This new ocean, p.76
This New Ocean, page 76
But the shots between the space telescope faction and JOP’s supporters in 1975 were quickly stopped by headquarters. Noel Hinners, who ran NASA’s Office of Space Science, had emphatically warned JPL, which was responsible for the big Jupiter spacecraft, not to attack the telescope. Meanwhile, George Field, chairman of the space agency’s Physical Sciences Committee, Princeton’s John Bahcall, Yale astronomer Lyman Spitzer, and others who had conceived and cherished the powerful orbiting eye had asked their own colleagues not to go after planetary missions. Hinners had openly warned against “fratricide,” and it had worked. Both programs—the Hubble Space Telescope and Galileo—would lead almost unbelievably tortured lives, both before and after launch. But they would ultimately distinguish themselves.
Now there was yet another threat. The likelihood that a truly elegant mission—mankind’s first close-up look at the outer planets and their environment—would be stopped cold, damaging or wrecking careers in the process, because of the whim of some political toady in Washington clarified the collective mind of everyone in solar system exploration. Men and women whose idea of political combat ordinarily had to do with tenure and promotion cases and picking department heads reacted with rage. The majestic enterprise whose course had been set by the likes of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Cassini, Hubble, Kuiper, and scores of other giants was being imperiled by something called supply-side economics.
At the Tuscon meeting in 1980, when the threat was still only thunder on the horizon, the astronomers had sniped at Sagan for being a dreaded “popularizer” and getting rich and famous in the process because of the Emmy award–winning Cosmos television series and a companion book of the same name. Every segment of the series noted up front that it was “A Personal Voyage.” A Personal Voyage? Furthermore, the book was copyrighted by Carl Sagan Productions, which no doubt further rankled the university-press crowd. “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be,” the Cornell astronomer said in the book’s opening. “Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us—there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, or falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.”70 That might have been schmaltz to the average astronomer, but, however melodramatically, Sagan was trying to get a wide audience to come to terms with humanity’s central question: “Where do we fit into the scheme of things?” Solving that mystery, he never tired of saying, depended squarely on exploring the universe: of going out there and looking around.
A year later, in Pittsburgh, no one was barbing at Sagan because most of the scientists suddenly understood that they were about to get shoved aside. David Morrison, chairman of the Division of Planetary Sciences, sent out a letter that got right to the point: “The time has come to politicize the planetary science community.” The boffins, as scientists are derisively called in Britain, quickly learned how to lobby congressmen and grumbled about forming their own political action committee. Eugene Levy, chairman of the National Academy of Science’s Committee on Lunar and Planetary Exploration, delivered a stinging indictment of a process that allowed space science and exploration to be destroyed by the likes of economists.
The counterattack—over an annual budget of $250 million, or less than the cost of a single B-1 bomber—quickly spread. Edwin Meese, a fellow Californian and presidential adviser, was targeted for a barrage of letters. Morrison and Sagan urged him to get Reagan to answer history’s call: A thousand years from now, they carefully explained, “our age will be remembered because this is the moment we first set sail for the planets.” Meese told them he would talk to the president. Arnold Beckman, a Caltech trustee, was more pragmatic in his own letter to Meese, warning that the proposed cuts threatened “to create total chaos and a rapid disintegration of a 5,000-person, $400 million Southern California enterprise.… There are obvious implications to the support of the President and to his Party should the Administration permit such a catastrophe to take place,” Beckman declared. John Rousselot, a conservative California representative, also pelted Meese, as did Thomas Pownall, the president of Martin Marietta, who told him that the firm’s work in exploration enhanced its work in national defense. That was brilliant, since the president was always concerned about the state of the nation’s armed forces. Mary Scranton, wife of the former governor of Pennsylvania and chairwoman of a new ad hoc Trustees Committee for JPL, yanked congressional strings, as did Marvin Goldberger, the president of Caltech, who wrote to the influential Senate majority leader, Tennessee’s Howard Baker. Baker wrote to Reagan, and the letter landed on David Stockman’s desk.
