Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Scaling Heaven

Who, my friend, can scale heaven?

—The Epic of Gilgamesh (Sumer, Third Millennium B.C.)

What?, I sometimes ask myself in amazement: Our ancestors walked from East Africa to Novaya Zemlya and Ayers Rock and Patagonia, hunted elephants with stone spearpoints, traversed the polar seas in open boats 7,000 years ago, circumnavigated the Earth propelled by nothing but wind, walked the Moon a decade after entering space—and we’re daunted by a voyage to Mars? But then I remind myself of the avoidable human suffering on Earth, how a few dollars can save the life of a child dying of dehydration, how many children we could save for the cost of a trip to Mars—and for the moment I change my mind. Is it unworthy to stay home or unworthy to go? Or have I posed a false dichotomy? Isn’t it possible to make a better life for everyone on Earth and to reach for the planets and the stars?

We had an expansive run in the ‘60s and ‘70s. You might have thought, as I did then, that our species would be on Mars before the century was over. But instead, we’ve pulled inward. Robots aside, we’ve backed off from the planets and the stars. 1 keep asking myself Is it a failure of nerve or a sign of maturity?

Maybe it’s the most we could reasonably have expected. In a way it’s amazing that it was possible at all: We sent a dozen humans on week-long excursions to the Moon. And we were given the resources to make a preliminary reconnaissance of the whole Solar System, out to Neptune anyway—missions that returned a wealth of data, but nothing of short-term, everyday, bread-on-the-table practical value. They lifted the human spirit, though. They enlightened us about our place in the Universe. It’s easy to imagine skeins of historical causality in which there were no race to the Moon and no planetary program.

But it’s also possible to imagine a much more serious devotion to exploration, because of which we would today have robot vehicles probing the atmospheres of all the Jovian planets and dozens of moons, comets, and asteroids; a network of automatic scientific stations emplaced on Mars would daily be reporting their findings; and samples from many worlds would be under examination in the laboratories of Earth—revealing their geology, chemistry, and perhaps even their biology. Human outposts might be already established on the near-Earth asteroids, the Moon, and Mars.

There were many possible historical paths. Our particular causality skein has brought us to a modest and rudimentary, although in many respects heroic, series of explorations. But it is far interior to what might have been—and what may one day be.

To carry the green Promethean spark of Life with us into the sterile void and ignite there a firestorm of animate matter is the very destiny of our race,” reads the brochure of something called the First Millennial Foundation. It promises, for $120 a year, “citizenship” in “space colonies—when the time comes.” “Benefactors” who contribute more also receive “the undying gratitude of a star-flung civilization, and their name carved on the monolith to be erected on the Moon.” This represents one extreme in the continuum of enthusiasm for a human presence in space. The other extreme—better represented in Congress—questions why we should be in space at all, especially people rather than robots. The Apollo program was a “moondoggle,” the social critic Amitai Etzioni once called it; with the Cold War over, there is no justification whatever, proponents of this orientation hold, for a manned space program. Where in this spectrum of policy options should we be?

Ever since the United States beat the Soviet Union to the Moon, a coherent, widely understood justification for humans in space seems to have vanished. Presidents and Congressional committees puzzle over what to do with the manned space program. What is it for? Why do we need it? But the exploits of the astronauts and the moon landings had elicited—and for good reason—the admiration of the world. It would be a rejection of that stunning American achievement, the political leaders tell themselves, to back off from manned spaceflight. Which President, which Congress wishes to be responsible for the end of the American space program? And in the former Soviet Union a similar argument is heard: Shall we abandon, they ask themselves, the one remaining high technology in which we are still world leaders? Shall we be faithless heirs of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Sergei Korolev, and Yuri Gagarin?

The first law of bureaucracy is to guarantee its own continuance. Left to its own devices, without clear instructions from above, NASA gradually devolved into a program that would maintain profits, jobs, and perquisites. Pork-barrel politics, with Congress playing a leading role, became an increasingly powerful force in the design and execution of missions and long-term goals. The bureaucracy ossified. NASA lost its way.

On July 20, 1989, the twentieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon, President George Bush announced a long-term direction for the U.S. space program. Called the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI), it proposed a sequence of goals including a U.S. space station, a return of humans to the Moon, and the first landing of humans on Mars. In a later statement, Mr. Bush set 2019 as the target date for the first footfall on that planet.

And yet the Space Exploration Initiative, despite clear direction from the top, foundered. Four years after it was mandated, it did not even have a NASA office dedicated to it. Small and inexpensive lunar robotic missions— that otherwise might well have been approved—were canceled by Congress because of guilt by association with SEI. What went wrong?

One problem was the timescale. SEI extended five or so presidential terms of office into the future (taking the average presidency as one and a half terms). That makes it easy for a president to attempt to commit his successors, but leaves in considerable doubt how reliable such a commitment might be. SEI contrasted dramatically with the Apollo program—which, it might have been conjectured at the time it began, could have triumphed when President Kennedy or his immediate political heir was still in office.

Second, there was concern about whether NASA, which had recently experienced great difficulty in safely lifting a few astronauts 200 miles above the Earth, could send astronauts on an arcing year-long trajectory to a destination 100 million miles away and bring them back alive.

Third, the program was conceived exclusively in nationalist terms. Cooperation with other nations was not fundamental to either design or execution. Vice President Dan Quayle, who had nominal responsibility for space, justified the space station as a demonstration that the United States was “the world’s only superpower.” But since the Soviet Union had an operational space station that was a decade ahead of the United States, Mr. Quayle’s argument proved difficult to follow.

Finally, there was the question of where, in terms of practical politics, the money was supposed to come from. The costs of getting the first humans to Mars had been variously estimated, ranging as high as $500 billion.

Of course, it’s impossible to predict costs before you have a mission design. And the mission design depends on such matters as the size of the crew; the extent to which you take mitigating steps against solar and cosmic radiation hazards, or zero gravity; and what other risks you are willing to accept with the lives of the men and women on board. If every crew member has one essential specialty, what happens if one of them falls ill? The larger the crew, the more reliable the backups. You would almost certainly not send a full-time oral surgeon, but what happens if you need root canal work and you’re a hundred million miles from the nearest dentist? Or could it be done by an endodontist on Earth, using telepresence?

Wernher von Braun was the Nazi-American engineer who, more than anyone else, actually took us into space. His 1952 book Das Marsprojekt envisioned a first mission with 10 interplanetary spacecraft, 70 crew members, and 3 “landing boats.” Redundancy was uppermost in his mind. The logistical requirements, he wrote, “are no greater than those for a minor military operation extending over a limited theater of war.” He meant to “explode once and for all the theory of the solitary space rocket and its little band of bold interplanetary adventurers,” and appealed to Columbus’ three ships without which “history tends to prove that he might never have returned to Spanish shores.” Modern Mars mission designs have ignored this advice. They are much less ambitious than yon Braun’s, typically calling for one or two spacecraft crewed by three to eight astronauts, with another robotic cargo ship or two. The solitary rocket and the little band of adventurers are still with us.