Voyager: Exploration, Space, and the Third Great Age of Discovery
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King, Wheeler, Hayden, Powell—each leader’s name became shorthand for his survey, and each survey conveyed a style as much as a geographic locale. One emphasized high-caliber geology, one cartography, another natural resources, and another land reform. One advertised the Yellowstone and galvanized Congress into creating America’s first national park; another, Grand Canyon; another, Death Valley. They appealed to commercial lust, national security, and cultural pride; they enlisted art to promote where science couldn’t. Their rivalry was ferocious, not only between military and civilian, but among civilians, and often among scientists, who disputed what constituted real geology and which group made proper maps, which institution of higher learning deserved the government’s patronage and which did not, and who was a genuine scientist and who a mere celebrity. So long as the West was open and money plentiful, each survey could find popular partisans and political champions in Congress, and take to the field year after year.
But after they began to stumble over one another, after the sleaziness of the Grant administration was replaced by an emphasis on sobriety, reform, and retrenchment, and after a second, more scientific grand reconnaissance had completed its survey of the West, the exuberance for unbridled exploration waned and some consolidation was mandatory. A political brouhaha ensued, with scientists fighting as ferociously against one another as against military dominance. Each survey denounced the others as a disgrace or an outright fraud. The outcome: the establishment of the civilian U.S. Geological Survey in 1879, with Clarence King as director.
The King Survey had, in truth, proposed the better hybrid of interests, and Clarence King himself, “as Yale man, adventurer and clubman, litterateur, scientist, and exposer of the Diamond Hoax,” was the epitome of “that peculiar alliance between very big business, the socially acceptable intellectuals, and the advocates of limited reform” who finally rallied behind the chosen program. That scroll should sound familiar; such were the syntheses of personality and programs that allowed a comparable compromise to proceed a century later.18
The similarities then and now are striking—and misleading. The greatest is timing: the U.S. Geological Survey helped close out an era of frontier exploration, while NASA helped to open one.
Consolidation in 1879 purged the resulting institution of much of the conflicts that had riven the Great Surveys; it moved the enterprise from geographical survey to formal science; its charter closed a debate that had flourished for a decade. In 1958 consolidation drove external rivalries into NASA, an agency kindled into being by impulsive reactions to Sputnik, without close argument and decades of consensus. When funding shriveled, those absorbed tensions could become unbearable. In 1879 the country was able to continue demobilizing from the Civil War. In 1958 the cold war retarded a full transfer from military to civilian operations. By the 1979 centennial of the USGS—in fact, while Voyager 1 was approaching Jupiter—the system was poised to reverse that trend, and under the Reagan administration to remilitarize America’s space program. Voyager threaded through that gap as though it were a historical Strait of Magellan.
JPL had made Voyager happen. Its staff had discovered the potential for the Grand Tour, had recognized in gravity assist the propulsion to yield the necessary trajectories, had designed a durable and redundant spacecraft, had equipped the robot with the semi-autonomy required to operate at the edge of the solar system, and had granted Voyager a persona—had stamped it with a JPL style. More than anything else, JPL had simply made Voyager possible. It had argued for it, fought for it, brought it back from the dead, and ultimately willed it into being. Voyager has traveled in a JPL manner, and its trek speaks in a JPL idiom. The quirks and powers and personality of the one are those of the other.
Yet that observation can be turned around with equal force. Whatever becomes of JPL, whatever stresses tear at its peculiar institutional arrangements, whatever future missions take shape or dissolve, the Voyager saga will immortalize JPL in the history of exploration. VGR-77 is a kind of Pygmalion story in reverse: the creation, begun in very mortal flesh and then preserved in imperishable form, that will outlive its creator.
DAY 95 -124
8. Missing Mars
The cruise might have ended, as so many planetary expeditions have, at Mars. More than anywhere else, Mars had fused the culture of exploration with the culture of space, distilling and distorting each. Here the boosters sang loudest, and the scorners scoffed longest. In the Viking mission to the Red Planet that preceded it by a year, Voyager had its greatest competitor and a rival vision. If the goal of the Third Age was Mars, then Viking could well stand as the era’s grand gesture. But exploration had greater unknowns to plumb than the Red Planet.
In November and December 1977, the Voyagers slid past the orbit of Mars without a twitch. Their meeting with Mars was a nonencounter; but it was rich with significance nonetheless, for what Voyager did not do—was never intended to attempt—could be as revealing as its announced goals. In seeking newer worlds, it bypassed the world that has most mesmerized the imagination of space partisans, that best expresses their effort to control the direction of Third Age exploration, and that best boils down the motives of those who have most fervently wished to project exploration into space and those who have most doubted its value.
MOTIVES
The Voyagers were machines on a mission. In their choice of instruments and in their design, in the passions and intentions of their creators as coded in trajectories, they carried a legacy of Western exploration. In their motivations, too, there were continuities as well as disconnects.
