Selling Space, the Greatest Show on Earth

Say you are in the market for a dog to herd your cattle. The San Fernando Valley Fair is one place to shop. Here, you will find all sorts of things for sale. People will sell you a look at a miniature horse or a giant pig. They will sell you cotton candy or a bungee jump or a game of Whac-a-Mole and a chance to win a prize. Here, at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center in Burbank, there are booths that sell telephone services, newspaper subscriptions and real estate. Foot soldiers of the Democratic and Republican parties will try to sell you on their candidates.

And at another booth, people are selling space, the final frontier.

The folks from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena are the Trekkers of fact, not fiction. They are scientists, engineers and technicians, mostly, but they also work in marketing. We are their customers, and we always want to be reminded that the billions and billions of dollars invested in space exploration are worth it.

At any fair, and this one ends today, showmanship is a necessity. And that’s why Kathleen Spellman, an uplink system engineer for the Mars Pathfinder, wanted to show children how to make a comet. It’s sort of like a cosmic mud pie. The ingredients call for several small chunks of frozen carbon dioxide, one cup of dirt, a dash of vinegar for the acetic acid, and a few drops of Worcestershire sauce to provide carbon. Wearing thick gloves to guard against frostbite, Spellman places the ingredients in a plastic sack, squeezes them together and . . .

BOOM!

Well, now, that wasn’t supposed to happened. “Don’t touch it!” she warns children curious about something that resembles snow but is much colder. Spellman herself had been sprayed with bits of frozen carbon dioxide and Worcestershire. This bag, she concludes, had been used once too often. Gas rising from the comet stew produced the effect.

She tries again. This time, there is no explosion. This time, the children are shown a dirty white clump that smells funny. “It looks like cauliflower,” someone says. “It looks like a brain,” says someone else.

Now just imagine frozen clumps that are the size of mountains, hurtling through space and smashing into Jupiter. Now those are serious booms.

The people at JPL are thrilled with the drama of the comet known as Shoemaker-Levy 9. Such amazing fireworks, plus the 25th anniversary of the lunar landing, are enough to make grown-ups look to the sky with the awe and wonder natural to children. The sales pitch is easier when the cosmos and history are pitching in.

“The timing is perfect,” Spellman says.

It’s perfect because, beginning with the Challenger tragedy, the space program has had to answer for so much failure. NASA, the government agency for which JPL does much of its work, has had to explain such troubles as the malfunction of a major antenna on the $1.5-billion Galileo space probe, the defective lens on the $2-billion Hubble space telescope (later repaired in a shuttle mission) and, most dramatically, the disappearance of the $1-billion Mars Observor. NASA lost contact with it 450 million miles from Earth.

At the fair, the folks from JPL prefer to dwell on the successes. There are, Spellman explains, tangible benefits that far exceed Tang. The technology developed for space exploration, she says, has resulted in many medical advancements, in robotics that benefit industry and optics that help the near-blind to see.

“We find so much about our own planet when we study others,” adds Taguhi Arakelian, who works as a support scientist on the Galileo space probe. A study of Venus provided us with a better understanding of the “greenhouse effect,” which is warming the Earth’s atmosphere, she points out. “From a selfish point of view, we can take better care of our own planet.”

Then there are the intangible benefits.

“We’re always looking forward,” Spellman says. “Space exploration gives you hope for the future--the hope than we can influence the future.”

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Still, there are always skeptics. One elderly man who visited the JPL exhibit pointed out that “some people” wonder whether Neil Armstrong really did make that giant step. Then he muttered something about conspiracies and the ability of “Hollywood studios.”

“I hope you don’t believe that, sir,” Arakelian said, as polite as could be.

And now there’s talk that we’ve thrown so much debris into orbit that a space station may be too risky. The question that is asked is: Why bother?

Why? Actually, the cosmic version of that question--the ultimate “Why?”--is precisely the reason we’re out there. A quest for understanding, for discovery, is deep in the species.

Taryn Wolfe, a 9-year-old fifth-grader from Tarzana with plans to be “an actress, singer, veterinarian and doctor,” was rapt as JPL worker Rick Shope described efforts under way to send two space probes toward Pluto. The launch is set for the year 2001. The probes will reach Pluto and its moon, Charon, in 2008.

The fountain of youth, by all best evidence, is a myth. But regular doses of wonder and awe aren’t a bad substitute.

A child’s fascination with space, Shope said, usually ends in the teen-age years, when other subjects come to the fore. Taryn’s 14-year-old brother, Brandon, and his pal Michael Fox, also 14, proved Shope’s point.

They could stand only a few minutes of this Pluto stuff. You don’t come to the fair to learn about Pluto, they explained. And you don’t come for the rides and games.

You come to look for girls.

It’s all a matter of discovery

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday.