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

by Stephen J. Pyne

  The Voyagers will approach their final rite of passage amid a void that no human could endure, a vacuum of meaning no less than of geography. It would seem that their trek must become a journey of movement without purpose and a narrative without events.

  They will continue to coast. They won’t decompose. They won’t rust. They won’t break down or wear out from use. With their motive power gone and their equipment switched off, they will no longer be even machines, but rather metallic statues or gangly headstones. They will move out of sheer inertia, slowed or quickened by the soft geography of the galaxy, the friction of interstellar gases, and the pull of distant gravitational fields. Light-years from now they may crash into a solid body, or vanish into a gaseous vortex. They may be captured by a planet or a star, or join the vast swirl of the Milky Way, another particle amid trillions. They will pass worlds unbounded, without a scan, a nod, or a message. They will simply persist, an endurance without sentience, record, or end, passing the black holes of space and the dark matter of time.

  But while this may be the Voyagers’ fate, it won’t be their story.

  The Third Age is yet young. It may yet last for another century or more.

  Like the others it has its distinctive traits and its ideal explorer. The Great Voyages had their questing mariners and indomitable conquistadors—their pilot-admirals like Columbus and Magellan, their great captains like Cortés and Coronado, and their maritime warriors like Albuquerque. The Second Age had its far-ranging naturalists and peripatetic natural philosophers with their unquenchable curiosity, their balky instruments, and their personal narratives. It could boast of La Condamine and Humboldt, Darwin and Wallace, and ended with the unyielding wills of professional explorers such as Stanley and Amundsen. The Third Age has its machines, some staffed by people, most piloted remotely or granted some slack as semiautonomous robots. It has the Trieste and the Alvin, Jason, and ABE, the Autonomous Benthic Explorer. It has Mariner 2, Viking, and Voyager.

  Among these new explorers Voyager may serve as synecdoche, as a testimony and a defining gesture. The Grand Tour offered the greatest possible traverse; it trekked farther and longer, saw more for the first time, spanned the entire geographic realm of the solar system, and climaxed a self-proclaimed golden age. Among that Earth-launched constellation of travelers Voyager offers the boldest silhouettes: it contrasts most starkly with the all-too-human explorers of the Second Age and the human-crewed capsules of Apollo, Cosmos, Skylab, and the fatally flawed space shuttle. The Third Age could proceed only with people and machines in sync, but as Voyager has demonstrated, people do not have to be in the machines. If Voyager does not perhaps offer the fullest synthesis of the age—for it did not send probes to the planets or land itself on discovered moons—if it has traded a breadth of reconnaissance for intensity of inquiry, it has coasted past the hard geography of new worlds and has cruised through the soft geography of interplanetary space as nothing else.

  And if, unlike the human hero of myth, it has not apotheosized, it has become iconic and as immortal a monument as civilization might build. It will outlast the pyramids, coliseums, and the Mona Lisa. It will outlast its rival realms, the ice sheets and the abyssal plains, which will rise and fall under the push and pull of tectonic and climatic tides. It might perhaps outlast Earth.

  Those associated with Voyager sensed from the beginning that it had a special destiny.

  The allure of the Grand Tour suggested an almost mythological birth, as though the heavens had foreordained it: it could not be denied, it had to happen. And the Voyagers were lucky. Through perils and glitches and malfunctioning parts, they survived, they defied odds and manufacturing warranties, they endured to the end. Voyager surprised, and kept surprising, and when the planetary program stalled shortly after launch, Voyager surprised everyone with its power to keep a grander vision alive. Ellis Miner noted, with almost impossible understatement, “There were more discoveries made on Voyager than I expect to ever see made on any single mission. It is probably the most successful mission ever done and likely ever to be done.” As Voyager 2 approached Neptune, Dick Laeser, mission director and later project manager, said simply, “I have no desire to do much else except to ride this thing all the way out into interstellar space.” 41

  Most participants found it difficult, in discussing Voyager, to avoid both the trite and the self-laudatory, and they stumbled; for them, the Voyagers’ continuing trek was the spacecrafts’ own narrative and statement. Professional pundits have tended to follow Carl Sagan’s lead and stress both the canonical power of the Voyagers’ images and the enforced vision that Earth is merely a speck in the cosmos, of scant significance, that Voyager’s power lies in its capacity to humble and to offer hope of some future redemption, perhaps with interstellar contact.