The Great Voyages had expressed their times. They were as much a part of the Renaissance as its commercial bustle, flamboyant arts, endless warring, and renewed learning. Over and again, explorers and their sponsors repeated the same trilogy of reasons to justify expeditions. They went for gold, for God, and for glory. They went to get rich, and thus acquire power. They went to spread the Gospel, weaken religious rivals, and generally ennoble the spirit and enhance the intangibles that endowed life with meaning. They went for fame and status, to rise in their societies and to become known and to have the future look upon them as they did the demigods and heroes of the past. Geographic exploration was an amalgam of quest, crusade, and commerce, with discovery and new knowledge as a means to those ends. With remarkable tenacity these reasons, or their reembodiments, have persisted.
The sponsors and captains of the First Age made no effort to disguise their purposes. Henry the Navigator sought new Madeiras, the gold and slaves of Africa, and a further means to wage Portugal’s perpetual conflict with Morocco. Columbus’s Enterprise of the Indies was founded on a premise of gold, which is “most excellent; of gold there is formed treasure and with it whoever has it may do what he wishes in this world and come to bring souls into Paradise.” Gold was the font of all other motives: Columbus promised he would find as much of it as his monarchs would “require,” though the forecast lands of bottomless gold were always a bit “further west.” When Vasco da Gama arrived in India, he declared he had come for co-religionists and wealth. The expedition had sailed to establish trade, by force if necessary.19
In his epic retelling of that voyage, Luiz Vaz de Camões includes long passages on both fame and greed. The “giant goddess Fame” was
Hot-blooded, boasting, lying, truthful,
Who sees, as she goes, with a hundred eyes,
Bringing a thousand mouths to propagandize.
But it was gold that “conquers the strongest citadels,” that turned friends into “traitors and liars,” debauched nobles and maidens, and that could buy “even scholarship.” The blinding, mesmerizing, corrupting, all-commanding power of gold could pervert; it could also drive men to astonishing deeds. Marching with Cortés to Tenochtitlán, Bernal Diaz noted simply that they came “to serve God, and also to get rich,” for “all men alike covet gold, and the more we have the more we want,” and it was the dazzling gold of the Aztecs that kept them fighting.20
In truth, the New World would require a couple of centuries to become commercially self-sustaining; until then, its preponderance of trade goods were luxury items, plunder, and drugs, with the occasional tourist junket. Colonization was a distraction. Fantasies dissolved upon actual contact. After the glowing visions conjured by Columbus’s first voyage, for example, everyone wanted to go to Hispaniola, “a land to be desired and, seen . . . never to be left,” and after his second, no one did. Trade produced wealth; colonies siphoned it off. What Europe wanted was riches, and what it sought from its explorers were routes to get them .22
Yet the intangibles mattered, too. They all professed to serve the Cross, or the prestige of their monarch, and their own fame. The most successful had a sense of personal destiny, of themselves as ciphers for a cosmic purpose. Gomes Eannes de Zurara, chronicler of Henry the Navigator, explained that “the reason from which all others flowed” was Henry’s faith in his horoscope, which had declared he would make “great and noble conquests” and “uncover secrets previously hidden from men.” Columbus gave such sentiments a Christian baptism by which he believed himself to be God’s instrument, and the discovery of a new route to the Indies, his destiny. He had no choice but to proceed, for by doing well by himself he would do good for all Christendom. (A remarkably similar conviction kept a fever-stricken David Livingstone in his traces.) Their personal purposes were sanctioned by their assertion of a larger consummation that both compelled and justified their implacable ambition .23
Still, the sum of greed, pride, and devotion does not seem enough to kindle the fuels that amply lay about. Some other spark had to set those piles ablaze. Despite endless attempts, historians have fared no better at snaring it than Renaissance mariners did in plying the Northwest Passage. In reviewing the Great Voyages to the New World, Samuel Eliot Morison asked, “What made them do it?” Was it, he continued rhetorically, “mere adventure and glory, or lust for gold or (as they all declared) a zeal to enlarge the Kingdom of the Cross?” He could not say. “I wish I knew.” But he did identify as a common theme “restlessness,” a physical and perhaps spiritual disquiet that led the restive to wander afield and, in the right age and with the right backing, become explorers. Felipe Fernández-Armesto proposed a more formal explanation: that “European culture” of the era was peculiarly “steeped in the idealization of adventure,” that exploration was another manifestation of a “code of chivalry.” The role models for such questers were “the footloose princes who won themselves kingdoms by deeds of derring-do in popular romances of chivalry—the pulp fiction of the time—which often had a seaborne setting. The hero, down on his luck, who risks seaborne adventures to become ruler of an island realm or fief, is the central character of the Spanish versions of stories of Apollonius, Brutus of Troy, Tristram, Amadis, King Canamor, and Prince Turian, among others, all part of the array of popular fiction accessible to readers at every level of literacy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.” For some, then, glory might substitute for gold. Antonio Pigafetta ingenuously opened his account of Magellan’s voyage by listing as his reason for travel, “that it might be told that I made the voyage and saw with my eyes the things hereafter written, and that I might win a famous name with posterity.” He did.24
What happened with literature happened also with geography. Fabled places of legend—prodigious with lore, wealthy beyond avarice—kept appearing just over the horizon, and when not found there, reappeared at another horizon. Moreover, “at the margins, chivalric and hagiographical texts merged”; there was a “divinization” of old legends; the romance went to sea with sword and cross in an expectation of earthly and heavenly rewards. Such romance proved impervious to facts and deathless to actual discovery. It simply reincarnated and relocated, and where adventurers went, historians have followed.25
The Second Age secularized those motives and laundered them through the Enlightenment. A more aggressive commerce replaced simple plundering, a generalized Civilization substituted for Christendom, and glory softened into national prestige and professional reputation. The Enlightenment allowed science standing as a justification, such that new discoveries of nature could serve as the font from which all else might flow.
