Ribbon Round the World : Voyager: The Next Step for Humankind

The brave Voyager journey of Richard G. Rutan and Jeana Yeager was the last triumph in the heroic age of aviation. But it was more. Just as Charles A. Lindbergh’s flight, almost 60 years ago, was not merely a step forward in transportation, Voyager’s patient conquest of the globe was more than a stunt. By ending the year of the Challenger tragedy with a moment of joy, Voyager has become an irresistible symbol. There is reason to hope that this achievement may be one of those rare events in time that mark turning points in history, to represent not only the advance of technology but the new, global nature of human life.

It is tempting to claim Voyager as an American symbol. Like Lindbergh’s flight, Voyager’s was a triumph of that particularly American union of fierce individualism and high technology. Few other public figures are as brusque, cantankerous, determined and patriotic as the Rutan brothers, Burt and Dick--the first an aeronautical genius who designed the plane. The second was a pilot who put his head down and pushed through years of public indifference to build the plane by hand and reach his historic goal. And few other machines so exquisitely match the most modern technology available with a singular task. Essentially, the Voyager is made of paper and glue--but it is engineered paper, very refined glue. Voyager accomplished its task without frills--it didn’t fly fast, or high or aggressively. It was technology without bombast or excess, directly tailored to its human requirements; it is pleasant to think those qualities can be identified as American, too.

Lindbergh’s journey had immense practical significance for the United States’ position in the world. The fire lit under aviation was burning before the Paris flight, but Lindbergh put the bellows to it. Voyager, however, will not likely have the same incendiary effect: Aviation’s curve of growth climbs at a shallow angle now, and while Voyager spokesmen talked of a day when such planes will crowd the skies, that seems an improbable outcome of this flight. The quiet trends that Voyager may ignite are more specialized: the use of composite materials instead of aluminum in aircraft; the miniaturization of instruments; increases in efficiency, range and load carrying ability, and innovation in design. This plane may foreshadow highly efficient barges of the sky, but most spectacular advances in the atmosphere are past. Private aviation is in such distressing doldrums today that it is more realistic to think that maybe Voyager, in conquering the last great milestone of atmospheric aviation, will mark the decline of the era when flight was a novelty and a joy.

But the sorrow of that thought to anyone who flies or who has longed to fly is personal and limited. Voyager has other, wider meanings--global, not nationalistic at all. Like Lindbergh, Rutan and Yeager dramatized changes in the way human beings look at their home planet, and pointed to the ways we will look at it in the future.

One of the reasons Voyager didn’t just fly off into the maw of Typhoon Marge, to be torn in shreds of paper and glue, was that Len Snellman, the mission meteorologist, was watching the weather move across the other side of the world. He picked up data fed to him from several satellites, analyzed it and then talked directly to Rutan by radio waves bounced back and forth from Mojave by telephone patches and satellite links all over the world. There were some radio problems during the flight, but, in general, wherever Rutan and Yeager were on the face of the Earth they were never completely out of touch.

Like Lindbergh’s ability to fly, by 1927 unremarkable, this stunning achievement in communications and observation does not seem awe-inspiring. But it is. We’re just used to it. So, just as Lindbergh made a whole new dimension of travel suddenly normal, today the Voyager has shown how ordinary it is to contemplate the whole Earth all at once.

Looking at the Earth whole is, of course, about as advanced as aviation was in 1927, when wooden Fokker tri-motors carried daring passengers from train to train and the DC-3 was still eight years away. But the signs of a swiftly interlocking global community are all about us, as were the signs of aviation’s growth then. From the international sweep of industry to the way every silly and barbaric war has its tie to distant powers, the evidence is everywhere. Yet there has been no prior moment in time when one might say: There was the point of change.

This may be the moment. There’s at least one coincidence that makes it seem that way. At the same time Rutan and Yeager were building their plane and flying around the globe, a group of scientists was planning another metaphorical world conquest. As Rutan and Yeager took new technology to make a pioneering machine, so scientists of many disciplines plan using new tools, at last to grasp the way the Earth works as a whole.

At present people can soar above Earth in rudimentary spaceships and photograph the planet’s sweet roundness, but though they can see the storms swirl and the ocean currents stir blues and greens together, their glance illuminates only details. The big mystery deepens: What is happening here? These new tools of observation--satellites, space stations, new kinds of ears to listen to the ring the Earth makes when a mountain stirs, or computers to make sense of the piles of data the other tools gather--are like the Voyager’s refined glue and engineered paper. They give people the chance to turn fragmentary views of the Earth into a comprehensive understanding of the systems driving the planet and making it a fit place to live.

This approach is capturing the imaginations of the scientific community as steadily as Voyager captured the attention of the larger public. The National Aviation and Space Agency calls it Earth Systems Science. The National Science Foundation calls it Global Geosciences. The National Academy of Sciences loads the idea with a title fit to swamp it: International Geosphere-Biosphere Program. But by any name, the thought of learning the way the world works is enticing: “It’s the biggest thing in Washington right now,” one NSF staff member said recently. He meant the scientific Establishment, of course, not the part of the city so preoccupied with other global transactions. But maybe, for the long term, as the idea requires funding and coordination, it ought to be the biggest thing in Congress, too.

Instruments are available or already in place that, with some determined application, could show not just where Typhoon Marge was--and where a passing plane could fly to pick up help from its winds without being clobbered--but also why the storm was there in the first place and what effect expanding Antarctic sea ice or shrinking rain forests might have on next year’s storms or on the corn crops of ’88. “An idea whose time has come,” a scientist called the global research program in an interview with Science magazine. It “symbolizes the realization that a comprehensive, global approach to understanding . . . change is better than ad hoc alarms over problems such as carbon dioxide buildup, ozone depletion and acid rain.”

Another scientist said: “Many of the observations we need are already being made for other reasons. It’s more an attitude of mind.”

Voyager’s flight was no alarm, no clang of warning, but it surely affected one’s attitude of mind. It was an adventure, a triumph that came to the people of Earth unexpectedly, out of the little desert town of Mojave. And among all the signs of danger and conflict that make it clear how all lives on this planet are now linked, it was a moment of good cheer. So if a marker is needed to show where a page is turned to a new story of living, this is as good as any. After all, the chance to know the planet whole is not just a matter of comprehending the various kinds of doom that seem to hang overhead. It’s part of the great adventure of knowledge, of using the best tools you have to push the outside of the envelope of understanding, and learn more about home.

Voyager didn’t shrink the world. Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager now know better than most just how enormous it is. Way back in 1947, when William P. Odom flew around the world with several fuel stops, his co-pilot, Milton Reynolds, stepped out of the plane and observed: “People who say what a small world it is haven’t gone around it lately.”

But though the world remains vast and mysterious, it seems less in fragments than it was two weeks ago. Voyager tied a ribbon around our lovely planet--and made it a gift.