Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier (11 page)

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CHAPTER TEN

THE NEXT FIFTY YEARS IN SPACE
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I
t would be hard to discuss the next fifty years in space without some reflection on the previous fifty. I happen to have been born the same week NASA was founded, in early October 1958. That means my earliest awareness of the world took place in the 1960s, during the Apollo era. It was also a turbulent decade internationally, and America was no exception. We were at war in Southeast Asia, the civil rights movement was under way, assassinations were taking place, and NASA was heading for the Moon.

At the time, it seemed clear that the astronauts, whatever criteria were used to select them, would never have included me. The astronauts were drawn from the military—all but two of them. One was Neil Armstrong, a civilian test pilot and aeronautical engineer—the commander of Apollo 11 and the first human to step foot on the Moon. The other was Harrison Schmitt, a geologist, the only scientist to go to the Moon. Schmitt was the lunar module pilot of Apollo 17, America’s last Moon mission.

Perhaps the most turbulent year of that turbulent decade was 1968, yet that’s the year Apollo 8 became the first craft ever to leave low Earth orbit and go to the Moon. That journey took place in December, at the end of an intense and bloody year. During Apollo 8’s figure-eight orbit, its astronauts took the most recognized photograph in the history of the world. As the spacecraft emerged from behind the far side of the Moon, they pulled out the camera, looked through the window of the command module, and captured Earth rising over the lunar landscape. This widely published image, titled
Earthrise,
presented Earth as a cosmic object, aloft in the sky of another cosmic object. It was simultaneously thrilling and humbling, beautiful and also a little scary.

By the way, the title
Earthrise
is a bit misleading. Earth has tidally locked the Moon, which means that the Moon eternally shows only one side to us. The urge is strong to presume that Earth rises and sets for observers on the Moon just as the Moon rises and sets for observers on Earth. But as seen from the Moon’s near side, Earth never rises. It’s just always there, floating in the sky.

Everybody remembers the 1960s as the era of the right stuff, but it had its share of robotic missions as well. The first rovers on the Moon were Russian: Luna 9 and Luna 13. America’s Ranger 7 was the first US spacecraft to photograph the Moon’s surface. But those go unremembered by the public, even though they were our robotic forebearers in space, because there was a much bigger story being told: only when human emissaries were doing the exploring did people feel a vicarious attachment to the dramas unfolding on the space frontier.

B
ecause I grew up in America, I took for granted that, by and large, everybody thinks about tomorrow, next year, five years from now, ten years from now. It’s a popular pastime. If you say to someone, “So, what are you up to?” they’re not going to tell you what they’re doing today. No, they’re going to tell you what they’re planning: “I’m saving to go on a trip to the Caribbean,” or “We’re going to buy a bigger house,” or “We’re going to have two more kids.” People are envisioning the future.

Americans are not alone in this, of course. But in some countries I visit, I speak to people who do not think about the future. And any country where people do not think about the future is a country without a space program. Space, I have learned, is a frontier that keeps you dreaming about what might get discovered tomorrow—a fundamental feature of being human.

Around the world and across time, every people and every culture—even those with no written language—has some sort of story that accounts, mythologically or otherwise, for its existence and its relationship to the known universe. These are not new questions. These are old questions. This is an old quest.

Humans are one of very few animals that are perfectly happy sleeping on their backs. Also, we sleep at night. What happens if you wake up from sleeping at night on your back? You see the stars. It is possible that, of all the animals in the history of life on Earth, we may be uniquely curious about the sky, and so perhaps we should not be surprised that we wonder about our place in the cosmos.

Today when we think of distant objects in space, we make plans to go there. We’ve gone to the Moon. We talk about the possibility of going to Mars. The twentieth century, of course, was the first in which the methods and tools of science—and particularly the methods and tools of space exploration—enabled us to answer age-old questions without reference to mythological sources: Where did we come from? Where are we going? Where do we fit in the universe? Many of our answers have come not simply because we went to the Moon or to some other celestial object but because space offers us places from which to access the rest of the cosmos.

Most of what the universe wants to tell us doesn’t reach Earth’s surface. We would know nothing of black holes were it not for telescopes launched into space. We would know nothing of various explosions in the universe that are rich in X-rays, gamma rays, or ultraviolet. Before we had vistas in space—telescopes, satellites, space probes—that enabled us to conduct astrophysical studies without interference from Earth’s atmosphere, which we normally think of as transparent, we were almost blind to the universe.