Consider Captain James Cook’s orders for his 1768 voyage. He is first to perform his observations for the transit of Venus, this from Tahiti, an island barely discovered before his departure. He is then to proceed southward to “make discovery” of a new “Continent” (Terra Australis), for whose existence there is “reason to imagine.” If that voyage falters, he is to search for the continent westward until he either discovers it or encounters “the Eastern side of the Land discover’d by Tasman and now called New Zeland.” Whatever he found he was to render into detailed surveys, complete with collections of flora and fauna, and records of its inhabitants, if any. If uninhabited, he should “take Possession for His Majesty by setting up Proper Marks and Inscriptions, as first discoverers.” If inhabited, he should “cultivate a Friendship and Alliance” with the indigenes and establish “Traffick.” Columbus’s Golden Chersonese has morphed into Terra Australis, and gold bullion into astronomical measurements, naturalist collections, and commerce. But the ambition for prestige has endured; and science and geopolitics have converged, as religion and geopolitics had earlier.26
The instructions written by Thomas Jefferson for Meriwether Lewis and William Clark tacked closer to Cook than to Cortés. More and more, Enlightenment learning became the public declaration of the motives behind expeditions and the means for understanding what they discovered, even if commerce followed the tracks of the explorers closely, as the Rocky Mountain fur trade did the two captains. Still, the trend was to deepen such exploits with science, and to replace individual senses of destiny with national ones. Thus America’s century of discovery ends with a sprawl of Great Surveys that managed to combine adventure, science, and geopolitics in classic fashion, as the instructions to Clarence King demonstrate: “examine all rock formations, mountain ranges, detrital plains, coal deposits, soils, minerals, ores, saline and alkaline deposits . . . collect . . . material for a topographical map of the regions traversed, . . . conduct . . . barometric and thermetric observations [and] make collections in botany and zoology with a view to a memoir on these subjects, illustrating the occurrence and distribution of plants and animals.” All this is a long way from looting gold and searching out souls to save; but it is a recognizable descendant, as Przhevalsky’s horse is from Eohippus.27
Where wealth of any kind was unlikely, fame could substitute, as before. The Antarctic offered only frost and struggle, and perhaps death, but there was also glory promised to explorer and sponsor. Ernest Shackleton’s celebrated advertisement in the London Times says it all: “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.” That was the voice of pure adventuring tied to a geographical goal, a traverse across the continent through the pole; this was General William H. Ashley’s corps of mountain men heading to the ice sheets.
But the Second Age had come to expect more. Apsley Cherry-Garrard stated it blandly and abstractly by calling explor
ation “the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion.” He urged those who have “the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore,” although not everyone would accept such endeavors as worthy. They would deny glory and disdain anything without an economic payoff. “Some will tell you that you are mad,” Cherry-Garrard wrote, “and nearly all will say, ‘What is the use?’ for we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which does not promise him a financial return within a year.” Yet even here, even if one had to sledge “nearly alone” across the proverbial frozen wastes, there could be expectations of social recognition and a contribution to the civilization of science .28
Exploration had become an entity in itself: the explorer could claim honor apart from where he practiced his craft. One of the greatest explorers of the day, and Scott’s rival to the South Pole, Roald Amundsen, did no science, but he did reveal geography and personified an ascendant Norwegian nationalism. For the larger culture exploring was, as Cherry-Garrard said of the “sledging life,” the “hardest test.” In the end it was enough that its practitioners explored their own character, and the larger civilization, its.29
The Third Age was different—and the same.
With astonishing tenacity, the classic rationales have persisted, not least because exploration has become a valued enterprise the culture is unwilling to discard. Gold takes the form not of wealth discovered but of wealth created through government-sponsored jobs, near-Earth satellites, and the scientific information that serves as the precious spices and bullion of an information economy. Glory has softened into national prestige, a hazy pride, and a devalued currency of the cold war. And God has permutated into vague yearnings for Something More—explanations for the fundamentals of existence, an atonement for lost virtues, and even, for some, contact with an Intelligence beyond the solar system. Across five centuries, while the vocabulary of exploration has changed, its syntax has remained intact.