The campaign worked. OMB’s Budget Review Committee met in December and agreed to add $80 million to $90 million to the planetary exploration budget. The Voyagers and the Deep Space Network were saved. And so was the Jupiter Orbiter with Probe.
Amazing Grace
Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 parted after Saturn. Voyager 1 swung out of the plane of the ecliptic and headed up, past Titan and beyond. On Valentine’s Day 1990, it would take the first “family portrait” of the solar system, or at any rate of the Sun and six of its planets, from a distance of almost 4 billion miles. Little Earth finally took its place with most of its sisters.
Meanwhile, Voyager 2, having survived asteroids, radiation, a serious loss of hearing, a stuck scan platform, and David Stockman, headed for Uranus. The spacecraft was four years old and more than a billion miles from home when it sailed through the Saturnian system. When it arrived at Uranus in late January 1986 it would be twice as old and twice as far away. That would create such formidable mechanical problems that the engineers—Earth’s Olympic archers—would have to turn it into a virtually new spacecraft. Computer hacks and astronerds, not square-jawed test pilots, would become the heroes of the longest and finest voyage of discovery in history.
* The popular term was used at least from the eighteenth century to describe an international jaunt taken by young English gentlemen (and sometimes chaperoned young ladies) in search of education and adventure. Such journeys were often considered to be an essential part of education. For example, John Bacon Sawrey Morritt, a squire from Yorkshire who was in his early twenties, wrote letters and kept diaries during a pilgrimage through Hungary, Austria, Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor at the end of the eighteenth century, which were published in 1914 as A Grand Tour: Letters and Journeys, 1794–96.
* The first were the four Army and Air Force Pioneers that had made unsuccessful attempts to reach the Moon in 1958 and 1959. Pioneer 5, with instruments built at Goddard, had managed to orbit the Sun between Earth and Venus in 1960 and sent back first-rate data. (Ezell, NASA Historical Data Book, Vol. 2, pp. 305–07.)
* These included still more Explorers (Explorer 45, a Meteor Technology Satellite, was at the moment being prepared for a July launch); the High Energy Astronomy Observatory series to collect high-quality X-ray, gamma-ray, and cosmic-ray data from the universe; the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory; the Orbiting Geophysical Observatory; the Biosatellite, or Biosat, program that collected data for the manned program; and Landsat (which was really an applications platform, not a purely scientific one). In addition, the science community participated in a number of European programs at the time, notably British, Dutch, and West German, and later with Canada, Italy, Spain, and the European Space Agency (ESA). (Ezell, NASA Historical Data Book, Vol. 3, pp. 151–201.)
* It measured the brightness and polarization of light scattered by interplanetary dust and solid matter and imaged Jupiter itself for the structure and composition of its clouds and to provide details about the amount and nature of the gases in its atmosphere. The heart of the very sensitive photopolarimeter was a photoelectric sensor, which worked on roughly the same principle as a photographic light meter and which would have become totally blinded by a direct look at the Sun.
14
The Roaring Eighties
The year 1981 marked the seventy-eighth time Earth had circled the Sun since the first heavier-than-air flight, the twenty-fourth since the first machine had taken to space, and the twentieth since a man had first gone there.
Now the space machines were everywhere. Four, bearing greetings from the place from which they came and still reporting back to it, were streaking toward encounters in unimaginable places at an incomprehensible time. Others rested silently on three other worlds, bearing mute testimony to the restless instinct of their creators. Still others, the ones that had tried to reach the Moon, Venus, or Mars but had failed, were lifeless derelicts shrouded in silver- or gold-foil thermoshields that circled the Sun in icy silence. There were hundreds of dead derelicts closer to home, too, tumbling uselessly: yesterday’s faithful robots turned into junky navigational hazards. But they were being replaced all the time. Within a mere twenty-five years of the start of the space age, machines that orbited Earth had made the transition from luxury to necessity. They had become an integral part of the life of the planet.
