Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [88]
Especially with continuing investment in robotics and machine intelligence, sending humans to Mars can’t be justified by science alone. And many more people can experience the virtual Mars than could possibly be sent to the real one. We can do very well with robots. If we’re going to send people, we’ll need a better reason than science and exploration.
In the 1980s, I thought I saw a coherent justification for human missions to Mars. I imagined the United States and the Soviet Union, the two Cold War rivals that had put our global civilization at risk, joining together in a far-seeing, high-technology endeavor that would give hope to people everywhere. I pictured a kind of Apollo program in reverse, in which cooperation, not competition, was the driving force, in which the two leading space-faring nations would together lay the groundwork for a major advance in human history—the eventual settlement of another planet.
The symbolism seemed so apt. The same technology that can propel apocalyptic weapons from continent to continent would enable the first human voyage to another planet. It was a choice of fitting mythic power: to embrace the planet named after, rather the madness ascribed to, the god of war.
We succeeded in interesting Soviet scientists and engineers in such a joint endeavor. Roald Sagdeev, then director of the Institute for Space Research of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, was already deeply engaged in international cooperation on Soviet robotic missions to Venus, Mars, and Halley’s Comet, long before the idea became fashionable. Projected joint use of the Soviet Mir space station and the Saturn V-class launch vehicle Energiya made cooperation attractive to the Soviet organizations that manufactured these items of hardware; they were otherwise having difficulty justifying their wares. Through a sequence of arguments (helping to bring the Cold War to an end being chief among them), then-Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev was convinced. During the December 1987 Washington summit, Mr. Gorbachev—asked what was the most important joint activity through which the two countries might symbolize the change in their relationship—unhesitatingly replied, “Let’s go to Mars together.”
But the Reagan Administration was not interested. Cooperating with the Soviets, acknowledging that certain Soviet technologies were more advanced than their American counterparts, making some American technology available to the Soviets, sharing credit, providing an alternative for the arms manufacturers—these were not to the Administration’s liking. The offer was turned down. Mars would have to wait.
In only a few years, times have changed. The Cold War is over. The Soviet Union is no more. The benefit deriving from the two nations working together has lost some of its force. Other nations—especially Japan and the constituent members of the European Space Agency—have become interplanetary travelers. Many just and urgent demands are levied on the discretionary budgets of the nations.
But the Energiya heavy-lift booster still awaits a mission. The workhorse Proton rocket is available. The Mir space station—with a crew on board almost continuously—still orbits the Earth every hour and a half. Despite internal turmoil, the Russian space program continues vigorously. Cooperation between Russia and America in space is accelerating. A Russian cosmonaut, Sergei Krikalev, in 1994 flew on the shuttle Discovery (for the usual one-week shuttle mission duration;