nothing compared to the emptiness of interplanetary space.

  Like far-sailing ships, spacecraft had their routines, and they attended to onboard maintenance. Each Voyager took about two weeks after launch to complete its circuit of instrument tests and navigational orientations. From time to time there were midcourse corrections to realign trajectories. Voyager 1 had two during its shakedown cruise; both spacecraft continued with minor corrective burns almost monthly.