And so it did.
In January 1957, the Soviet missile maven and ultrapersuasive space advocate Sergei Korolev (never referred to in the Soviet press by name) warned his government that America had declared its rockets to be capable of flying “higher and farther than all the rockets in the world,” and that “the USA is preparing in the nearest months a new attempt to launch an artificial Earth satellite and is willing to pay any price to achieve this priority.” His warning worked. In the spring of 1957, the Soviets began testing precursors to orbiting satellites: intercontinental ballistic missiles that could loft a two-hundred-pound payload.
On August 21, their fourth try, they succeeded. Missile and payload made it all the way from Kazakhstan to Kamchatka—some four thousand miles. TASS, the official Soviet news agency, uncharacteristically announced the event to the world:
A few days ago a super-long-range, intercontinental multistage ballistic missile was launched. . . . The flight of the missile took place at a very great, hitherto unattained, altitude. Covering an enormous distance in a short time, the missile hit the assigned region. The results obtained show that there is the possibility of launching missiles into any region of the terrestrial globe.
Strong words. Strong motives. Enough to spook any adversary into action.
Meanwhile, in mid-July the British weekly New Scientist had informed its readers about the Soviet Union’s growing primacy in the space race. It had even published the orbit of an impending Soviet satellite. But America took little notice.
In mid-September Korolev told an assembly of scientists about the imminent launches of both Soviet and American “artificial satellites of the Earth with scientific goals.” Still America took little notice.
Then came October 4.
Sputnik 1 kicked many heads out of the sand. Some people in power went, well, ballistic. Lyndon B. Johnson, at the time the Senate majority leader, warned, “Soon [the Soviets] will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses.” Others were anxious to downplay both the geopolitical implications of the satellite and the capabilities of the USSR. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles wrote that the importance of Sputnik 1 “should not be exaggerated” and rationalized America’s nonperformance thus: “Despotic societies which can command the activities and resources of all their people can often produce spectacular accomplishments. These, however, do not prove that freedom is not the best way.”
On October 5, under a page-one banner headline (and alongside coverage of a flu epidemic in New York City and the showdown in Little Rock with the segregationist Arkansas governor, Orval Faubus), the New York Times ran an article that included the following reassurances:
Military experts have said that the satellites would have no practicable military application in the foreseeable future. . . .Their real significance would be in providing scientists with important new information concerning the nature of the sun, cosmic radiation, solar radio interference and static-producing phenomena.
What? No military applications? Satellites were simply about monitoring the Sun? Behind-the-scenes strategists thought otherwise. According to the summary of an October 10 meeting between President Eisenhower and his National Security Council, the United States had “always been aware of the cold war implications of the launching of the first earth satellite.” Even America’s best allies “require assurance that we have not been surpassed scientifically and militarily by the USSR.”
Eisenhower didn’t have to worry about ordinary Americans, though. Most remained unperturbed. Or maybe the spin campaign worked its magic. In any case, plenty of ham radio operators ignored the beeps, plenty of newspapers ran their satellite articles on page three or five, and a Gallup poll found that 60 percent of people questioned in Washington and Chicago expected that the United States would make the next big splash in space.
America’s cold warriors, now fully awake to the military potential of space, understood that US postwar prestige and power had been challenged. Within a year, money to help restore them would be pumped into science education, the education of college teachers, and research useful to the military.
Back in 1947, the President’s Commission on Higher Education had proposed as a goal that a third of America’s youth should graduate from a four-year college. The National Defense Education Act of 1958 was a key, if modest, push in that direction. It provided low-interest student loans for undergraduates as well as three-year National Defense Fellowships for several thousand graduate students. Funding for the National Science Foundation tripled right after Sputnik; by 1968 it was a dozen times the pre-Sputnik appropriation. The National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 hatched a new, full-service civilian agency called the National Aeronautics and Space Administration—NASA. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, was born the same year.
All those initiatives and agencies funneled the best American students into science, math, and engineering. The government got a lot of bang for its buck; graduate students in those fields, come wartime, got draft deferments; and the concept of federal funding for education got validated.
But some kind of satellite, built by any means necessary, had to be launched ASAP. Luckily, during the closing weeks and immediate aftermath of World War II in Europe, the United States had acquired a worthy challenger to Sergei Korolev: the German engineer and physicist Wernher von Braun, former leader of the team that had developed the terrifying V-2 ballistic missile. We also acquired more than a hundred members of his team.
Instead of being put on trial at Nuremburg for war crimes, von Braun became America’s savior, the progenitor and public face of the US space program. His first high-profile task was to provide the first rocket for the first successful launch of America’s first satellite. On January 31, 1958—less than four months after Sputnik 1’s round-the-world tour—he and his rocketeers got the thirty-pound Explorer 1, plus its eighteen pounds of scientific instrumentation, into orbit.
