DESTINATION MARS
Mars is waiting for us.
How many of us first "turned on" to science fiction by reading about the Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs? Or Stanley G. Weinbaum? Or Ray Bradbury?
And how much of the public's waning interest in space exploration is upheld by the chance of finding life somewhere on the Red Planet?
In this issue of Analog, we present three pieces of fiction, a science fact article, and a special feature—all of them about Mars. Not Burroughs' Barsoom, nor Weinbaum's abode of the ancient Egyptian gods, nor Bradbury's site of bone-chess cities. The Mars we describe today is NASA's Mars, the planet revealed by the Mariner space probes.
The Mars that may kill the space program.
As Richard C. Hoagland shows in his science article, there is a strong possibility that the Viking probes which will be launched next year to soft-land on Mars in 1976 will not—repeat, NOT—find life on the Red Planet. Hoagland also shows how this disappointment could permanently end the space program; or at least, the exploratory spearhead of it.
To understand fully how this might happen, we must look at the history of the space program, and then extrapolate two possible future scenarios.
America's efforts at exploring interplanetary space began with a space race, but it wasn't the well-publicized Space Race (note the capitalization) that was epitomized by the Apollo lunar landing program. The real space race was conducted mostly in secret, beginning in the early 1950's. It was only on October 4, 1957, when the Russians successfully orbited Sputnik I, that the race came out into the open. And even then, only the smallest tip of the iceberg was seen by the general public.
The real space race was a contest to see if Soviet Russia could deploy a strategic strike force of ICBM's before the United States could. The Russians got a long lead on us, mainly because of the differences in interpretation that the two different national governments placed on the scientific advice they received from their expert advisers.
At the end of World War Two, both superpowers closely examined the future potentials of the two most awesome weapons to come out of the war: nuclear bombs and long-distance rockets. Two nuclear bombs had ended the war. Earlier, German V-2 rockets had proved to military men—and the helpless citizens of London—that there was no defense against rockets that flew at many times the speed of sound.
The US assessment of these weapons was led by Vannevar Bush, who had headed the Office of Research and Development during the war, an organization that had spearheaded the development of proximity fuses for artillery and rocket-assisted takeoff boosters for aircraft. Bush concluded that nuclear bombs will always be too heavy and bulky to be lifted by rockets; it would be foolhardy, he reported to the Government, to expect rockets ever to attain the payload capacity and accuracy needed to make them useful nuclear weapons delivery systems.
So American rocketry languished, even well into the 1950's, using captured V-2's and a few newly-developed single-stage rockets for very limited high-altitude sounding flights. American rocket technology never moved beyond about 200 kilometers' altitude in those years.
The Russian assessment of the same basic facts came to a very different conclusion. Since nuclear weapons would always be heavy and bulky, they decided that they had to develop very large rockets to carry them accurately across 10,000-kilometer ranges. The Russians pushed ahead with big rockets.
Incidentally, the basic premise of these studies turned out to be unrealistically pessimistic. Nuclear weapons became smaller, and more potent, as weapons development programs progressed in both nations.
By the mid-1950's the Russians were flight-testing ICBM's and the US was conducting a frenzied, secret crash program to close the lead that the Russians had established. If the Russians could field enough operational ICBM's to do severe damage to the US before we could produce a comparable force to counterbalance their threat, the tide of the Cold War would swing to their side. Perhaps permanently.
Thus, there was a "missile gap" in the mid-1950's, although by the time the phrase became popular enough to be a part of the 1960 Presidential election campaign, the gap had been closed considerably. Thanks to the last crash program the US military-industrial complex ever mounted, the Russians never gained a big enough lead to really threaten us. Today, sophisticated analysts argue among themselves over which side has the stronger nuclear strike force.
The Russians, realizing that they were not going to attain a clear-cut military superiority, turned the race into one of international prestige. They used their big, reliable boosters to launch the first Sputniks and Luniks. America's response to this sudden change of pace was too little and too late. As a technical editor on Project Vanguard, I know first-hand how poorly we did in the opening phase of the (capitalized now) Space Race.
President John Kennedy focused the US space program on the target of a manned lunar landing: Project Apollo. He did it for a variety of reasons, mostly political, as all superior statesmen do. Once focused, the space program could be pushed through the Congress as a means of recapturing America's lost prestige. It succeeded in doing that—and much more. Practically all of the space exploration that's been done since the early 1960's, including the unmanned scientific probes to the planets, is a very real spinoff from the Apollo program. Without Apollo to convince the Congress that billions were needed for space, the smaller programs such as Mariner and Pioneer would have quietly died. Pure science never fared well in Congress.
The Russians dropped out of the Space Race. We landed on the Moon more than five years ago, and to date the Russians are still having difficulties with long-duration missions in orbit around the Earth.
So much for history.
A brief note about the present. July 20, 1974, was the fifth anniversary of Apollo 11's touchdown at Tranquility Base. It slipped past with hardly a murmur from the nation's press and communications media. True, all eyes were focused on Watergate and the Middle East. But except for a CBS-TV documentary by Walter Cronkite, a self-confessed "space buff," there was scarcely a word about that historic date.
One thing Cronkite did mention, however, was in answer to all those who decried the twenty-some billion dollars spent on Apollo, shouting that it should have been spent "on the poor." He pointed out that during the same period of time that Apollo was running, the Federal Government alone spent more than 560 billion dollars on social and welfare programs.
Now for the future.
