Voyager: Exploration, Space, and the Third Great Age of Discovery
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22. Far Travelers
There are now four spacecraft headed beyond the solar system.
Pioneer 10 is moving downwind toward termination shock, roughly heading to the star Aldebaran in the constellation Taurus, and at 43,000 kilometers per hour (relative to the Sun) might reach it in some two million years. Pioneer 11’s long reverse trek to Saturn has pointed it toward the closer, upwind border, cruising at 41,500 kph; it will pass, within the next six light-years, by Proxima Centauri, and some 6,500 years later it will sail within four light-years of the star Ross 248. Both spacecraft have gone silent. All contact was lost with Pioneer 11 by November 1995. Shortly after its thirtieth anniversary in 2002, Pioneer 10 blinked off. The two Pioneers now sail onward, ghost ships from Earth.7
By comparison the Voyagers are still vigorous. They crossed termination shock with their field instruments and communications intact. And they are faster. On February 17, 1998, Voyager 1 surpassed Pioneer 10 as the most distant human-made object in space. By January 1, 2008, relative to the Sun, Voyager 1 sailed at 61,600 kph and Voyager 2 at 56,000 kph. Voyager 2 was slower because its peculiar targeting at Neptune had turned the magic of gravity assistance against it and cost it velocity—that was the price of Triton. At that date, Pioneer 10 was 94 AU distant from Earth; Pioneer 11, 75 AU; Voyager 1, 106 AU; and Voyager 2, 85 AU. The Voyagers have become Earth’s farthest explorers.8
In all this there is a certain symmetry. The Voyagers had begun their journeys by riding enough energy to escape Earth’s gravity, and they had acquired sufficient additional energy on their travels to escape the Sun’s. But there is also a profound asymmetry. They will not return. That of course has been true for many exploring expeditions, and the ships that carried them; it was a risk every explorer took; it was part of why their sustaining societies granted them special honor. But it was never an intention of design. For the Voyagers, it was.
What has been the fate of famous vessels? In the past they returned to sea and plied the waves until they sank or were scrapped. Columbus’s Santa Maria foundered in the New World, while the Niña rejoined him for the second voyage, and later took him back yet again to Hispaniola. The Victoria, which first circumnavigated the Earth, was refitted and sent out for transport, until it eventually sank. That was the destiny of vessels generally: they were reconditioned, rechartered, and reworked. Very few had been originally designed for exploration; they had been refashioned, ice-strengthened, copper-plated, supplied with living quarters in place of cannons, fitted out with heaters and libraries for polar campaigns, given laboratories and collection cabinets; and when finished, they were reworked again further down the food chain until they sank or were sold for scrap. A few—the James Caird, lifeboat of Shackleton’s Endurance, is an example—found themselves accidentally placed into service, yet achieved such fame that they seem to have been designed for their destiny. The Caird has become a museum piece, now displayed in traveling exhibitions like a painting from the Old Masters.9
A few might find a second wind and explore further. After serving as a flagship for the U.S. Exploring Expedition, the USS Vincennes was dispatched on a second tour (the North Pacific Expedition) before running out its life cycle. The HMS Erebus and Terror, having sailed with James Ross to the Antarctic, joined John Franklin’s quest for the Northwest Passage, where they sank. The HMS Beagle was recycled into three expeditions (Darwin’s was the second), before being refitted from coastal surveying to coastal patrols against smuggling, ending in the marshlands of the River Roach.
Ships were expensive: in order to endure, they had to mine a deeper vein than their legacy to exploration alone. Who frets over the fate of the Astrolabe? The Mirnyy? The Terra Nova? The keelboat used by Lewis and Clark? La Salle’s Griffon? But where a richer cultural bond exists, the desire to preserve or re-create (and reenact) can thrive. Enthusiasts have rebuilt and voyaged in Norse longships; they have resurrected Columbus’s Santa Maria and reenacted its voyage to the New World; they have reconstructed and sailed John Cabot’s Matthew to Newfoundland; they are rebuilding the Beagle. Land vehicles could survive junking as well. Douglas Mawson’s pared-down sledge is a museum artifact at the University of Adelaide. The Discovery expedition’s hut at McMurdo Bay, Antarctica, is a protected historic site.
