Voyager - Exploration, Space, And The Third Great Age Of Discovery

by Stephen J. Pyne

  But the culture at large sided with Boswell, and with Joseph Banks, the aristocratic naturalist who declared that his Grand Tour would be a voyage around the world. The romance of exploring science would sweep the moral realism of skeptics aside and would pull literature in its train.

  Once Earth had been again encompassed by the Second Age, some sought to look heavenward. The means to go wasn’t there, however, and the culture meanwhile had wandered into the labyrinths of modernism. When, after World War II, technology made such travel possible, the issue rekindled, and a new generation of boosters arose. Untethered to Earth, prophets could claim a high ground of hope and idealism, new creation stories unmarred by tragedy, though to critics they might seem like the Laputans on their Floating Island. Still, the rhetoric of the future rode upward on ever-more-powerful rockets. Satire had flourished as exploration sagged; now boosters could express their fantasies in steel and rocket fuel, not merely words; critics could muster nothing equivalent. It was a great age of science fiction and, by the time Voyager sailed, of Hollywood space Westerns and costume epics.

  Yet the critics persisted. The scoffers noted that boosters confused geographic exploration with the virtues with which it alloyed: that curiosity was not limited to travel but could be found in libraries and laboratories; that adventuring and hardihood did not demand untrodden geographies but could be found in rock climbing, NASCAR, and extreme-site science; that wanderlust could be satisfied by internal migrations from country to city and back, by tourism, by vagabond communities of retirees in RVs, by walkabouts in virtual worlds; that idealism did not demand a ridgeline below a setting sun but could be found by trying to make a better world through political reform or social activism; that synthetic cyberworlds might satisfy precisely those human urges that in the past could come only from hazardous travel, that they might sate curiosity as a candy bar could the craving for carbohydrates. The boost to economies, science, and technology that accompanied a government-sponsored space race could follow from any massive spending program, any stimulant to scientific research, and any technological investments. America as a “people of plenty” required an open society, not open lands; the economic frontiers lay with building not the space equivalent of railroads across the Far West but information highways spanning the world wide web. Skeptics such as Amitai Etzioni dismissed the hype of the Apollo program as a “moon-doggle” and systematically demonstrated how it was a “monumental misdecision” that acted as a “drag” on the larger civilization.48

  The doubting doctors remain. Space historian Roger Launius notes that, after Apollo, the NASA budget has steadied at 1 percent of the national budget, and that popular interest waxes and wanes not with launches but with Hollywood space movies. The “inescapable lesson” of Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s brisk survey of humanity’s exploration of Earth was “that exploration has been a march of folly, in which almost every step forward has been the failed outcome of an attempted leap ahead.” Explorers were often the “oddballs or eccentrics or visionaries or romancers or social climbers or social outcasts, or escapees from the restrictive and the routine, with enough distortion of vision to be able to reimagine reality.” The exploration of space he regarded as a “gigantic folly.”49

  All true, and all more or less irrelevant. The Old Man of Belém may stalk the launchpads of Canaveral and Tyuratam, but the fleets still sail.

  Yet the Third Age is different. The reason lies not in the ultimate rightness of the boosters and prophets, not because uncontaminated idealism and techno-utopianism can at last prevail, but because of the age’s peculiar geography. Amid ice, abyss, and space it is possible to shear away the moral ugliness and ultimately tragic core of exploration because there is no Other to confront, and without an Other, there is no need for a human self. Robots are not only the most practical explorers but the only ones that make sense of the age’s distinctive terrains.

  That is the tradeoff: exploration by robots of places fit only for robots. If exploration can proceed without the ethical burdens of the past, it also comes without the past’s inspiration, moral drama, and narrative tension. Voyager would undergo no mutinies. It could harm no one. It reduces criticism to that of comparative costs or relative returns on cultural investment. It can find new worlds without the horrors that have marred past discoveries. All this, however, comes at the cost of a sanitized encounter cleansed of the messiness and ambiguities and tragedies that had defined the founding discourse and its supporting story.