  Few believed that. They sensed, if they could not give voice to their sentiments, that there was little about Voyager that spoke of a mandatory meekness or frailty. Perhaps if viewed from the stellar Olympus of Clarke’s Overlords or the cool mathematics of Sagan’s cosmic intelligence, Earth seems trite and its inhabitants boorishly arrogant. But viewed from Earth, the Voyagers look positively Promethean, expressions of an indomitable moment when humanity returned fire to the heavens. Their power was not to humble but to inspire. Its observers recognized that Voyager’s like would not come again. Norm Haynes, project manager for the Neptune encounter, explained in terms many participants recycled, “It wasn’t an once-in-a-lifetime experience. It was a one-time experience.” It did what couldn’t be repeated. Voyager’s saga was, as Edward Stone put it, injecting new juice into an old cliché, “the journey of a lifetime.” The lifetime was humanity’s.42

  There are those for whom the quest for newer worlds must point outward, for whom it means the discovery and occupation of distant places. And there are those for whom the quest points inward, for whom it means the rediscovery of Earth, or further, a deeper discovery of the human heart. But all can look to Voyager with awe, pride, and faith that whatever we are, we will endure, and all can savor its journey as an expression of a shared longing that newer and better worlds are indeed possible, and that Earth might be among them.

  Afterword

  Voyager is not the text I set out to write. What intrigued me about the Voyager mission—apart from its sheer audacity and awe—was its long history, which is to say, a lengthy and complex narrative that I thought might braid with a general chronicle of geographic discovery by Western civilization. I hoped that I might use a stream of commentaries, drawn from the exploring past, to shepherd the story, much as Voyager’s overseers used course corrections to keep it on trajectory, such that each narrative could reinforce the other. Voyager could carry the grand narrative of Western exploration, the grand narrative of Western exploration, could propel Voyager, and their collective story could have a common tempo throughout.

  I couldn’t make it work. One or the other had to be the primary vehicle, and I chose Voyager. That left the Great Ages of Discovery as a commentator but not a co-chronicle; and without the prospects for sustained counterpoint, I opted to replace a chattering stream of recalibrating observations with fewer but larger set pieces that could highlight particular themes of relevance to both. Accordingly, I shifted the early chapters from a continuous narrative into a format more traditional and analytical. This meant a lot of text to get Voyager to launch and a big payload to carry upward. What results is an interpretive history whose internal rhythms mimic those that led to Voyager’s launch and journey.

  The Great Ages will have to wait for a full-spectrum history of their own. They enter this text as an organizing principle that allows for comparisons and contrasts, that is, for context. The conceit has itself a context, however, that may be worth explicating. I wish to acknowledge my intellectual debts for its evolution.

  The idea of parsing the grand sweep of exploration by Western civilization into eras derives from a 1974 graduate seminar on nineteenth-century America in which William Goetzman
n read a paper that argued for a “second great age of discovery.” It took no great leap of imagination to see the latter half of the twentieth century as part of a third great age. I exploited Goetzmann’s phrase, if not wholly his idea, in a paper read at an AAAS meeting in 1976 and subsequently published under the title “From the Grand Canyon to the Marianas Trench: The Earth Sciences after Darwin,” and then in my 1976 doctoral dissertation, written under Goetzmann’s general supervision, about an American geologist and explorer, later published as Grove Karl Gilbert (1980). Our separate lines of inquiry converged in 1986 with his book New Lands, New Men: America and the Second Great Age of Discovery, and my book The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica.

