Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds (23 page)

Putting the telescope away, I was suddenly struck with the realization that there could have been men and women up there. For some reason I hadn't made the connection, emotionally:
this
closest approach of the planet was the one we would have been aiming for in the post-Apollo Mars program. If only Nixon had been in favor of it—or if in his cynicism he had used it as a smoke screen for Vietnam and Watergate—what a different future we might be living in now.

Or would it be? After the first couple of moon shots, Americans were pretty blasé; NBC was showered with complaints when it dared interrupt the Super Bowl to show two clowns walking around on the Moon. A lot of Americans would probably think a Mars expedition a colossal waste, and some of them, even an outright fake, since Industrial Light & Magic can do a better Mars than the real one without leaving northern California. And do you believe everything the government tells you?

More serious people will argue that it's irresponsible to spend money and energy on a space stunt when, for instance, there are tens of thousands of children starving in this country, and millions in Africa; when all the topsoil is going south and the sky is leaking acid rain and thousands of species are endangered and the ozone layer's disappearing…name your poison. It's true that if we took the $10 billion price tag of a Mars expedition and applied it to humanitarian ends, we could do a lot of good, at least temporarily. But you can argue that greater benefit might ultimately result from spending the money on Mars. Not just from technological spin-offs, which are hard to predict, but from the trip itself.

The rationale for large space projects usually masquerades as logical argument, but it's actually a matter of faith, or belief, dressed up with some currently hot concern. Kennedy could sell the Moon by exploiting paranoia about Russian technology, growing since Sputnik, with a nice subtext of concern over American education. Gerard K. O'Neill did a convincing sales job for solar power satellites by invoking the specter of finite petroleum reserves during the Energy Crisis.
²
So what is hot now?

We could go back a quarter of a century and recycle Kennedy's rhetorical fuel. The
Challenger
and Titan failures put Russia five to ten years ahead of us in the practical—read “military”—use of space, so paranoia in that direction is even more justifiable than it was after Sputnik. His failure-of-American-science-education subtext is at least as valid now, as well. A recent poll characterized 85% of adult Americans as “technologically illiterate”; only a third of them could identify what a molecule was.

But the paranoia road leads straight to Star Wars. The rightwing politicians and militarists will have SDI if we let them—at least they'll have the parts that work—but it's not, except for the obvious technological links, actually related to space exploration. Where Star Wars would be a stupefyingly expensive monument to fear, a Mars expedition could be the focus of unprecedented international cooperation, and not cost us all that much. We can and should spread the expense and the glory as thin and wide as possible.

Besides us and the Soviets and the European Space Agency (which coordinates the space programs of ten member nations), Japan, India, and China have launched space ships. Other countries, such as Canada and Indonesia, don't have direct launch capabilities, but do have space programs using others' launch vehicles. Let's offer all of them a piece of another world.

This world seems more fragmented now than it has been since World War II—differences leading to squabbles, squabbles growing to wars; wars perpetuated out of stubborn bloodymindedness. We desperately need goals to pursue
as a world
, and a Martian expedition would work better than most earthbound projects, at least in that Mars isn't part of anybody's turf, yet.

There's a particular direction of wishful thinking in science fiction, a story plot whose variations crop up so often that it almost qualifies as a subgenre: a scientific project of huge scope serves to remind us how small we are alone and how powerful we can be if we work together, the whole world. A sensitive modern treatment of the story is James Gunn's novel
The Listeners
, where radio astronomers “hear” a transmission from an apparently mature race many light years away, and work out a response, and the world surprises itself by waiting with calm patience for the next century to bring a reply.

My favorite, though, is Howard Fast's clever 1959 story “The Martian Shop.” In this tale a number of shops spring up all over the world, overnight, supposedly manned by Martians. They sell only a few items, but there's nothing like them on Earth: a perpetual light bulb, a razor blade that never needs sharpening, a motor with no obvious source of power. They sell a few of these things and then disappear. Delight at the gadgets soon turns to paranoia—what kind of
weapons
could these bozos build? The only thing for it, of course, is a worldwide crash program to send a fleet to Mars.

When they get there, though, they won't find any shops or Martians. The whole thing was a hoax perpetrated by an international committee of scientists, whose goal it was to deflect the nationalistic energies that were going into stockpiling nuclear weapons, preparing for the last war. I don't remember whether the story tells what happens after they finally do get to Mars, though we can hope that humanity takes the joke well and sees itself in a new way, as the scientists intended.

Alas, we know there aren't any magic-wand solutions to real problems. Instead of a cabal of benevolent father figures bent on saving us from ourselves, we have NASA, hard pressed to save itself from
it
self. But the moral of that tongue-in-cheek story is still useful, still true, in our Martian contest.

The world needs a common goal that can survive changes in parliaments, presidents, premiers. A Mars expedition might benefit from being done slowly, the expense spread out over time as well as being shared by many countries. Soviet boosters, say, lifting a ship with American life support systems, European instrumentation using Japanese electronics and Canadian robotics. A crew from all around the world, taking the longest trip in history, and doing it in the name of their common humanity.

The goal of putting humans onto another planet for the first time is intoxicating. But as often happens, it could be that this time the trip is more important than the destination.

¹
It wasn't just a matter of Webb saying okay, and tossing the $60 million contract Texasward. A team of NASA experts went around the country ostensibly searching for the best site location, and wound up recommending Houston. But
Florida Trend
magazine, investigating how their state lost the Center, unearthed a memo from Webb to Johnson, admitting that Houston was the only politically realistic choice—three months before the team started its search. The rest was for appearances.