Way out at geosynchronous, U.S. ballistic missile early-warning satellites with frozen eyes peered continuously at Eurasia and the world’s oceans through twelve-foot telescopes, watching for a surprise attack that would be answered in kind. Their Soviet counterparts, nine flying at once in three different planes, peered at North America and Western Europe from very elliptical orbits that kept them within constant sight of American missile silos. Other satellites that faced Earth from 22,213 miles out used giant ears to eavesdrop on telephone conversations, radio signals, and missile telemetry. Still others relayed television images of Olympic sprinters and pole-vaulters as they raced and sailed over the crossbars.
Closer to home, there were civilian and military Earth huggers that relayed communication traffic and others that took pictures in a never-ending search for information, most of it secret. Still others conducted a wide range of scientific experiments, tracked shipping, helped navigation, watched the weather, measured the planet, and sniffed at radars. And some kept people high in the sky. The view from Earth orbit was still sensational physically, if not politically.
Stations and Shuttles: The People Imperative
The great enigma that continued to haunt spaceworld had to do with whether people belonged there. Those who practiced the religion, from Lucian of Samosata to Bernard Smith to Arthur C. Clarke, never doubted that they did. Yet the engineering of robots had gotten so good that by 1981, from the standpoint of practical necessity, it essentially preempted a human presence in space. The ostensible reason for killing the Manned Orbiting Laboratory in 1969, for example, had been economic. Yet if it had been the only way to “crack the Communist secrecy curtain,” as Air Force magazine bluntly put it, the money would have been found. But the robots did it better and cheaper. Starting in December 1976, a top-secret satellite called the KH-11 began sending back high-quality imagery in near real time—within minutes of the pictures being taken—and it did not need the MOL’s pricey life-support system (including a Gemini return capsule “lifeboat,” to be used like a dinghy on a yacht if the MOL foundered).
Still, there were compelling reasons for sending men and women to space, whether their presence there was physically superfluous or not. First and foremost, there was the tangle of nationalistic motives, including the creation of jobs and keeping the respective space industries healthy. Brenda Forman, a respected and outspoken Washington-based space analyst and a dreamer who was conflicted by an acute sense of reality, maintained that base politics always drove the dream. “Politics, not technology, sets the limits of what technology is allowed to achieve,” she insisted, and while that might be unpleasant to the dedicated engineer, it was “perilous” to ignore. By and large, Forman continued, Congress didn’t care about a space program’s technological or engineering content. “Instead, program funding depends directly on the strength and staying power of its supporters; i.e., its constituency.” Put another way: “Jobs über alles.” And fabulously expensive, large engineering programs that kept people in space spread jobs and profits to virtually every corner of the country.
More subtly, keeping people in space not only created heroes, but entities with whom ordinary citizens could identify. “We don’t give ticker-tape parades for robots,” as NASA Associate Administrator Franklin D. Martin aptly put it at a meeting in 1989.
Then, too, sending satellites into orbit in the 1980s was no longer exotic, as France, China, Japan, and India had demonstrated. But sending people to space was infinitely more complicated, and doing so proved in the most dramatic way that both superpowers were holding their lead by a wide margin and, by implication, were robust societies.
And there was no doubt that the pictures of Earth from space, as well as the view shared by the tiny minority that went there, started a gradual shifting of the way civilization as a whole thought about the spaceship upon which it lived and about its place on that ship and in the larger universe. This has been called the overview effect. Astronaut Rusty Schweikart, for example, said that Earth “is so small and fragile and such a precious little spot in that universe that you can block it out with your thumb, and you realize that on that small spot, that little blue and white thing, is everything that means anything to you—all of history and music and poetry and art and death and birth and love, tears, joy, games, all of it on that little spot out there you can cover with your thumb. And you realize from that perspective that you’ve changed, that there’s something new, that the relationship is no longer what it was.”
