This week, Americans celebrated the successful delivery of NASA’s Perseverance Rover to its destination on the Martian surface, marking the beginning of a new era of interplanetary exploration. However, as far as the solar system around us is concerned, the USA has not always led from the front. During the Reagan administration, for example, the agency saw its budget reduced in favor of arms build-up ahead of an expected Cold War with the Soviet Union, as we see in this excerpt from David W Brown’s latest work, The Mission.
Harper Collins
Excerpt from the book THE MISSION: or: How a disciple of Carl Sagan, an Ex-Motocross Racer, a Texas Tea Party congressman, the world’s worst typewriter saleswoman, California Mountain People, and an anonymous NASA functional war with Mars went on to survive with Washington , and stole a ride on an Alabama moon rocket to send a space robot to Jupiter in search of the second Garden of Eden at the bottom of a strange ocean within an ice world called Europe (a true story) © 2021 by David W. Brown. From Custom House, a series of books by William Morrow / HarperCollins Publishers. Reprint with permission.
For planetary scientists, the Jimmy Carter – Ronald Reagan years were in retrospect like the Dark Ages, and they, the monks who tend to enclave the cultivation of civilization. NASA did not launch any planetary scientific missions during a solid decade, in late 1978, and the only space science data drifting back to Earth came from the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft from the farthest planets of the solar system, where you would come three weeks of data and then three to five years of silence – barely enough to sustain an entire field of scientific inquiry. Voyager’s findings at Jupiter have aroused a desire by the well-groomed planetary science community to return there, but it requires Reagan to fund the Galileo spacecraft – something his government zealously avoided in accepting power in 1981. The new president believed he had a mandate to reduce defense spending, and he followed suit, and if you did not build bombs, battleships or Black Hawk helicopters, your budget was ready – and grab it. While NASA’s top line has generally performed well, the money was mainly focused on the spacecraft program, which in the public imagination has become something of a flying Statue of Liberty. Either way, the shuttle had military applications, including deploying spy satellites and, at least on paper, stealing satellites from foreign governments. However, the looters on the supply side will still get their pressure from the agency, and that means science. Before the toner dried on new presidential letterheads, the White House told NASA that of Galileo, the Hubble Space Telescope and the joint NASA – European Space Agency International Solar Polar Mission to study the sun, it could save two (for now). And just like that, Solar Polar was gone. The Europeans invested more than a hundred million dollars in it, and America thanked them for the trouble by withdrawing without warning and leaving the Europeans boiling. The massacre continued with the spacecraft VOIR, the Venus Orbiting Imaging Radar: evaporated. This cancellation also went badly. If the Solar Polar abandonment was an uninvited conspiracy that drove America’s allies abroad, the Venus cancellation was to the least a rude gesture that suggests the same to the world scientists at home.
But that Galileo mission – how it annoyed and annoyed the White House. How the administration wanted to kill this half-billion-dollar monster! This expedition to Jupiter. . . we – we want just been there with Voyager! Why did we even talk about this? The Office of Management and Budget therefore lifted Galileo in its preliminary plan for the agency. As for the twin spacecraft Voyager: What was there to learn about planets beyond Saturn anyway? Uranus! Neptune! Did it matter? I mean, come on! Just give out the shutdown command, and we can also turn off this devil-infested Deep Space Network, those giant twenty-story radio dishes needed to talk to them. That’s two hundred and twenty-two million dollars saved overnight. Between Galileo and Voyager, we can reduce costs by half a billion.
To somehow save a sinking ship, which even became for outsiders, the public began to pit. In one case, Stan Kent, an engineer in California he called the Viking Fund, created – a private attempt to cover the cost. for the Deep Space Network downlink time for Viking 1, the last surviving spacecraft on the surface of Mars. Donate now to feed a hungry robot – send checks to 3033 Moore Park Ave. # 27, San Jose, CA 95128. The Viking program was once the pinnacle of NASA space science, the most ambitious agency since the Apollo program, and when it was conceived, a prospective forerunner of Apollo’s obvious heir: human missions to the planet Mars.