One possible scenario, explored by Hoagland in his fact article, is that the Viking landers will not find evidence of life on Mars, even though life exists on the planet. The reaction to this negative information could be disastrous for the space program.
After all, the first part of the space race—the secret race—is still fixed in the public's mind as the famous Missile Gap of the 1960 Presidential campaign: a gap that turned out later to be nonexistent. At least, most voters think it was nonexistent. Then came the wildly ballyhooed Space Race for the Moon. When the Russians bowed out, after realizing they were being embarrassingly outdistanced by the Apollo program, the public and politicians again felt that they had been hoodwinked into spending billions of dollars on a "Moondoggle."
NASA no longer has competition with the Russians to wave in front of the Congressional appropriations committees. A strong part of their annual sales pitch now is the search for life on other worlds. Should the Viking probe of Mars prove negative, even this somewhat shaky support will be knocked out from under NASA's platform.
The politicians, coached by those who never wanted a space program in the first place, will reason that there's no life on the Moon, Venus is a red-hot inkwell, and Mercury is barren. Now, if Mars seems devoid of life, why spend all that money on dead chunks of rock? Just because the scientists are curious? Spend it on programs that will earn votes!
The exploration of the Solar System will cease. All right, but there will still be a space program. We'll still have operations in near-Earth orbit: the practical kinds of communications and observation satellites that everybody "knew all along" would be useful.
But human society is not static, and neither is technology. Without the impetus of new challenges, both society and technology wither. If the exploratory part of the space program dies, we will never get to develop the hardware we will need to reach the Moon with large payloads, or to reach outward to the planets. We will never even begin to exploit the natural resources of the other worlds of the Solar System, resources that our Earth will desperately need in the next century.
And there will be no second chance. If we don't reach out to the Solar System now, by the time we have gutted our own world and realize that we must seek resources elsewhere, we'll have neither the resources nor the energy to explore the remainder of the Solar System and utilize the wealth that lies there waiting for us. The next few decades are the critical decision-making time for the human race: either we grow up and reach out into the Solar System, or we collapse from lack of resources and energy and revert to the Middle Ages, or further. If we don't take the steps today that will make us a spacefaring race, humankind will be locked forever into a planet-bound existence, and eventually will become as extinct as the dinosaurs.
The second scenario is brighter. Picture a successful Viking probe, and the electrifying effect the discovery of life on Mars will have. The space program will not only continue, it will be enlarged and accelerated. Good ideas that are now languishing for lack of interest will be revitalized. Above all, new propulsion techniques that will cut down the costs of spaceflight will be developed, including nuclear rockets, electric propulsion, and even laser propulsion.
The cry of "On to Mars!" will be virtually irresistible.
There is a third alternative, and one that we must prepare for. Like a good general, we must be ready to face reverses, and prevent setbacks from becoming permanent defeat. This means that we who understand the value of the space program, and realize how much it means to humankind's future, must be prepared to weather the storm of negative reaction to a "failure" of the Viking program. Even if life is not found on Mars, we must push for a continuation of space exploration, and continued development of space hardware.
There are two programs underway today that can provide the basic framework for a strong and successful future space program. They are the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission, planned for 1975, and the Space Shuttle, scheduled to begin operations in the early 1980's.
The Apollo-Soyuz mission is more symbolic than anything else. But it is symbolic of an important change in our attitudes. Instead of competing against each other, America and Russia can cooperate in space efforts. The costs of space operations can be halved, if the two nations can learn to cooperate fully. And more than halved, if Europe, Japan, and all other interested nations share in a single worldwide program that is truly by, for, and of the people of Earth.
As John Kennedy pointed out long ago, "United, there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures; divided, there is little we can do . . ."
The Space Shuttle is designed to cut down the costs of putting payloads in orbit. It will be the workhorse of the Eighties. While all the spacecraft flown so far can be likened to hand-tooled sportscars, the Shuttle will be a truck—built to carry loads from Earth to orbit economically, reliably, and repeatedly.
The Shuttle will be reusable. Up until now, astronauts and cosmonauts have flown into space in a wildly extravagant style, using throwaway, one-time boosters and spacecraft. Imagine using the same technique to travel from New York to Melbourne. You'd take an aircraft carrier as far as Capetown and sink it there, after taking off from it in a jet plane, which you ditch in Melbourne harbor so that you can complete your journey in a rubber raft.
Unless the foes of space efforts have their way in Congress, the Shuttle will he carrying men and women to work in the 1980's. Not just the astronauts who pilot the bird, but construction crews who will build the permanent manned space stations of the Eighties, astronomers, physicists, physicians, clinicians, therapists, patients, engineers, tourists. Perhaps even a few science fiction writers.
With the Shuttle as a beginning, and a strong international space program pushing the development of ever-more-efficient propulsion systems, the rest of the Solar System can he opened up to us. We will be able to take the first steps in ending the man-made erosion of our planet, by utilizing the environment of space as a site for our industry, and as a source of energy and raw materials.
What better way to symbolize this new era of human existence than to mount an exploratory mission to Mars, manned (and womaned) by people from many nations: a true expedition from Earth, not from any single nation.
That future can he open to us, even if Viking reports negative results. But only if we are ready to counter the short-sighted arguments of those who will seize on a "failure" of Viking as an excuse for strangling the space program.
For better or worse, Mars is the symbol of our future, the place where our best dreams—or worst fears—will be realized.