When I think of tomorrow’s space exploration, I don’t think of low Earth orbit—altitudes less than about two thousand kilometers. In the 1960s that was a frontier. But now low Earth orbit is routine. It can still be dangerous, but it isn’t a space frontier. Take me somewhere new. Do something more than drive around the block.

Yes, the Moon is a destination. Mars is a destination. But the Lagrangian points are destinations too. Those are where gravitational and centrifugal forces balance in a rotating system such as Earth and the Moon or Earth and the Sun. At destinations such as those, we can build things. We already have some experience, brought by building the International Space Station, which is bigger than most things ever conceived or constructed on Earth.

I
f you ask me, “What is culture?” I would say it is all the things we do as a nation or group or inhabitants of a city or region, yet no longer pay attention to. It’s the things we take for granted. I’m a New Yorker, and so, for example, I no longer notice when I walk past a seventy-story building. Yet every tourist who comes to New York City from any place in the world is continually looking up. So I ask myself, What do people elsewhere take for granted in their own cultures?

Sometimes it’s the simple things. Last time I visited Italy, I went to a supermarket and saw an entire aisle of pasta. I had never seen that before. There were pasta shapes that never make it to the United States. So I asked my Italian friends, “Do you notice this?” And they said no, it was simply the pasta aisle. In the Far East, there are entire aisles of rice, with choices undreamt of in America. So I asked a friend who wasn’t born in America, “What’s in our supermarkets that you think I no longer notice?” And she said, “You have an entire aisle of ready-to-eat breakfast cereals.” To me, of course, that’s just the cereal aisle. We have entire aisles full of soft drinks: Coke and Pepsi and all their derivatives. Yet that’s just the soda aisle to me.

Where am I going with these examples? In America, everyday items incorporate icons from the space program. You can buy refrigerator magnets in the shape of the Hubble Space Telescope. You can buy boxes of bandages decorated not only with Spider-Man and Superman and Barbie but also with stars and moons and planets that glow in the dark. You can buy pineapple slices cut into Cosmic Fun Shapes. And for car names, the cosmos ranks second after geographic locations. This is the space component of culture that people no longer notice.

S
everal years ago I served on a commission whose task was to analyze the future of the US aerospace industry—which had been falling on hard times, in part because of the success of Airbus in Europe and Embraer in Brazil. We went around the world to explore the economic climate in which American industries are functioning, so that we could advise Congress and the aerospace industry how to restore the leadership, or at least the competitiveness, that they (and we all) may once have taken for granted.

So we visited various countries in Western Europe and worked our way east. Our last stop was Moscow. One of the places we visited was Star City, a training center for cosmonauts where you’ll find a striking monument in honor of Yuri Gagarin. Following the usual introductory platitudes and a morning shot of vodka, the director of Star City just sat back, loosened his tie, and spoke longingly of space. His eyes sparkled, as did mine, and I felt a connection I did not feel in England or France or Belgium or Italy or Spain.

That connection exists, of course, because our two nations, for a brief moment in history, directed major resources toward putting people into space. Having engaged in that endeavor has worked its way into both Russian and American culture, so that we don’t conceive of life without it. My camaraderie with Star City’s director made me think about what the world would be like if every country were engaged in that enterprise. I imagined our being connected with one another on a higher plane—beyond economic and military conflicts, beyond war altogether. I wondered how two nations with such deep, shared dreams about human presence in space could have remained such long-standing adversaries in the post–World War II era.

I have another example of space becoming part of culture. Three years ago, when NASA announced that an upcoming servicing mission to fix the Hubble Space Telescope might be canceled, it became big news in America. Do you know who played the biggest role in reversing that decision? Not the astrophysicists. It was the general public. Why? They had beautified their walls, computer screens, CD covers, guitars, and high-fashion gowns with Hubble images, and so in their own way they had become vicarious participants in cosmic discovery. The public took ownership of the Hubble Space Telescope, and eventually, after a slew of editorials, letters to the editor, talk-show discussions, and congressional debates, the funding was restored. I do not know of another time in the history of science when the public took ownership of a scientific instrument. But it happened then and there, marking the ascent of the Hubble into popular American culture.