Between 1965 and 1976, NASA maintained a steady series of sophisticated Mars probes. Mariner 4, a flyby in 1965, was humanity’s first successful encounter with the Red Planet. Mariners 6 and 7 followed four years later, taking a closer look at the entire Mars disk, and these images, stitched together, revealed a true rotating planet – just like Earth. Mariner 9 in 1971 was the first spacecraft to orbit another planet, mapping Mars in high resolution and capturing dust storms and weather patterns. Like the past lines in the book of Genesis, each spacecraft in turn made Mars a world like our own. By the time the Viking landers left launching blocks at Cape Canaveral in 1975, there was still no hope for the continued existence of alien civilizations, but flora and fauna of some form were still on the table. And the question remained – the ultimate question – the same that fueled fiction and spurred scientists for centuries: What did that wildlife on Mars look like?
The US space program has always relentlessly moved to Mars. Before the Eagle landed – before even the first naut – cosmo, taiko or astro – before Sputnik–before even the formation of NASA itself – was there The Mars project, a work of speculative fiction by Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist moved to the United States immediately after World War II. No mere experimentation or luxury – no shotguns, no saucers – the plot was a thin veneer on How to Do It, and the author was the person who was likely to make it happen. Written by Braun The Mars project in 1948 after completing the V-2 rocket with the reconstruction of his new American host, a ballistic missile he helped develop during the war. The book was later stripped of its fictional elements and redesigned as a nine-page article in the April 30, 1954 issue. Collier’s Weekly, then one of the most popular and sought after magazines in the United States. The first serious study of how to get to Mars involved von Braun’s plan that there was a space station and a flotilla of reusable rockets and shuttles, and that a crew of seventy people was needed for a Martian stay of more than one Earth year. Upon arrival, astronauts (well, “astronauts”) –astronauts (not yet invented) would enter the orbit and explore suitable settlements for the human beachhead. (He did not discuss robot exploration, because digital, programmable robots have not yet been invented.)
For von Braun, Mars was always the plan, the moon just a waypoint, and fourteen years later, when Armstrong jumped from the bottom step of the lunar lander, it was Braun’s Saturn V rocket that brought him there. He (ie von Braun) was at the time director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, de facto ‘father of the American space program’, and a minor celebrity. He had appeared several times in a 1950s television program years before. Disneyland– Hosted by Walt himself – to sell to 40 million Americans the idea of robust, reliable rockets, lunar shots and Mars colonies. When the programs aired, Yuri Gagarin was still an obscure pilot in the Soviet Air Force, and Alan Shepard a test pilot in Maryland. To the extent that Americans were even aware of American spatial ambitions, it was von Braun’s soft sale of Mars missions with Walt Disney. He worked on this for a very long time.
So it was not surprising that two weeks after American silicone soles pressed presses into fresh mouthwash, von Braun walked into Spiro Agnew’s office and hit the next natural frontier for American exploration on the vice president’s table: the Red Planet. The presentation of fifty pages – the definitive plan to make humanity multi-planetary – represents the culmination of von Braun’s life work. His prescription pertains to many of the elements he had proposed decades earlier: the rockets, the shuttle buses, the station – even a nuclear-powered spaceship.
Unfortunately for von Braun, ruling powers in Congress and the White House quickly saw the Apollo program as the goal, rather than an early milestone of something much bigger, as he had hoped. You did not build Hoover Dam and then … built more Hoover Dams along the river, the politicians said. We set a goal and through God we did it. Why even have a NASA? the White House wondered aloud. At Apollo 15 in 1971, opinion polls linked public space spending to about twenty-three percent, while sixty-six percent said spending was too high. There would be no national political price to close Cape Canaveral completely. Really, what did we do up there?
Nevertheless, von Braun’s series of space missions that resulted in Mars exploration defined NASA in such a way that it was almost wrapped up in the system. Nixon, who had no interest in the space program but even no interest in being the one to end it, only entertained the spacecraft element as viable because it had 1. those spy satellite applications and 2. a large construction project in Palmdale could be California, and keep his home state in his column during the next presidential campaign. So the California-made, satellite-stealing spacecraft was it! NASA lived another day to escape.