The HMS Endeavour began as a north-country collier, was refitted to suit Cook’s first circumnavigation, and then slid back into the obscurity of the Admiralty’s rosters. It was again refitted, this time as a store ship, and sold in 1775 for £615. Its subsequent history is murky, but the likely story is that, renamed the Lord Sandwich, it worked the Baltic trade and then was accepted into the Transport Service to carry Hessian soldiers to Rhode Island during the American Revolution. At Newport, Rhode Island, it became a prison ship and was later sunk to help blockade the harbor. In the 1960s the anchor and cannon that were lost when the Endeavour struck the Great Barrier Reef were recovered and put on display in Australia. In 1988, as part of Australia’s bicentenary, a replica was constructed using the drawings from the 1768 refit; the project was completed in 1994, and a few years later reenactors sailed the ship around the globe before it came to rest at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney.10
The HMS Endeavour was special, not only for its legacy to exploring but for its role in the national story of Australia, and it was the Australians who oversaw its partial recovery and reconstruction. The HMS Challenger had no such national narrative. The fifth Admiralty ship to be named Challenger, it was converted from a corvette in 1872, abandoned in 1880, and finally sold in 1921. It was reincarnated only in name; the seventh and eighth ships were designed for survey and research (the last sold in 1993). By then the name had been transferred to an American research vessel for deep drilling, and to a space shuttle.11
Only toward the end of the Second Age had exploration become sufficiently professional and self-conscious that it designed vessels for its own purpose, and considered saving them as museum pieces after their task was done. Perhaps the most famous is Frijthof Nansen’s Fram, which survived the frozen Arctic Ocean it was designed for and then went to Otto Sverdrup for another round, and finally to the Antarctic and back with Roald Amundsen. It then dry-rotted in storage until it was reconditioned into a museum in Oslo.
The Third Age has been different—and the same. It could beat rockets designed as swords into plowshares to launch spacecraft. But the spacecraft themselves had been custom-built for their missions, and their societies have sought to memorialize them (or their facsimiles) after they completed those missions.
All this reflects the wealth of the societies that have sponsored exploration, the difficulty of recycling spacecraft, the self-consciousness with which modern exploration builds on its legacy, and the self-interest that seeks to parlay historical continuity into political conviction. No sooner do capsules return to Earth than they head to museums. Mercury Friendship 7, Gemini IV, Apollo 11—all grace the halls of the National Air and Space Museum. In place of the lost robots, curators have substituted replicas, many constructed from the spare parts left over from the originals or the reserve craft that remained on the ground, where they functioned as working models to help resolve engineering glitches, and were then available for display rather than scrapping. So the National Air and Space Museum’s Milestones of Flight includes Explorer 1, Mariner 2, Viking, and Pioneer 10. Voyager resides within another exhibit, Exploring the Planets. Only the Stardust probe, returned to Earth from comet Wild 2, may be recycled into another mission.12
But while the Voyager simulacrum has gone into the NASM, the real Voyagers are inverting the expected relationship. Instead of fitting into an earthly museum, they are carrying a museum within them. Attached to their frame is a miniature of Earth, a distillation of the planet’s sights, sounds, and stuff. It is an odd, yet oddly apropos, act of self-reflection that once again bears witness that the Voyagers are truly mechanical doubles of their creators.
23. New Worlds, New Laws
Once beyond Earth, the Voyagers would seem to have left behind earthly concerns with law and politics; and once beyond Mars, obsessions and qualms over colonization.
After all, while the spacecraft carried plaques from Earth, they had neither the capacity nor the intention to deposit them on the new worlds they surveyed. Now, as they pushed beyond the Sun, they would seem to have shed such concerns altogether as mere metaphysical distractions. Even an abstract rule of law had to fade at termination shock.
