Space Is the Romance, Orbiting Jalopies the Reality
In the heady 1960s, politicians like John F. Kennedy and TV producers like Gene Roddenberry saw space travel as transcending not only the gravity of Sir Isaac Newton but also the gravity of being human.
The astronauts who slipped “the surly bonds of Earth,” as pilot/poet John Magee put it, were idealized as superhuman. And certainly those earthlings we imagined living in space--in “Star Trek” for instance--seemed above us in more ways than one.
Recent misadventures aboard the Russian space station Mir, however, remind us of the more likely reality that human nature in space is no different from human nature on Earth, and that life in space bears less resemblance to the Ritz Carlton-like space station in the movie “2001” than to the dank and dark confines of the submarine in “Das Boot.”
Once we have stripped away the romanticism of space, we are left with the question: Why send people there at all? The question carries special meaning now that robots like the Mars Pathfinder have proved better equipped than us humans to live up to NASA’s new mantra of “faster, smaller, cheaper.”
Consider: While the Pathfinder mission cost $286 million, a manned mission to Mars that NASA proposed to President Clinton last year would total $100 billion. And for what? Admittedly it was sensational to watch Apollo astronaut Alan Shepard swat a golf ball on the moon in 1971, but are astronauts really better equipped to, say, analyze mineral deposits than Sojourner’s spectrometer?
The late Carl Sagan and other space enthusiasts, even the romantics, have pointed out that the most spectacular discoveries in recent years have come from relatively cheap, unmanned spacecraft: Galileo’s photographs of a possibly life-bearing ocean on a Jovian moon, for instance, and the SOHO solar observatory’s recording of a massive explosion on the sun.
Furthermore, the space around our planet these days is anything but vast emptiness, and this fact raises questions about the wisdom of sending humans beyond Earth’s atmosphere. There are more than 100,000 pieces of junk wheeling around in the same orbit as Mir and the space shuttle missions. While a few of these pieces are as big as a double-decker bus, studies have shown that even debris as tiny as a few specks of paint could crack open a spaceship’s skin. New findings of serious bone and muscle deterioration in astronauts present another troubling picture.
Clearly, the rationale for sending humans into space is scientifically shaky. But science, of course, is not the sole reason for leaving terra firma. Equally valid is the challenging “Star Trek” line: “To explore strange new worlds . . . to boldly go where no man has gone before.”
America has always been energized by the prospect of exploring new frontiers, and space may be just about the only geophysical frontier we have left. Sending humans into space may indeed be an irresistible way of continuing to “go boldly.” But space also can humble us, putting things into proper perspective. It’s hard to imagine a more instructive experience than the mess aboard Mir, an outpost that increasingly seems held together with chewing gum and baling wire in an environment where any misstep can cost lives.
As a voice of reason says after too much bravado and bluster bring tragedy to the characters in Shakespeare’s “King Lear”: “It is the stars, the stars above us, govern our conditions.”
