All this, Voyager has gathered from history, as its instruments have collected cosmic rays from deep space. The Voyager mission amassed the pieces of this new era, miniaturized and assembled them into working machines, and dispatched them on an immense journey. Those two spacecraft look back across five centuries of looking outward. Their trek is a complex fugue of past and future, of tradition and novelty, a narrative that pushes onward to newer worlds by constantly realigning with a legacy of exploration to older ones. The Voyagers’ journey is an apt symbol for what might be considered a Third Great Age of Discovery, which is our own.
part 1
THE BEGINNING OF BEYOND: JOURNEY OF AN IDEA
I cannot rest from travel; I will drink
Life to the lees . . .
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail;
There gloom the dark, broad seas.
—Alfred Tennyson, “Ulysses”
1. Escape Velocity
A Great Age of Discovery, like the epic voyages it encompasses, requires places to visit, the means to get there, and A the will to go. For decades, after sledging over Antarctica and suffering through world wars and a global depression, exploration had sunk into a deep trough. But by the late 1950s all those errant requirements, separately evolving, had come into auspicious alignment. With Sputnik, a new era of planetary exploration achieved escape velocity.
There now existed technologies to carry instruments and people into places implacably hostile to life, and once there, to measure, map, and inventory by remote sensing. Some were mechanical devices such as rockets and submersibles; some, intellectual inventions such as maneuvers to boost spacecraft through gravitational assists. Together, machines and minds made possible forays over the ice fields of Antarctica and Greenland, across and down into the oceans’ abysses, and through the solar system, the primary geographic arenas for new discovery. And there were motives aplenty from science, ever competitive, always pushy; from communities of believers and enthusiasts, explorers and space cultists, eager to exploit a congealing alloy of interests; from cultural longings, especially traditions of adventuring and questing, however projected afar; from businesses keen to supply the products of desire, particularly when refracted through governments; military ambitions, either for defense or forward strategies to forestall moves by antagonists.
This bundle of new motives, means, and opportunities made the exploration of the solar system possible, beginning with planet Earth. By themselves, however, they could not guarantee a new great age. Left to its own momentum, scientific inquiry and technological inventiveness would have slowly opened more of Antarctica, here and there, as coastal bases appeared and sledging parties converted from dogs to Sno-Cats and Bell 212 helicopters. Instrumented vessels would have probed the continental shelves and the occasional abyssal plain. Rockets would have supplanted balloons for sampling the upper atmosphere and the fringes of interplanetary space. Geographic adventuring would have merged with extreme sports and exotic tourism. The process would likely have been slow and sporadic, not unlike the Portuguese coasting that mapped the shores of Africa in fits and starts over the course of the fifteenth century or that slowly seeped across South America during the sixteenth.
The cold war, however, whipped those long swells into the white-caps of a cultural storm. Golden ages involve concentrated outbursts, contained frenzies of discovery, typically within a single generation or two. The dynamics of the latter twentieth century offered a close paraphrase of those that powered previous outbursts such as the Iberian reconnaissance of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the Russian leap across Eurasia in the mid-seventeenth century, the British and French circumnavigations of the late eighteenth, the North American blitz from the Appalachians to the Pacific in the early nineteenth century, the three-decade scramble across Africa that commenced in the late nineteenth, and the twentieth century’s spectacular if brief heroic age in Antarctica. Now, as another fever of discovery spread, new expeditions looked to their predecessors not only for navigational aid but for models by which to define their character.
THE COLDEST WAR
In 1599 Vargas Machuca asserted the valence between geopolitics and exploration by declaring simply, “a la espada y el compas, mas y mas y mas y mas.” By the sword and compass, more and more and more and more.
Some 350 years later the cold war reconfirmed that alliance. Rockets and remote sensing owed their rapid development to military sponsorship and the perceived need to control the new high ground of near-Earth space. Submersibles plumbed the oceans to map the terrain for nuclear-armed submarines. Both kinds of vehicles, moreover, whether beyond the atmosphere or beneath the seas, required secure communications, always an incentive to investigate new media and the paths of technology. The bonding of science with a national security state, begun during World War II, stabilized amid the early cold war and was then bolstered by the political panic that followed Sputnik. The primary institutions of contemporary exploration, even those nominally civilian, as often as not had Defense Department funding or acted as civilian surrogates to the same geopolitical ends—NASA doing for the space program, for example, what it was hoped the Peace Corps might do to forestall insurgencies. The superpower rivalry played out amid gestures of cultural superiority, from counting Olympic medals to technological triumphalism in rocketry, and it played out on the coldest of terrains from Antarctic ice to deep-ocean abyss to interplanetary space.