  No place had shown the ambition to revive and project the old age into the new more than Mars, and nowhere did the Voyagers demonstrate better both their mission’s novelty and its purity than when they bypassed Mars without a whisper. In late November 1977, Voyager 2 crossed the Martian orbit; a month later Voyager 1 repeated the transit. But both avoided Mars itself—did not even pay respects before moving on. In shunning Mars, Voyager bypassed all the agendas, and much of the inherited apparatus of boosting and scoffing, that had waxed and waned with the Great Ages of the past.

  ALWAYS-KNOWNMARS

  For the space program, Mars held many attractions. After the Moon it was the obvious common goal. For geopolitics, it was a potential sphere of influence, analogous to the hinterlands of Second Age imperialism. For space science, it offered the nearest best target to extend the package of IGY instruments beyond Earth, and it might, just might, have some form of life. For spacecraft designers, it promised to extend the range of technology and ambition incrementally. And for colonizers, it was the ideal arena for migration and the test planet for experiments in terraforming. After the Moon, more spacecraft went to Mars than anywhere else. By the time Voyager launched, America had sent eight vessels to Mars (six successfully), and the USSR thirteen (none really successful). Between them they had made nineteen attempts to Venus, one to Mercury, two to Jupiter (Pioneers), and one to Saturn.

  Moreover, Mars had far more cultural associations than any other planet. That was its glory—and its burden. What made it attractive to popular culture also made it potentially an exorbitant distraction, for it proved impossible to shear the fantasies from the facts, each of which was renewed after every encounter. So while Mars was actually smaller than Earth, its gravitational attraction, as measured by cultural interest, was far greater than the giant planets visited by Voyager. In fact, Voyager’s rival as a grand gesture was its immediate predecessor, the 1976 Viking mission to search for life on the Red Planet. For Mars partisans, Viking proposed an alternative narrative and interpretive prism. It is worth pausing, as Voyager did not, to examine how that happened and what it meant.

  For the visionaries who promoted space as the next arena of colonization, Mars had been the realm of the technological romance, the target for colonizing rockets, the founding planet. When Edgar Rice Burroughs reached beyond the landscapes of the Second Age for exotic settings, he sent Tarzan, in the person of Virginia gentleman John Carter, to Mars (which he named “Barsoom”)—morphing the classic Western The Virginian into the science fiction pulp novel. When H. G. Wells sent imperialism beyond the sublunary realm, he projected an invasion from Mars. Over and again, Mars loomed as the specter before the kindled imagination of those who looked to space for inspiration, be they rocketeers from Robert Goddard to Wernher von Braun, or visionaries from Arthur C. Clarke to Carl Sagan, or the romancers of contemporary literature from Robert Heinlein to Ray Bradbury. Mars was the bidding siren of space-voyaging history, the challenge to technology, the test case for life beyond Earth, the first port of call for the dissemination of humanity throughout the universe. Earth-orbiting space stations, lunar bases, robotic reconnaissance—all had meaning to the extent that they contributed to the settlement of Mars.

  The drumbeat began early in the postwar era. Robert Heinlein published Red Planet in 1949. Ray Bradbury wrote The Martian Chronicles in 1950. The science that such fiction demanded, however, came with Wernher von Braun’s The Mars Project, an “algorithm of spaceflight” to establish colonies,
published in 1952 (English edition in 1953). Soon afterward, Collier’s magazine ran a series of eight features on space activities. Von Braun and journalist Cornelius Ryan argued in 1954 that such a mission was technologically possible. With television emerging as the popular medium of the time, Disney Studios made the transition from print to screen by creating three animated features for T V, aired between 1955 and 1957, the last appearing two months after Sputnik. Sandwiched between the shows, von Braun and Willy Ley assembled the Collier’s series’ arguments into a summary book, The Exploration of Mars. By 1962, Marshall Space Flight Center, under the directorship of von Braun, was busy projecting a future beyond the Moon. Early Manned Planetary Roundtrip Expeditions (EMPIRE) would first send a major exploratory party to Mars. Immediately after Apollo 11, von Braun submitted detailed plans that would repeat the triumph of the Moon landing on Mars by 1982. And Arthur C. Clarke wrote a short story in which he neatly framed the exploratory impulse that had been announced with the eighteenth century’s expeditions to measure transits of Venus by imagining the sole survivor of an inaugural expedition to Mars who watches the transit of Earth across the Sun in 1984.50