But while the Third Age might go beyond Earth, it could not go beyond history. In the past, geographic discoveries had led not only to new ideas but also to new relations among peoples. Notions of sovereignty, of just wars, of the rights to rule over distant lands or remote others—all were upset and reformed as much as ideas in natural history, text-based scholarship, and the literature of travel. Exploration stretched, deformed, and remade inherited legal and political regimes. In particular it kept in constant turmoil two sets of governances. One sought to mediate among the explorers themselves. The other sought to mediate between the discoverers and those being discovered.
The Third Age skimmed over the latter. But it could not avoid the former. Like all ages, the Third was powered by rivalries, and its keenest political energies arose out of the cold war. It had to govern those passions so that exploration did not mutate into more lethal expressions. The revelations of the Third Age forced inherited institutions and ideas to evolve, and much as natural selection must act on what exists—turning a mammalian digit into a fin or a thumb, for example—so novel legal and political orders appeared that still bore the legacy of their hard-thought past.
From the onset of the Great Voyages, explorers had simply gone where they were sent or wished to go. They rarely sought permission from those being discovered.
When Vasco da Gama arrived at Calicut, for example, he was asked why he had come, and famously replied, “for spices and Christians.” But the question had been posed by a Muslim trader who was neither astonished nor rapt with wonder, but dismayed and angry at the arrival of an unwanted commercial competitor. The Armada may have been a grand adventure for Portugal, but it was a destabilizing presence for the peoples it contacted. It meant fighting, treaties, forts and trading factories, a reconfiguration of commerce, and a realignment of political alliances. Was this havoc warranted so that, in modern terms, the Portuguese might exercise their inalienable curiosity and right to wander? They weren’t wanted. The Indians didn’t accept as justification that they were only responding to ethnic imperatives or the call of their DNA. Their choice to explore did not affect them alone. All too often trade, especially monopoly, required force, and force segued seamlessly into empire.
No one put it more succinctly than Henry Stanley at the close of the Second Age. “We went into the heart of Africa self-invited,” he confessed, “therein lies our fault,” and conceded that Africans certainly had an “undeniable right to exclude strangers from their country.” Once having tramped into new lands, explorers might then have to fight their way out, or be rescued, or incite rivalry with another country that had also sent in exploring teams, which removed local matters into international politics. Similarly, the Institut d’Egypte’s appeal to science hardly justified Napoleon’s invasion, nor did the discovery of the Rosetta Stone warrant a forcible translation of institutions onto a society that didn’t want them. A Stanley critic from the Saturday Review summarized the situation succinctly: “a private American citizen, traveling with negro allies, at the expense of two newspapers” had precipitated the deaths of indigenes “with no sanction, no authority, no jurisdiction—nothing but explosive bullets and a copy of the Daily Telegraph—into a country where he and his black allies are intruders and natural enemies.”13
Of the justifications offered—science, proselytizing, the Enlightenment of commerce—only the cause of knowledge could persist into the Third Age. Instead of the call to missionize, advocates substituted a genetic hardwiring, and in place of empire, the need for national rejuvenation. Without indigenous peoples and without obvious sources of wealth, the classic competition sublimated into rivalries over science and status, or the paranoid desire to keep someone else from claiming something whether or not it had any value to the claimant. Instead, techno-romances brood over the possible contamination of newly discovered worlds; and the adventures of Star Trek pivot around a “prime directive” that specifically forbids interference in the affairs of discovered cultures and that prescribes protocols for contact. Apart from forcing sterilization procedures on spacecraft, these concerns have remained in the realm of fiction.
In the Third Age, as earlier, the first set of relationships, those among the exploring nations, still require regulation. There is clear value to all participants in having rules and in signing treaties that can prevent incidents from spiraling into ruinous competition or outright war.