The prime mover of exploration remained what it had historically always been: the competition not between Europe and others but among the Europeans themselves, or among their former colonies and empires. However removed from overt confrontation, however benign compared to hot-war battlefields, space launches were a form of saber rattling. Whatever they had to say about distant planets, they spoke first to and about Earth. Just as Europe’s internal competitions had pushed it into colonial conflicts, so the cold war projected Earth’s dominant rivalry into the heavens. This appeal to exploration for geopolitical ambitions had a long pedigree. The monarchy that England could not assault in Madrid it could hobble on the Spanish Main. What France failed to achieve in Alsace, it could relocate to the Atlas Mountains. What Holland could not seize in North America, it might claim in the Spice Islands. The containment of communism that the United States was unable to achieve in the Mekong Delta it might overcome on the Sea of Tranquility. If it trailed the USSR in rockets, it could best its rival in satellites and science. “Space exploration,” conceded Bruce Murray, co-founder of the Planetary Society and director of JPL during Voyager’s passage through Saturn, “burst forth amid open belligerence and armed confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union.”1
Curiosity, a passion to explore, economic spinoffs, intellectual sparks cast from the whetstone of political necessity, cultural rejuvenation, government investment as a fiscal stimulant, renewed frontiers—whatever reason could be associated with the enterprise likely would be. After World War II, American oceanographers, for example, seemingly appealed to any and every cause that might fill their coffers and advance their standing as scientists. If the U.S. Navy had technical needs, then it could meet them. If foreign policy required international “cooperation,” then that became the sustaining rationale. If assistance in “development” for emerging nations drove national interest, then that served. But in the postwar era, all these jostled under the covering umbrella of the cold war. National defense, broadly defined, was the overarching conceit, both unanswerable and sufficiently elastic to justify and disguise whatever real purpose a proponent intended.2
Yet those selfish pursuits emanated from a common culture, and it is precisely such amalgams—the sloppier and less precise, the better—that allow scattered acts of discovery and exploring expeditions to congeal into a Great Age of Discovery. The power of exploration derives from the power it shares with its sustaining society. The more deeply it can draft from that culture, the more interests it can tap, the more robust wil
l be its support and the richer its impact. Still, something has to hold those oft-disparate pieces together to reach a goal: a colossal rivalry does just that, as internal dissensions shrink in comparison with the distance to a common foe. That was the catalytic effect of the cold war. Paradoxically, while they emanated from very different societies, the two superpowers displayed vital commonalities. Both identified themselves as expansionist nations founded on an ethos of exploration. Both committed themselves to similar state-sponsored technologies and came to mirror each other in their exploring styles; even civilian institutions morphed into looking-glass versions of their military cognates.3
The core issue for those interested in transforming stunning gestures into a program of space exploration and colonization was not whether the cold war could spark a golden age—it clearly did. The issue was whether such an era could sustain itself once that catalytic competition was gone.
EXPLORATION’S NATION
What this era of discovery means—why it happened when it did, what precedents it taps, even whether it constitutes a special age at all—depends on how those framing issues are placed and to what purposes. It configures one way within the cold war; another within sagas of imperial expansion, folk wanderlust, or colonization; still others within chronicles of technological innovation and scientific inquiry. Most advocates are eager to seize whatever justifications can be mustered, gathering any and all auxiliaries under the banner of their master purpose.4
But every proponent of a space program has instinctively appealed to exploration as a cause and consequence. Whatever else planetary spacecraft do, they explore, and whatever else they might mean, they belong necessarily in that illustrious pantheon of humans and societies that have pushed beyond frontiers to reveal a wider world. Against such motives, boosters assert, there can be no appeal. Exploration is politically deserving, culturally enriching, and genetically obligatory. It just is, and it must be.
In July 1969 William Pickering, director of JPL, responded to a request from Thomas O. Paine, head of NASA, for thoughts about the future direction of agency programs. Over the previous decade, Pickering noted, “the contest with the Soviet Union” provided the “necessary incentive” for Apollo. After Apollo 11 that external stimulus no longer existed, and Pickering, perhaps surprisingly, argued against an explicit replacement such as “a scheduled goal to land men on Mars.” But how otherwise to “describe and justify the NASA purpose” remained tricky.5
He ticked through the usual roster. The advancement of scientific knowledge was “not worth $4 billion for a relatively narrow area of knowledge having no obvious relevance to everyday problems.” The spinoffs from new technologies were “not good enough.” (The public had already waited in vain for ten years for some “dramatic application of space technology” and had gotten Tang and the DustBuster.) The sense of “human adventure” was “interesting” but awkward to justify at these expenditures. National security was important, but it was hard to see how the present array of programs contributed. No single factor was, in truth, sufficient.6
Rather, the answer lay in “combining the several factors.” That required an “integrating factor,” which in Pickering’s mind should be “exploration.” Exploration could rally public sentiment. The country had always celebrated its “explorers and pioneers who tamed a continent.” Now that the entire Earth had been “thoroughly explored from pole to pole, from mountain top to ocean depth,” it fell to NASA to project that saga across the solar system. This, he concluded, was “a fitting task for the U.S.”7
Exploration was, in brief, the final frontier of justification that potentially absorbed all the others and whose claims, in some respects, seemed unanswerable. Yet the appeal the space community made to the actual history of exploration was often both banal and irrelevant. That chronicle existed in the minds of many proponents only to motivate. The worst offenders were the colonizers, who saw themselves as true cosmopolites—literally citizens of the cosmos, who were willing to tap any nationalist chauvinism that would advance their cause. In particular, they became adept at phrasing the arguments for space travel in ways that would make critics seem to question the significance of the New World and especially the success of the American experiment.