Space Tweet #19
An object in orbit has high sideways speed so it falls to Earth at exactly the same rate that the round Earth curves below it
May 14, 2010 11:56 AM
Disposal of dead weight was a key to their success. If you want to reach orbital speeds—just over seventeen thousand miles an hour—you’d better unladen your rocket at every opportunity. Rocket motors are heavy, fuel tanks are heavy, fuel itself is heavy, and every kilogram of unnecessary mass schlepped into space wastes thousands of kilograms of fuel. The solution? The multistage rocket. When the first-stage fuel tank is spent, throw it away. Run out of fuel in the next stage; throw that away too.
Jupiter-C, the rocket that launched Explorer 1, weighed 64,000 pounds at takeoff, fully loaded. The final stage weighed 80.
Like the R-7 rocket that launched Sputnik 1, the Jupiter-C was a modified weapon. The science was a secondary, even tertiary, outgrowth of military R&D. Cold warriors wanted bigger and more lethal ballistic missiles, with nuclear warheads crammed into the nose cones.
High ground is the military’s best friend, and what ground could be higher than a satellite orbiting no more than forty-five minutes away from a possible target? Thanks to Sputnik 1 and its successors, the USSR held that high ground until 1969, when, courtesy of von Braun and colleagues, the USA’s Saturn V rocket took the Apollo 11 astronauts to the Moon.
Today, whether Americans know it or not, a new space race is under way. This time, America faces not only Russia but also China, the European Union, India, and more. Maybe this time the race will be one between fellow travelers rather than potential adversaries—more about fostering innovations in science and technology than about struggling to rule the high ground.
• • • CHAPTER SIXTEEN
2001—FACT VS. FICTION*
The long-awaited year has come and gone. There was no escape from the relentless comparisons between the spacefaring future we saw in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and the reality of our measly ea
rthbound life in the real 2001. We don’t yet have a lunar base camp, and we have not yet sent hibernating astronauts to Jupiter in outsize spaceships, but we have nonetheless come a long way in our exploration of space.
Today, the greatest challenge to human exploration of space, apart from money and other political factors, is surviving biologically hostile environments. We need to send into space an improved version of ourselves—doppelgangers who can somehow withstand the extremes of temperature, the high-energy radiation, and the meager air supply, yet still conduct a full round of scientific experiments.
Fortunately, we have already invented such things: they’re space robots. They don’t look humanoid and we don’t refer to them as “who,” but they conduct all of our interplanetary exploration. You don’t have to feed them, they don’t need life support, and they won’t get upset if you don’t bring them home. Our ensemble of space robots includes probes that are monitoring the sun, orbiting Mars, intercepting a comet’s tail, orbiting an asteroid, orbiting Saturn, and heading to Jupiter and Pluto.
Four of our early space probes were launched with enough energy and with the right trajectory to escape the solar system altogether, each one carrying encoded information about humans for the intelligent aliens who might recover the hardware.
Even though humans have not left footprints on Mars or on Jupiter’s moon Europa, our space robots at these worlds have beamed back to us compelling evidence of the presence of water. These discoveries fire our imaginations with the prospect of finding life on future missions.
We also maintain hundreds of communication satellites, as well as a dozen space-based telescopes that see the universe in different bands of light, including infrared and gamma rays. In particular, the microwave band allows us to see the edge of the observable universe, where we find evidence of the Big Bang.
And so, we may have no interplanetary colonies or other unrealized dreamscapes, but our presence in space has been growing exponentially nonetheless. In some ways, space exploration in the real 2001 strongly resembles that of Kubrick’s movie. Apart from our flock of robotic probes, we have a fleet of hardware in the sky. Just as they do in 2001 the movie, we’ve got a space station. It was assembled with parts delivered by reusable, docking space shuttles (which happened to say “NASA” on the side instead of “Pan Am”). And, as in the movie, the space station has zero-G flush toilets, with complicated instructions, and plastic pouches of unappealing astronaut food.
As far as I can tell, the only things Kubrick’s movie has that we don’t have are Johann Strauss’s “Blue Danube” waltz filling the vacuum of space, and a homicidal mainframe named HAL.
• • • CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
LAUNCHING THE RIGHT STUFF*
In 2003 the space shuttle orbiter Columbia broke into pieces over central Texas. A year later, President George W. Bush announced a long-term program of space exploration that would return humans to the Moon and thereafter send them to Mars and beyond. Over that time, and for years to come, the twin Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, wowed scientists and engineers at the rovers’ birthplace—NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)—with their skills as robotic field geologists.
The confluence of these and other events resurrects a perennial debate: with two failures out of 135 shuttle missions during the life of the manned space program, and its astronomical expense relative to robotic programs, can sending people into space be justified, or should robots do the job alone? Or, given society’s sociopolitical ailments, is space exploration something we simply cannot afford to pursue? As an astrophysicist, as an educator, and as a citizen, I’m compelled to speak my mind on these issues.
