Gregory Benford - Antartica and Mars

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GREGORY BENFORD

ANTARCTICA AND MARS

Recently I was mulling over my favorite authors, and it struck me that often a

writer's essential flavor can be summed up by one of his book titles. Charles

Dickens, Great Expectations. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury.

Hemingway, In Our Time.

At least it's an amusing game. I picked The Stars My Destination for Alfred

Bester, Star Maker for Olaf Stapledon, Childhood's End for Arthur C. Clarke.

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Word for World is Forest. Poul Anderson, Time and Stars.

Then I thought of that ceaseless advocate of the space program, Robert

Heinlein. Surely his mood and attitude is captured by The Moon is a Harsh

Mistress. Space as gritty, huge, hard, real.

Which depressed me a bit, for today the space program's spirit is anything but

that. A diffuse unreality pervades NASA. Similarly, James Gunn's definitive

treatment of the radio search for intelligent life, The Listeners-- not a bad

title choice for his essential theme, since Gunn is one of our best social

critics -- now seems quite optimistic, since Congress recently killed the

program (though the Planetary Society plans to carry on, using public

donations). Were all these hopeful outlooks in sf simply naive?

I reflected back on my own involvement with space, from the freckled kid

reading Willy Ley and Arthur Clarke describing how rockets worked, to a

consultant for NASA and the Planetary Society. Somehow a lot of the zip has

gone out of space for a lot of us, and for the public, too. Why?

We went wrong just after Apollo, I think. James Fletcher was NASA

Administrator from 1971 to 1977, when the Shuttle was being proposed, designed

and checked out -- or rather, not checked out. He convinced Congress that this

nifty little reusable rocket-cum-space-plane gadget would get magically

cheaper and cheaper to fly, eventually delivering payloads to orbit for a few

hundred dollars a pound.

The cost now is over $5000 a pound, and still climbing as missions get delayed

and services shrink. A twenty-fold increase, allowing for inflation. The Nixon

administration bequeathed to us an econo-ride Shuttle (and Jimmy Carter signed

the appropriations bill for it). They also axed the remaining Apollo missions

and the 1970s version of the space station, though they weren't vital. Their

killing the long-range research for a Mars mission had great effects, however,

because we now have no infrastructure developed for large deep space missions.

Then came the Challenger disaster, with Fletcher in charge again. In the

Challenger commission report he allowed as how "Congress has provided

excellent oversight and generous funding and in no way that I know of

contributed to the accident." Except, of course, for consistent under-funding

and pressure to attain goals set by people with little or no technical

competence.

The shuttle is a spaceship designed by a committee of lawyers. "The fault was

not with any single person or group but was NASA's fault," Fletcher went on,

"and I include myself as a member of the NASA team." As Joe Haldeman

sardonically remarked, "Most people would say he was more than just a member."

And we can't even buy shuttles in quantity. The Fletcher-Nixon vision saw a

flight a week. That got scaled down to twenty-four a year, then twelve. In

1989 there were nine, in 1990 six, with that abysmal prospect, a flight every

few months, apparently settling in as the normal routine.

Unmanned exploration was once the virtually unblemished, high-minded face of

space. Now our failures accumulate. The wrong lens curvature of the Hubble

telescope. The big antenna which won't deploy aboard Galileo as it limps

toward Jupiter, years late; we could have sent it directly, on a Proton

booster the Soviets offered us at bargain rates, but politics of the late

1980s ruled that out. The Titans that explode with billion-dollar packages

aboard, the satellites which go awry.

And the Mars Observer, lost to unknown error or just bad luck. My personal

guess at the time was that while a small chip manufacturer is now getting

blamed, there is an interesting coincidence that we lost contact after the

thruster tanks were being pressurized. Tanks have exploded on missions before-

- remember Apollo 13 -- and in both cases they had been engineered to three

times the expected design limits. The review panel fingered the same plausible

culprit, but basically we will never know.

The repair of the Hubble Telescope lifted spirits a bit, but face facts: it

was a repair job we should not have had to do at all. The Hubble mission was

overloaded with tasks, and NASA ejected to do them all with One Big Shot -- a

poor strategy when you're pushing the envelope in several different

directions.