  Missions followed. JPL had early established a Mars group, believing that Mars was where vision and practice would converge. Mariner 4 made the first planetary flyby of Mars in 1965. By then JPL was immersed in the elaborate Martian program centered on a new spacecraft called Voyager. When that program got scrapped, the name floated free until it was reclaimed for the Grand Tour. Then came Mariner 9, in November 1971. As the spacecraft entered Martian orbit, JPL convened a panel of tribal elders and young oracles to discourse on the subject of “Mars and the Mind of Man.” Bruce Murray, Walter Sullivan, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Carl Sagan—all save Murray were literary figures, journalists or novelists, and science popularizers. Mars could attract that kind of cultural event.51

  Unsurprisingly, it was Mars that merited for planetary exploration the first experiment in big science, as the abandoned Mars Voyager mission metamorphosed into Viking. When the two spacecraft landed in July 1976, NASA Langley convened another soiree, again at JPL, expanding the theme to encompass “Why Man Explores.” The panel’s luminaries included James Michener, Norman Cousins, Philip Morrison, Jacques Cousteau, and Ray Bradbury. Michener tidily summarized the cultural tethers to Mars: “All my life I have followed the explorations of Mars intellectually, philosophically, imaginatively. It is a planet which has special connotations. I cannot recall anyone ever having been as interested as we are in Jupiter or Saturn or Pluto. Mars has played a special role in our lives because of the literary and philosophical speculations that have centered upon it.” He concluded: “I have always known Mars.”52

  The panel veered into metaphysics, meandering poetry, and loose allusions that sought to equate exploration with curiosity. But Michener was right. Attempts to replicate the event with “Jupiter and the Mind of Man” and “Saturn and the Mind of Man” never caught fire. The literary imagination returned to where there were people, or the prospects of people, or at least the works of previous literary people to contemplate. For space philosophy, Mars was less a planet than a strange attractor, perturbing all the intellectual fields around it.

  At the time, the smart money would have bet that Viking would become the grand gesture of the age. It seemed to unite perfectly the classic motives behind exploration with a modern knot. With its dual orbiters and two landers, it was Apollo come to Mars, and instead of collecting Moon rocks, its robotic astronauts sampled soil for evidence of life. Both settled into the Martian maria (or planitia). The first was named Chryse, and the second, Utopia. “Chryse” is Greek for gold, and “Utopia” is a word invented during the Renaissance to describe an ideal if imaginary place in the distant sea. In an appropriate if eerie way the spacecraft had carried God, gold, and glory to Mars.

  The Viking mission thus fused into one expedition all the inherited parts—science, with the exotic search for life; politics and national prestige, with its landings staged to coincide with the American bicentennial; engineering and journeying encoded within its complex choreography of guiding, landing, and robotic sampling, all at the edges of technology; cultural contact, that sense of always having known Mars. Here, it seemed, was the ideal narrative for the Third Age.

  Yet it never quite took, even with Sagan shilling its story, and not solely because it failed to find life or because the country at large was in a dark, sour mood—exploration had often in the past countered such gloom. A likely explanation is that what Mars gave it also took away. If the density of cultural overlays added meaning, it equally burdened the expedition. In looking forward to the human explorers who it assumed would surely and shortly follow, Viking looked back to a past that the Third Age had to selectively discard. Though Mars could join space to those futures the past had imagined, it could not fling that past into the future by itself. Besides, the mission had a target: a suite of experiments to test for life, and these were at best inconclusive. When the experiments ended, so did the Vikings’ narrative.

