I don’t have much of the explorer’s instinct. I’ve never been out of the country–well, to Canada a couple of times, but that doesn’t really count. When I travel I collect unpleasant experiences the way some people collect postcards. I get migraines. I get nausea. The notion of traveling anywhere without adequate bathrooms makes me quiver. Hell, sometimes it takes some doing just to get me out of the apartment.
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For a long time space exploration has been a bit like this: it’s not the idea of new horizons, of new discoveries that draws scientists and politicians, despite all the lip service given to such a quest. It’s the difficulty and even dangerousness of the enterprise. Scientists remembering the first moon shots don’t talk much about the moon itself; they wax nostalgic about the challenge of getting there. Not surprisingly, the most potent metaphor used to describe the early days of space exploration–the “space race”–evokes not the voyages of Columbus but the spectacle of highly trained athletes competing on a track.
Yet back in the 60s, when there was still a faint chance we might actually discover something interesting out there, the enterprise still had a certain glamour to it. (Though when John Kennedy promised to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade he didn’t really expect anyone would be there to greet the visitors from earth; he was more worried about the Red menace.) But now that we realize we’re not going to find any aliens paddling gondolas through the canals of Mars, we can’t even pretend to be interested in discovering new lives and new civilizations. Space exploration has become merely an exercise in getting to the top.
To those in the space-exploration business–NASA scientists, professional futurologists–it’s been obvious for a long time that the party’s over. So it’s hardly surprising to find that a new book on the future of space exploration has the tentative title Where Next, Columbus? Where next, indeed? And why? These questions haunt this colorful coffee-table book edited by Valerie Neal, a curator of space history at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum. But despite essays by some of the best-known and most perceptive observers of science and space exploration, including Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould, they remain unsatisfactorily answered. Which is perhaps the best we can expect.
If Pyne’s essay is about disenchantment, the essay immediately following, by Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt, is an attempt at reenchantment, a wide-eyed celebration of the wonder of discovery. Schmitt can’t provide a rational explanation for the appeal of space exploration and doesn’t even try. “‘Being there’ adds the human element to life’s events,” he concludes. “The desire to ‘be there’ will continue to drive young people away from the established paths of history on Earth and to the planets and the stars. Yes, they probably will follow the examples of previous explorers and offer ‘practical’ or ‘pragmatic’ reasons to rationalize going ‘up into space in ships’–a route to the Indies, first to reach the poles, beat them to the moon…but it still will be a rationalization for the basic human desire to ‘be there.’”
Science fiction is pretty transparently a projection of our own fantasies, an opportunity to imagine what the world would be like if we gave this or that human tendency free rein to design a world of its own. It’s a perfectly understandable, even admirable, imaginative endeavor. But if the only reason we can think of to go into space is to spark someone’s imagination, then I begin to wonder. Hell, there are cheaper forms of inspiration. A good book, for example. A model train set. A school lunch.