It wasn't always so. Both Voyager spacecraft -- remember them? --returned a

very interesting bonus in mid-1993 -- a burst of low frequency electromagnetic

radiation. We believe these emissions came from beyond the spacecraft, about a

hundred astronomical units from the sun lan A.U. is the distance from the sun

to your house). A big flare eruption on the sun had propagated past the

spacecraft and the emissions came at a time when the fast-streaming particles,

going about 100 km/sec, struck something about twenty or thirty A.U. further

out. What?

Plasma physicists identified the emissions as probably waves radiated by those

particles as they ploughed into the shock wave which separates our solar

neighborhood from the true deep-space plasma that ranges between the stars.

Thus the Voyagers may have sensed the boundary of our little solar comfort

zone. Within a decade or so they will cross that standing transition, where

the plasma density drops and true inter-stellar space begins, a "wall" more

meaningful than the orbital radius of Pluto.

Voyager was a miracle. We caught the big brass ring on that one, beginning

when an orbital specialist noted in 1963 that a Grand Tour could be won by

looping a probe past several of the outer planets. The window for this orbital

high wire act opens every 175 years, but the last time, when Thomas Jefferson

was President, we missed the chance. In 1972, when astronauts still trod the

moon, we decided to go for the launch window in 1977.

I don't think NASA could do that today. Hell, it couldn't even decide to not

do it that quickly. In just five years during the 1970s NASA invented and

developed nuclear-power batteries which are still running, sixteen years after

launch. It assembled fail-safe computers, and electronics that withstood the

proton sleet of Jupiter, where a human would die of an hour's exposure. Built

to give us Jupiter and Saturn, they still forge outward after gliding past

Uranus and Neptune as well.

Voyager is a legacy of the 1960s, a child of the hustling Space Age that

wanted to do everything it could (and a few things it couldn't, like building

a true space plane). The Voyagers keep sailing on just as they were, dutifully

sending back reports to a society that has changed profoundly.

Nothing follows them. Sure, Galileo is bound for Jupiter, due to arrive in

1995, but there it stops. NASA passed up the Halley's comet mission, while

other nations went. Nothing will go to Saturn for many years. The proposed

Cassini probe which does finally reach Saturn, probably sometime in the next

millennium, will drop a vessel named Huygens onto Titan, the second largest

moon in the solar system and to me the most interesting place of all.

Titan has a surface pressure not much different from that in your living room.

It is far colder, but its thick atmosphere holds the organic chemicals we know

existed on the early Earth. Has some slow, cold chemistry been at work there,

conjuring up life forms utterly different from our own? Impossible to say, for

our only closeup look showed only the featureless upper cloud deck of a

methane atmosphere.

The stretching out of missions is getting worse. Galileo was planned to get to

Jupiter in 1985. Though cooperation between the US and the Russians keeps

getting talked about, it still has not materialized in solid ways. The recent

agreements to combine our operations with the Mir station are a good sign, and

probably will work out. But it's still only a beginning.

Gorbachev in 1987-88 sounded much like Khrushchev, talking up space. George

Bush in 1989 resembled Kennedy, setting a goal: a manned Mars landing by the

50th anniversary of the Apollo landing, 2019. Both leaders sounded the charge.

Both countries yawned and changed the subject. Shortly afterward, they changed

the leaders, too.

What's different? The game has changed. It isn't national rivalry any more,

and probably won't be for quite a while.

Brace Murray, former director of the Jet Propulsion Lab and professor at

CalTech, pointed out to me many of these curious analogies and features of the

Space Age, but his most striking analogy reached even further back.

Once we had a distant, hostile goal, and men threw themselves at it, too:

Antarctica. Early in this century, Scott and Amundsen raced for the south pole

with whole nations cheering them on. The Edwardian Englishman who tried to

impose his own methods died. The savvy Norwegian who adapted to the hostile

continent came through smoothly.

Others tried to follow. Shackleton made some progress, and then national

rivalry became far more serious: World War I swallowed up the exploratory

energies. Admiral Byrd and others made headway between the wars, but true,

methodical Antarctic exploration did not resume in earnest until the

International Geophysical Year, 1957.

The wars gave the International Geophysical Year teams cheap, reliable air and

sea transport technology. (Scientists don't like to talk about it much, but

modem war bequeaths science a feast of intriguing gadgets.) Military services

were happy to assist, exercising their capabilities. International though the

spirit was, national and territorial claims did not vanish; Argentina and

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GREGORYBENFORDANTARCTICAANDMARSRecentlyIwasmullingovermyfavoriteauthors,anditstruckmethatoftenawrite...

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