Once Again, Man Triumphs Over Machine--to NASA’s Chagrin

Forget the chess match of Garry Kasparov versus IBM’s Deep Blue. A much more interesting battle between man and machine is playing out in today’s media. In one corner is the Mars Pathfinder and its roving companion, Sojourner, which is slowly poking and prodding about on the Red Planet. And in the other, the Mir, Russia’s accident-prone space station, retreading the same orbit just above Earth every 92 minutes.

No contest. For better and (largely, I’m afraid) for worse, victory goes solidly to the humans, who have handily trounced Pathfinder on the evening news and on front pages.

Remember Pathfinder? When it reached the Martian surface July 4, the intrepid spacecraft was rightly lauded as a triumph of a revitalized space-exploration program. It was built for $150 million--not cheap, exactly, but a pittance by NASA standards and roughly equal to the total budget of the summer movie “Men in Black.”

In contrast to the tame Hollywood fare, however, NASA’s production took a decidedly high-risk but high-payoff approach. To avoid using costly re-entry rockets, Pathfinder inflated a cocoon of air bags and dropped to the surface at the speed of a moderate car crash. On landing, it unfurled its solar panels, set up scientific shop and set loose Sojourner, a semi-autonomous, tinker-toy robot about the size of a breadbox. For a few days, the world watched rapt as this brave bag of bolts picked its way across the Martian landscape, stopping periodically to bombard the rusted rocks with gamma rays to sniff out their composition. The official Pathfinder Web site logged 80 million hits in one day. And Time and Newsweek made temporary stars out of NASA’s tech nerds, celebrating the engineering teamwork that returned us to Mars after a generation.

Pathfinder’s sensors are still monitoring the chilly Martian winds; Sojourner continues to explore the rocks given fanciful names like Yogi and Barnacle Bill by the scientists back home. But you can be forgiven if you don’t know that, because the dispatches from Mars have been thoroughly displaced by tales of the latest misadventures aboard Russia’s space station.

The story really begins 11 years ago, when Mir entered orbit as one of the last great bits of Cold War propaganda, perfect for tweaking the West each time a cosmonaut set a new long-duration record in zero gravity. But those grand days are long past; Mir’s raison d’etre has grown much more complicated after communism. Russian technological pride is still a prime motivation. For the United States, however, Mir is many other things: a cheap training ground for astronauts ultimately destined for the shiny new international space station; a ready symbol of East-West cooperation; a way to keep former Soviet rocket technology out of the hands of unfriendly nations. In short, Mir is about everything except its ostensible purpose: the human exploration of space.

Which brings us to Mir’s latest and most ignoble function, a stage for space tragicomedy. By now, it is hard not to be aware of the staccato sequence of odd and sometimes pathetic mishaps that have struck the Russian space station this year. On June 25, a controller’s error led to a collision between Mir and an unmanned cargo craft--essentially, the station struck its garbage truck (inspiring the joke that “objects at Mir are closer than they appear”). On July 17, an astronaut inadvertently disconnected a cable, disabling the station’s guidance system. And there have been three critical failures of the oxygen generators, including one incident in which a generator caught fire. As common sense would tell you, fire is one of the last things you want in a pressurized tank floating in space.

The litany of blows has been so relentless that Mir almost seems cursed--American reporters dutifully related comments by Russian priests to that effect. Mir’s troubles are not really all that surprising. The station is old, many of its components are operating well past their intended lifetimes and the Russian space program--like virtually every other function of the Russian government--is operating under tight budgets and shaky morale. What is interesting is not so much why these problems have occurred as why they are now the cause of such fascination.

First and foremost, people in space are more interesting than robots in space. Testy exchanges between Russian astronauts and imperious flight controllers on Earth qualify as solid melodrama; a communication breakdown that requires rebooting Pathfinder’s computer does not. We are in the middle of the summer doldrums, already acquainted with the Seinfeld reruns. The economy is puttering along fairly smoothly. Bosnia and Rwanda, Cambodia and Hong Kong have largely fallen out of the news. Into this vacuum comes the news from the other vacuum, a soap opera in orbit.

Mir’s peculiar mission only adds to the allure. Where once we feared the Soviets who would “bury” us, now we can muster paternalistic concern for the Russian astronauts who just want to avoid a scolding. Vladimir Solovyov, Mir’s mission director, exploded at the astronauts on the station, muttering “this is a kindergarten.” Even Boris N. Yeltsin got into the act, touching off a volley of blame and counterblame between the Mir’s hapless residents and their boss on the ground.

These conflicts have been covered with almost gleeful attention to detail in print and on TV. The ostensibly staid New York Times opened its front-page Aug. 20 story on Mir’s latest computer problems with a salivating comment that “the can-do face of Mission Control cracked today.” In the current scheme, the Russians are our junior, somewhat backward partners and we can afford to laugh a little. How can the Mars Pathfinder hope to compete with that?

Unfortunately, the smirks and sad shaking of the head tend to distract from the larger lessons of Pathfinder versus Mir. From its inception, NASA has been keenly aware of the enormous public-relations advantage that manned missions have over unmanned ones. But Mir’s woes illustrate how easily that edge can turn against you. At present, the news coverage is flippant, albeit somewhat concerned. If there are mortalities, however, both the Russian and the American space programs could be severely shaken.

Construction of the international space station is slated to begin next year. Despite its name, the station is, first and foremost, an American venture. It will be far larger, more sophisticated and (one hopes) less trouble-prone than Mir, but it shares one crucial detail: It has no clearly defined mission other than to put humans into orbit around Earth. Although it gives the space shuttle someplace to go, the station itself merely flies around in lonely circles. Without a destination and a dream, a space station is little more than a man in a can.

It need not be that way. One of the most quintessential aspects of life is its relentless pursuit of new environmental niches to colonize. It seems inevitable that, sooner or later, living things will spread off this planet--if not us, then perhaps whatever comes after. Seen this way, a space station need not be a tin can. It can be like the reptile’s egg, the bold evolutionary innovation that contained the water and the salts of the oceans and brought them safely onto land.

An overarching vision of human exploration of space is what would transform melodrama into high drama. The media triumph of the Mir saga can be more than a crude victory of voyeurism over intellectualism. It could serve as a reminder that the mind and the spirit need to expand together.