  Over the succeeding years I have tinkered with and refined the idea in a handful of papers read to conferences and occasionally published, used it as an organizing device for a course I taught on exploration history, and relied on it as an informing conceit for How the Canyon Became Grand (1998). It was embedded in the text I delivered on “The Future of Exploration” at the Sarton Memorial Lecture at the AAAS meeting (2002), and in “Seeking Newer Worlds,” delivered at a workshop co-sponsored by NASA and the National Air and Space Museum and later published in Critical Issues in the History of Spaceflight (2006). By then I had decided I ought to apply these ideas directly to the space program, with Voyager as my preferred vehicle. As before, the three ages get refracted through a particular subject. In the past, these were places; here, an expedition. Even Voyager, however, has only so much narrative thrust: it cannot lift the entire Third Age, and it carries it outward to space when so much of the era will explore the depths of the oceanic abyss. But it is a start.

  Several people have assisted in this project, which has too often resembled the tempo of the Voyager mission, full of frenzied activity and long voids. I would like to note particularly Julie Cooper, archivist at JPL; David Fries at NASA’s History Office; Stan Seibert, who gave up scarce discretionary time to help a mathematically challenged friend check some calculations; and Lydia Pyne, who offered comments on a draft. A special thanks goes to Wendy Wolf for defibrillating parts of texts and ideas that threatened to sink into reverie, self-absorption, or obscurantism and for reminding me that the narrative really is the message. While the text, unlike the Voyager spacecrafts, cannot carry an aluminum plaque with all their names, it carries their presence.

  All were thrusters, helping to stabilize and point. The primary propulsion has come as always from Sonja, who looks ever heavenward, yet always manages to have her feet planted squarely on Earth.

  Brittlebush Valley, August 2009

  Appendix

  CHRONOLOGY OF MAJOR LUNAR AND PLANETARY MISSIONS (LAUNCH DATES FOR SUCCESSES ONLY)