Modern societies have been sending robots into space since 1957, and people since 1961. Fact is, it’s vastly cheaper to send robots—in most cases, a fiftieth the cost of sending people. Robots don’t much care how hot or cold space gets; give them the right lubricants, and they’ll operate in a vast range of temperatures. They don’t need elaborate life-support systems either. Robots can spend long periods of time moving around and among the planets, more or less unfazed by ionizing radiation. They do not lose bone mass from prolonged exposure to weightlessness, because, of course, they are boneless. Nor do they have hygiene needs. You don’t even have to feed them. Best of all, once they’ve finished their jobs, they won’t complain if you don’t bring them home.
So if my only goal in space is to do science, and I’m thinking strictly in terms of the scientific return on my dollar, I can think of no justification for sending a person into space. I’d rather send the fifty robots.
But there’s a flip side to this argument. Unlike even the most talented modern robots, humans are endowed with the ability to make serendipitous discoveries that arise from a lifetime of experience. Until the day arrives when bioneurophysiological computer engineers can do a human-brain download on a robot, the most we can expect of the robot is to look for what it has already been programmed to find. A robot—which is, after all, a machine for embedding human expectations in hardware and software—cannot fully embrace revolutionary scientific discoveries. And those are the ones you don’t want to miss.
In the old days, people generally pictured robots as a hunk of hardware with a head, neck, torso, arms, and legs—and maybe some wheels to roll around on. They could be talked to and would talk back (sounding, of course, robotic). The standard robot looked more or less like a person. The fussbudget character C3PO, from the Star Wars movies, is a perfect example.
Even when a robot doesn’t look humanoid, its handlers might present it to the public as a quasi-living thing. Each of NASA’s twin Mars rovers, for instance, was described in JPL press packets as having “a body, brains, a ‘neck and head,’ eyes and other ‘senses,’ an arm, ‘legs,’ and antennas for ‘speaking’ and ‘listening.’ ” On February 5, 2004, according to the status reports, “Spirit woke up earlier than normal today . . . in order to prepare for its memory ‘surgery.’ ” On the 19th the rover remotely examined the rim and surrounding soil of a crater dubbed Bonneville, and “after all this work, Spirit took a break with a nap lasting slightly more than an hour.”
In spite of all this anthropomorphism, it’s pretty clear that a robot can have any shape at all: it’s simply an automated piece of machinery that accomplishes a task, either by repeating an action faster or more reliably than the average person can, or by performing an action that a person, relying solely on the five senses, would be unable to accomplish. Robots that paint cars on assembly lines don’t look much like people. The Mars rovers looked a bit like toy flatbed trucks, but they could grind a pit in the surface of a rock, mobilize a combination microscope-camera to examine the freshly exposed surface, and determine the rock’s chemical composition—just as a geologist might do in a laboratory on Earth.
It’s worth noting, by the way, that even a human geologist doesn’t go it alone. Unaided by some kind of equipment, a person cannot grind down the surface of a rock; that’s why a field geologist carries a hammer. To analyze a rock further, the geologist deploys another kind of apparatus, one that can determine its chemical composition. Therein lies a conundrum. Almost all the science likely to be done in an alien environment would be done by some piece of equipment. Field geologists on Mars would lug it around on their daily strolls across a Martian crater or outcrop, where they might take measurements of the soil, the rocks, the terrain, and the atmosphere. But if you can get a robot to haul and deploy all the same instruments, why send a field geologist to Mars at all?
One good reason is the geologist’s common sense. Each Mars rover was designed to move for about ten seconds, then stop and assess its immediate surroundings for twenty seconds, then move for another ten seconds, and so on. If the rover moved any faster, or moved without stopping, it might stumble on a rock and tip over, becoming as helpless as a Galápagos tortoise on its back. In contrast, a human explorer would just stride ahead, because people are quite good at watching out for rocks and cl
iffs.
Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the days of NASA’s manned Apollo flights to the Moon, no robot could decide which pebbles to pick up and bring home. But when the Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt, the only geologist (in fact, the only scientist) to have walked on the Moon, noticed some odd orange soil on the lunar surface, he immediately collected a sample. It turned out to be minute beads of volcanic glass. Today a robot can perform staggering chemical analyses and transmit amazingly detailed images, but it still can’t react efficiently, as Schmitt did, to a surprise. By contrast, packed inside the field geologist are the capacities to walk, run, dig, hammer, see, communicate, interpret, and invent.
Of course when something goes wrong, an on-the-spot human being becomes a robot’s best friend. Give a person a wrench, a hammer, and some duct tape, and you’d be surprised what can get fixed. After landing on Mars, did the Spirit rover just roll right off its platform and start checking out the neighborhood? No, its airbags were blocking the path. Not until twelve more days had passed did Spirit’s remote controllers manage to get all six of its wheels rolling on Martian soil. Anyone on the scene on January 3 could have just lifted the airbags out of the way and in mere seconds given Spirit a little shove.
Let’s assume, then, that we can agree on a few things: People notice the unexpected, react to unforeseen circumstances, and solve problems in ways that robots cannot. Robots are cheap to send into space but can make only a preprogrammed analysis. Cost and scientific results, however, are not the only relevant issues. There’s also the question of exploration.
Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier Page 14