²
O'Neill's basic social argument, though, is still a convincing one for me: there will be no lasting peace until there's a measure of permanent prosperity in the Third World; the Earth doesn't have readily accessible energy and material resources sufficient to raise the standard of living of poor nations while maintaining the rest of us in comfort; ergo, the energy and materials must come from somewhere else; from space.

 

Appendix A

Putting the Fox in Charge of the Henhouse

Even in an administration notable for spectacularly inappropriate appointments, giving NASA back to James Fletcher stands out. Dr. Fletcher was NASA Administrator from 1971 to 1977, while the shuttle was being designed and tested, or not tested. It was he who convinced Congress to fund the current design, claiming that it would eventually deliver payloads to orbit for a mere $100 a pound. The cost is now $5,264 a pound, which is nearly a twentyfold increase, allowing for inflation.

The New York Times
ran two long articles on the 23rd and 24th of April—not coincidentally, the days Fletcher's appointment was being reviewed by Congress—detailing the excesses of his earlier administration. Still projecting the “can-do” reputation it earned during the Apollo years, NASA was actually a stew of inefficiency spiced with occasionally actionable neglect and criminal conduct. The
Times
article details a few whoppers where NASA actually outdoes the Pentagon, like paying Boeing $315 for metal loops available from government sources for three cents, or giving Morton Thiokol $3.6 million in rent for a building the government had owned recently and sold for $300,000. More damning, though, is the consistent refusal to correct deficiencies in management, testing, contractor relationships, and cost projection, pointed out in more than 500 audits of the agency. Fletcher defends his refusal by claiming that what needed fixing was actually just a matter of opinion, his versus the auditors'. The auditors might have seen their function differently.

Some congressional aides must have read the
Times
article, and since it was on the front page both days, a few Congresspersons might even have noticed it, but it didn't slow down the appointment noticeably. Fletcher repaid Congress for its generosity in June, when the
Challenger
Commission report came out, saying, “Congress has provided excellent oversight and generous funding and in no way that I know of contributed to the accident.” That is purest K-Y Jelly. The shuttle program was notoriously underfunded and under constant pressure to attain unrealistic goals—including the laughable one of eventually turning a profit. (No unmanned NASA system had ever come out in the black, even without the liability of carrying along food, air, water, and people.)

Fletcher did gracefully accept part of the blame for the
Challenger
accident, saying, “The fault was not with any single person or group but was NASA's fault, and I include myself as a member of the NASA team.” Most people would say he was more than just a member.

 

Appendix B

The Shuttle and Science in the Future

1986 was going to be the most active year yet for science aboard the shuttle—and possibly a turning point in astronomy as important as the invention of the telescope. The Galileo Project was supposed to fly by an asteroid on the way to Jupiter, and then drop a probe into that planet's atmosphere, after surveying its larger satellites. The Ulysses Solar Polar mission would also have gone to Jupiter, using the huge planet's gravity to fling it back toward the Sun, to fly over its polar regions, invisible from here. There were other, smaller, experiments in astronomy and space sciences, and another Spacelab, but the most important mission by far was to have been the Hubble Space Telescope, a huge machine built literally to see to the edge of the universe.

Even in the best of all worlds, none of these could fly soon. The Hubble telescope takes up all of the shuttle's cargo bay and part of another flight's. (It requires two data relay satellites; one was aboard the
Challenger
when it exploded.) The two Jupiter-bound probes have to be launched within fairly tight windows, that occur only once each thirteen months.

In June, the picture became even more bleak for the Jupiter-bound ones, when NASA announced that they would no longer use the shuttle to launch the Centaur upper stage, which both of them require. Astronauts were nervous about having 20,000 pounds of explosive fuel in the cargo bay. Now both of them will have to fly on the Titan, which is also grounded pending redesign.

Any scientific launch has to compete with Star Wars and paying customers. The order of priority for the shuttle's payloads has always gone like this:

1.   Military satellites.

2.   Payloads that have to be launched within a specific time period.

3.   Payloads from paying commercial or foreign customers.

4.   NASA space science projects.

The Congressional Budget Office's report
The Budget Effects of the Challenger Accident
says that of the first twenty shuttle flights when the program becomes regular again, at least fifteen will be given to the military. Now that the Galileo and solar polar flights have been bumped, the Hubble Space Telescope may have a chance of being one, or one and a half, of the remaining five. The new Spacelab, with its European backing, might also get one of the early tickets, to help boost international confidence in the American program.

Of course no one can yet say when regular flights will be resumed. At this writing, the first test flight may be as early as next July or as late as February, 1988. A lot hangs on the redesign of the booster; how smoothly the testing goes. You know it will go cautiously.

Confessions of a Space Junkie

This is the text of a speech I delivered on 6 June 1981 at Ohio State University. I recycled it partly because of the sad predictive aspect of it, and partly to try to recapture for some of
Science Fiction Review
's younger readers what it was like back in the days when space travel was new and exciting and, we thought, fraught with uncertainty…

It happens that I know exactly what I was doing ten years ago tonight: I was drinking beer at Joe Green's house.

Now if I remembered every night I spent drinking beer, there wouldn't be room in my brain for much else. But this particular evening was special, the way only a dozen or so evenings have been special—because ten years ago today, Apollo 14 roared into the sky, and Joe Green lives at Cape Kennedy.

Joe writes science fiction, but also works for Boeing down at the Cape. When the Apollo launches started, he put out a blanket invitation. Any science fiction writer who wanted to see a launch close up could come down and he'd make arrangements: let his house be a central meeting place. I don't know if he realized it at the time, but he was catering to a brand new kind of social misfit: space junkie.

Our habit is expensive but otherwise we're a relatively harmless lot. We don't lounge nodding in doorways, frightening children, or knock over liquor stores. Like all junkies, we do lie and cheat and steal. But since we only lie to and cheat and steal from the government, it's all very American.