Finally, at the heart of it all, as usual, there remained the core of dreamers—“dreamy-faced loons,” as one journalistic detractor called them—who steadfastly believed that it was their race’s manifest destiny to leave Earth for both adventure and survival.6 The dreamers never for a moment believed that the Viking missions to Mars were for the abstract goal of achieving what its own scientists called “pure knowledge.” No. The dreamers thought of themselves as utilitarians. It was an article of faith that the exploration of the planet by robots was the necessary prelude to the eventual establishment of a colony. Manned space missions, including living in orbit for long periods, were therefore taken to be logical steps on the road to Mars and beyond. Certainly the dreamers in the two competing space agencies thought so. That is why they justified their stations largely by claiming that they were necessary to see how the human body would react to long flights to Mars. And there was a body of opinion, eventually to be challenged, that the human expedition to Mars would have to leave either from a space station or from the Moon.
Diamonds Are Not Forever
The Russian notion of stations in space—of people living there, as opposed to being tourists—goes back to Tsiolkovsky’s floating cities in Beyond Planet Earth. But a practical concept of orbiting stations really started in March 1962, when OKB-1 produced a report called “Complex for the Assembly of Space Vehicles in Artificial Earth Satellite Orbit (the Soyuz).” The document mostly described building a spaceship in orbit that would circle the Moon, but it also dealt with a small station put together with independently launched modules that would hold three cosmonauts who were to observe the planet beneath them from a “science package” module. Three years later, Korolyov’s bureau proposed a ninety-ton station that was to be sent up on an N-1 and that would have a docking module with ports for four Soyuz spacecraft.
OKB-1 was by then so busy gearing up for the race to the Moon, though, that the project was given to Korolyov’s rival, Vladimir Chelomei. The engineers at OKB-52 then produced plans for a true Battle Star Galactica: a single-launch station equipped with a capsule for as many as three cosmonauts, radar remote-sensing equipment and cameras for imaging Earth, two re-entry capsules for returning data to Earth, and even a cannon for defense against an attack by the Americans. The generic station was designed for launching by Chelomei’s own Proton, of course, and was named Almaz (Diamond).7 It would be the Soviet equivalent of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory; a dedicated, populated, military spacecraft. And like the MOL, it was duly canceled, at least as a cosmonaut carrier. Three unmanned versions would eventually be built with nuclear-powered synthetic aperture radars, one of which was lost when its launcher exploded, and two of which sent down respectable imagery before one of them crashed in Canada.
By February 1970, four Americans had stood on the Moon and several more were training to do so, including two who were scheduled to fly on Apollo 13 that April. Meanwhile, two N-1s had blown up and an L-1 lunar orbiter test version had turned into rubble when the third stage of the Proton that was carrying it exploded in a shower of flaming fragments. Although there were some in the Soviet space establishment who still wanted to send cosmonauts to the Moon for two-week stays (and who would still be dreaming about it when the Soviet Union disintegrated twenty years later) the race to the Moon was effectively over. The Ministry of General Machine Building therefore looked elsewhere for a competitive edge and quickly decided to push work on stations in the hope of getting at least one in orbit before Skylab. Landing people on the Moon, after all, was only a stunt; serious physical and psychological experiments would be done on stations. The fact that General Machine Building wanted to believe that because it had lost the race did not mean it was entirely wrong.
But the effort to get a space station to orbit would also be marked by death and destruction. With work on subsystem components falling dangerously behind during that February of 1970, the ministry transferred Almaz back to Korolyov’s bureau while allowing Chelomei’s engineers to keep working on it. The idea was to use specially designed Almaz sections for the new station’s hull and other major components, plus Soyuz parts for subsystems, and have the thing ready to fly within a year. The first Long-Duration Station, or DOS-1 in the Russian acronym, was the one named Salyut in honor of Gagarin’s flight and launched on a Proton on April 19, 1971. The main purpose of the forty-eight-foot-long spacecraft was to test the concept of keeping a manned military station—the still-dreamed-of Soviet MOL—in orbit.