This, too, can trace its genealogy to the Great Voyages. Between 1479 and 1494, Portugal and Spain negotiated three treaties that partitioned the discovered new worlds between them. The first divided Morocco and the Atlantic isles—Spain got the Canaries, and Portugal the rest. The most critical determinations involved the primary realm of the First Age, the ocean. The Iberians naturally wanted to rule the seas as they did isles and discovered lands; and as other nations entered the scramble, Spain and Portugal also sought to extend their monopoly over sea as well as land. In practice, however, they were unable to enforce such an edict, and the more nations that joined the contest, the more difficult it was for any one to assert unquestioned ownership.14
Instead of the right to a mare clausum, or closed sea, challengers proposed a mare liberum, or open sea. In 1609 the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius codified the arguments for a mare liberum into a book of that title, establishing a body of customs and prescriptions that evolved into a generally recognized Law of the Sea. It was not an easy sell. That the Dutch were, at the time, keen competitors demonstrated the working alliance of politics, commerce, and jurisprudence. Self-interest figured as fully as idealism. Grotius was himself equally engaged in justifying various Dutch intrusions, such as seizing everything from vessels to ports, particularly against the Portuguese and English. Nations had a right to their coastal seas out to three miles (roughly, the range of a cannonball), but the idea that the high seas should be freely open to all became an enduring legacy.
Over the centuries a corpus of international law elaborated on what constituted discovery and on what basis a nation might claim rights to discoveries. When islands and coastlines were the prime realms, first sighting was deemed sufficient until other explorers demanded a more tangible act, a landing along with a formal declaration and a monument of some kind. Trading posts and colonies escalated the requirements into “effective settlement,” and then into various concepts of “hinterlands,” seeking to establish just how far a presence might justifiably extend into the backcountry, a judgment that had to factor in the character of the land and its inhabitants (if any). These issues were still under legal definition as late as 1933, when the international court at The Hague ruled that Norway could not claim eastern Greenland, since Denmark’s two settlements on the south and west were sufficient to extend its rule over the uninhabitable ice sheet.
The Third Age required new protocols for its discovered realms. Unsurprisingly, the process began in Antarctica. In the aftermath of IGY, the nations active in Antarctica met in Washington, D.C., to establish a workable arrangement for governance.
At the time seven nations had territorial claims over the continent, three of which overlapped significantly. A large chunk of West Antarctica was unclaimed but widely recognized as the American sector, although officially American policy was to advance no formal claim and not to recognize the claims of others. During IGY, the Soviet Union carefully placed bases in each of the claimant territories. The prospect that the cold war might extend to the Ice was real. Yet IGY also demonstrated an alternative: in the name of science, it allowed for the free m
ovement of all parties across the continent. In effect, for the duration of IGY, it treated Antarctica as high seas. The Antarctic Treaty that emerged in 1959, and entered into force on June 23, 1961, sought to continue that regime.
The treaty applied to all land and ice south of sixty degrees south. Among its articles were provisions to eliminate military activity, weapons trials, and nuclear tests or waste disposal; to allow the free movement of personnel and information; and to resolve disputes through the International Court of Justice. By adding further protocols and accords, these provisions have established a system of governance. Most interesting, perhaps, is the way the treaty has finessed the question of national sovereignty. It neither recognizes such claims, nor does it insist that by signing the treaty nations are renouncing claims. The treaty can thus mean one thing to domestic audiences and another to international, a kind of legal equivalent to Bohr’s principle of complementarity. Sovereignty becomes symbolic, not operational. Modernism finds a geopolitical expression.
The deep oceans, likewise, increasingly found themselves outside a legal regime. The world sea was collecting problems as it did garbage; its concerns embraced the oft-oil-rich continental shelves as well as pollution, military traffic, nuclear waste disposal, even schemes for colonization. The more the Third Age mapped its terrain and identified its constituents, the greater the incentive for potential rivals to announce claims. The mare liberum threatened to become a submarine mare clausum. The case went to the UN in 1967, when the Malta ambassador, Arvid Pardo, warned about a cold war in the abyss, and called for a regime to govern these newly accessible but lawless regions. They should belong to no one, he insisted. They were rather the “common heritage of all mankind.”15