  1957

  USSR: Sputnik 1

  USSR: Sputnik 2

  1958

  USA: Explorer 1

  USA: Vanguard 1

  1959

  USA: Pioneer 4—lunar flyby

  USSR: Luna 2—lunar impact

  USSR: Luna 3—lunar flyby

  1962

  USA: Ranger 4—lunar impact

  USA: Mariner 2—Venus flyby

  1964

  USA: Mariner 4—Mars flyby

  1965

  USA: Rangers 8, 9—lunar impact

  USSR: Luna 5—lunar soft landing

  1966

  USSR: Lunas 9 and 13—lunar landers

  USSR: Lunas 10 through 12—lunar orbiters

  USA: Surveyor 1—lunar lander

  USA: Lunar Orbiter 1, 2

  1967

  USA: Lunar Orbiter 3 through 5

  USSR: Venera 4—Venus probe

  USA: Surveyors 3 through 6—lunar lander

  USA:Mariner 5—Venus flyby

  1968

  USA: Surveyor 7—lunar lander

  USSR: Luna 14—lunar orbiter

  USSR: Zonds 5 and 6—lunar orbit and return

  USA: Apollo 8—lunar orbit and return

  1969

  USSR: Venera 5 and 6—Venus probes

  USA: Mariner 6 and 7—Mars flybys

  USA: Apollo 10—lunar orbit and return

  USA: Apollo 11—lunar landing

  USSR: Zond 7—lunar flyby and return

  USA: Apollo 12—lunar landing

  1970

  USA: Apollo 13—aborted lunar landing

  USSR: Venera 7—Venus lander

  USSR: Luna 16—lunar sample return

  USSR: Zond 8—lunar flyby and return

  USSR: Luna 17/Lunokhod 1—lu nar rover

  1971

  USA: Apollos 14 and 15—lunar landings

  USSR: Mars 2 and 3—Mars orbiters and landers

  USA: Mariner 9—Mars orbiter

  USSR: Luna 19—lunar orbiter

  1972

  USSR: Luna 20—lunar sample return

  USA: Pioneer 10—Jupiter flyby

  USSR: Venera 8—Venus probe

  USA: Apollos 16 and 17—lunar landings

  1973

  USSR: Luna 21/Lunokhod 2—lunar rover

  USA: Pioneer 11—Jupiter/Saturn flyby

  USA: Skylab

  USSR: Mars 4 through 7—Mars flybys, orbiters, landers

  USA:Mariner 10—Venus and Mercury flyby

  19 74

  USSR: Luna 22—lunar orbiter

  1975

  USSR: Veneras 9 and 10—Venus orbiters and landers

  USA: Vikings 1 and 2—Mars orbiters and landers

  1977

  USA: Voyagers 1 and 2—Grand Tour

  1978

  USA: Pioneer Venuses 1 and 2—Venus orbiter and probes

  USA: ISEE-3/ICE—Comet flybys

  USSR: Veneras 11 and 12—Venus orbiters and landers

  1981

  USSR: Veneras 13 and 14—Venus orbiters and landers

  1983

  USSR: Veneras 15 and 16—Venus orbiters

  1984

  USSR: Vegas 1 and 2—Venus landers and Comet Halley flyby

  1989

  USA: Magellan—Venus orbiter

  USA: Galileo—Jupiter orbiter and probe

  USA: Hubble space telescope

  USA/ESA: Ulysses—Jupiter flyby and solar orbiter

  1994

  USA: Clementine—lunar orbiter, attempted asteroid flyby

  1996

  USA: NEAR—asteroid Eros orbiter

  USA: Mars Global Surveyor—Mars Orbiter

  USA: Mars Pathfinder—Mars lander and rover

  1997

  USA: Cassini—Saturn orbiter

  1998

  USA: Lunar Prospector—lunar orbiter

  USA: Deep Space 1—asteroid and comet flyby

  1999

  USA: Stardust—Comet Coma sample return

  Source: NASA Planetary Exploration Timeline

  STATUS OF VOYAGERS (AUGUST 2009)

  Source: JPL Voyager Weekly Operations Report http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/weekly-reports/index.htm

  THE GRAND TOUR AND ITS ENCOUNTERS

  FIGURE 1 THE GRAND TOUR

  Source: Voyager Neptune Travel Guide

  FIGURE 2 ENCOUNTER: VOYAGER 1 AT JUPITER

  Source: NASA

  FIGURE 3 ENCOUNTER: VOYAGER 2 AT JUPITER

  Source: NASA

  FIGURE 4 ENCOUNTER: VOYAGER 1 AT SATURN

  Source: NASA

  FIGURE 5 ENCOUNTER: VOYAGER 2 AT SATURN

  Source: NASA

  FIGURE 6 ENCOUNTER: VOYAGER 2 AT URANUS

  Source: NASA

  FIGURE 7 ENCOUNTER: VOYAGER 2 AT NEPTUNE

  Source: NASA

  FIGURE 8 VOYAGER INTERSTELLAR MISSION AND MAP OF THE FOUR FAR-TRAVELER SPACECRAFT LEAVING THE SOLAR SYSTEM

  Source: Voyager Neptune Travel Guide

  FIGURE 9 EXPLORING THE SOLAR SYSTEM: A SPACE-TIM E CONTINUUM

  Data source: NASA, Planetary Exploration Timeline

  THE COLDEST WAR

  FIGURE 10 COLD WAR FRONTIERS

  Source: NASA Planetary Exploration Timeline

  FIGUR
E 11 THE COLD WAR IN SPACE: A CHRONOLOGY (1957 TO 2000).

  Source: NASA Planetary Exploration Timeline

  Notes

  MISSION STATEMENT: VOYAGER OF DISCOVERY

  1 See, for example, Asif A. Siddiqi, Deep Space Chronicle: A Chronology of Deep Space and Planetary Probes 1958-2000. Monographs in Aerospace History, no. 24. NASA SP-2002-4524 (Washington, D.C.: NASA, 2002), and Brian Harvey, Russia in Space: The Failed Frontier? (Chichester, UK: Springer Praxis, 2001).

  PART 1 : THE BEGINNING OF BEYOND: JOURNEY OF AN IDEA

  CHAPTER 1. ESCAPE VELOCITY

  1 Bruce Murray, Journey into Space: The First Three Decades of Space Exploration (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), p. 15.

  2 On shifting rationales, see Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Oceanographers and the Cold War: Disciples of Marine Science (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005); the introduction is a useful summary of motives, so similar to those for space.