In writing a history of space travel, with the help of two associates, Wernher von Braun concluded with a panegyric:During the Renaissance, Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal established in his seaside castle of Sagres the closest precedent to what the space community is trying to accomplish in our time. He systematically collected maps, ship designs, and navigational instruments from all over the world. He attracted Portugal’s most experienced mariners. He laid out a step-by-step program aimed at the exploration of Africa’s Atlantic coast as well as the discovery of the continent’s southernmost tip, which he knew had to be circumnavigated if India were to be reached by the sea. With equal determination he pushed for the possibly shorter westbound route to the Far East. Prince Henry trained the astronauts of his time—men such as Bartolomeu Diaz, Ferdinand Magellan, and Vasco de Gama, and he created the exploratory environment that launched Christopher Columbus from neighboring Spain on his historic voyage.8
Not a word of that valedictory screed is true. This is an engineer’s history, redesigned as one might rework a faulty engine to make it run better. It is a prophet’s history, selectively culled and shaped to anticipate a premonitory future. And it is a rationalizer’s history, gliding over the character of early rocketeers—the freelance pilots of the twentieth century—who offered their services to whatever power might advance their millennial ends. It is, too, a manifesto that justifies exploration as a scouting party for colonization. Discovery nests within a narrative of Western imperialism. It does not exist within a narrative of exploration as an act and institution in its own right.
To the believers, historical distortions mattered less than the value of historical appeal. “Henry the Navigator,” von Braun continued, “would have been hard put had he been requested to justify his actions on a rational basis, or to predict the payoff or cost-effectiveness of his program of exploration. He committed an act of faith and the world became richer for it. Exploration of space is the challenge of our day. If we continue to put our faith in it and pursue it, it will reward us handsomely.” Again, not a word rings true, save the appeal to faith, that history might justify what reason could not. What matters to the prophet is motive: if old faiths could move mountains, new ones could move to Mars.9
Still, whatever else it was, the space program was at least partly exploration, and its historical position remains a triangulation between past and future. If there is a new great age of discovery aborning, it will help to know its parentage, for like all progeny, the offspring will share some traits with its forebears and show new ones. The Voyagers tapped into that heritage and took it in directions never before attempted, so much so that they displayed the ideal expression not only for a new era of exploration but also for what might be considered a new species of explorer.
2. Grand Tour
In its origins, Voyager was both a mission in search of an opportunity and an opportunity in search of a mission.
Although the means to send spacecraft beyond Earth’s gravity had become possible, and the rivalry with the USSR, rekindled by hysteria over Sputnik, made some undertaking obligatory, it was not obvious where such vehicles should go. The “new ocean” of space—a Black Sea of Darkness, as it were—beckoned powerfully, if vaguely. Beyond the Moon, an obvious first port of call, destinations depended on personalities, institutional preferences, ideas in the wind, real or anticipated moves by rivals, and that element of chance that is both randomness and opportunity.
FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON, AND BEYOND
The clamor of voices after Sputnik was furious. Whatever the gloss of science applied to Sputnik, journalists and the public saw the satellite as a surrogate for nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Congress immediately commenced inquiri
es to restore American prestige, principally under the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which for its Texan chair, Lyndon Johnson, meant being first and biggest. The Pentagon made its own claims early and loudly, offering compelling reasons why space belonged under its aegis, particularly the near-Earth environs of orbiting satellites for weather, communication, and espionage, and of course the powerful rockets necessary to launch payloads for any purpose; each service had its own claims, and collectively the Department of Defense funded an Advanced Research Projects Agency. The Rocket and Satellite Research Panel, a scientific advisory group under the Naval Research Laboratory, issued proposals within six weeks after Sputnik. The National Academy of Sciences evolved a Space Science Board out of its International Geophysical Year panel. The President’s Science Advisory Committee staked a claim. The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) insisted that space best belonged within its bailiwick. And of course there were professional societies, commercial vendors, and citizen prophets. Each proposed programs tailored to its own purposes.10
What emerged was a consensus that the United States needed to demonstrate political will by besting the Soviet technological triumphs, that this might be achieved most blatantly by a high-visibility mission, and that however powerful the military substrate, the program ought to be ostensibly civilian. The institutional compromise, urged by a cautious President Eisenhower, was to recharter the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, originally established in 1915 to coordinate among academia, industry, and government, into a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on July 29, 1958. The technological compromise was to have the civilians adapt military rockets to nominally scientific goals. And the political compromise was to leave NASA’s founding purposes ambiguous, allowing each competing group to see in the NASA charter the realization of its own ambitions. Beyond an understood imperative to produce a publicity event equivalent to Sputnik, everyone could project onto NASA what they wished to see. The agency thus had a difficult birth that led to a troubled adolescence.
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