  The mantle of the Third Age would require a different kind of journey in which the trek would not end—in which the journey itself contained its drama. This demanded another kind of story, one bonded to exploration and quests, not to colonization. It is the narrative of Voyager.

  Voyager could not avoid the Mars mystique altogether. In presenting the Mariner Jupiter/Saturn 1977 mission to the readership of Astronautics and Aeronautics, JPL authors framed their account with lengthy quotes from Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which had bypassed Mars for the Jovian moon Iapetus. Yet it is doubtful that even the most addled techno-romancer believed that Voyager’s journey was a prelude to settlement or the end of earthly childhood.53

  Voyager was, instead, a modernist machine loosed onto the cosmos. The Voyagers would not be blinded by gold or the mirage of fame. They would not abandon wife or child, or enslave unwary indigenes. They could not despair, could not be crippled by loneliness, could not fight for the cross or suffer for science, would not know epiphanies or endure tropical fevers. They would lay no claims, issue no proclamations of sovereignty, raise no toasts to king or republic, sign no treaties of trade or military alliance, nor send out reconnaissance parties to lay out routes for folk migration. They conducted no conversions, collected no soil samples or ore assays, erected no missions and outposts. The Voyagers confronted no Other, or even life. Instead the Voyagers would carry a tradition of exploration—one bonded to an older and brasher tradition of vision quest—into new times and to new worlds.

  For this the Voyagers had to shun Mars, as they shunned the dominant passions of Martian prophets. By the end of 1977 both spacecraft had rushed by Mars’s orbit without a blink and in so doing slid past all the fantasies and utopianism that Mars has provoked. They had left one of the founding trilogy of narratives, colonization, behind.

  Beyond the Inner Planets

  DAY 125 - 413

  9. Cruise

  Between the orbit of Mars and the asteroid belt, the Voyagers did what they did mostly through their long trek. They cruised, and cruised, and cruised. For Voyager 1 the first full-fledged encounter, at Jupiter, would not occur until nineteen months after launch, and for Voyager 2, almost twenty-three months. Between them lay the shoals of the asteroids, the first and most visible of the hazards the Voyagers had to face. Before then, however, they had to navigate through the immensity of space.

  The real hazards lay on Earth. The Voyagers did not know boredom and could not be distracted; their minders could. As programmed, the Voyagers routinely sent back information gathered about interplanetary space, and they expected only in reply JPL’s weekly radio acknowledgment. If they did not receive it, they assumed their primary receiver had failed, and switched to a backup. In early April 1978 a week passed with nary an electronic whisper from JPL, and Voyager 2, as preprogrammed, switched to its secondary receiver. Controllers, now alert to the glitch, instructed the spacecraft
to return to the primary, a command it ignored.

  Now hardware and software began a toxic scenario in which each minor failure cascaded into another potentially more fatal one. The attempt to reconnect caused a tracking loop capacitor to fail, which meant the backup receiver could not adjust to a wide range of frequencies out of which it could automatically pluck commands, but could only tune to a precisely defined one, a frequency that Voyager 2’s earthbound minders would have to search for. Identifying that required frequency is complex, because it varies with all the motions of Earth and spacecraft, along with temperature and other idiosyncrasies. A week of frantic scrambling eventually reestablished the primary receiver, but only temporarily, before a short developed that blew both the receivers’ redundant fuses. After another week of scrambling, communication reverted permanently to the backup.54

  CRUISE CONTROL

  To the uninitiated, space travel might seem no more complex than sending a billiard ball across a Euclidean void. It was only necessary to avoid collisions with large hard objects, which were few and obvious. The reality was, travel beyond Earth was jarring, quirky, and often rough, with slight margins for error.