Can John Glenn Do It Again?
Long ago he saved America from losing the space race to the Russians. Now the 77-year-old astronaut has a new mission: saving NASA.
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Of course, it’s a risky move—the last time the agency tried a PR stunt, it blew up a schoolteacher and six astronauts on national television. You would think NASA officials would be gun-shy about trying something similar. But there is nothing risk-averse about Dan Goldin. “Hey! John Glenn is a big boy!” he thunders. “John Glenn understands the dangers of space and that there’s a finite probability he won’t come back. NASA opens the frontier. Why should we be afraid?” Goldin sticks to the official line about studying the aging process, but he isn’t blind to the mission’s ancillary benefits. “NASA was formed in 1958, and there were a bunch of brilliant, nerdy engineers, but the public didn’t really connect with us,” he says. “But with Alan Shepard and John Glenn, we put a face on the space program. We defined what America is really doing in space. And that is as important an aspect of the space program as anything else. The nation needs heroes.”
“Dead on Arrival”
FOR ITS ENTIRE EXISTENCE NASA HAS been riven by the classic debate over whether human beings are needed in space. Lately Goldin’s retrenchments have given a new edge to the traditional battle. Advocates of unmanned exploration argue that machines are cheaper to send up and less politically risky, since you can’t kill them. Supporters of manned flight counter that humans are more flexible and therefore constitute a real asset to any mission; they also argue that by risking their lives, astronauts supply the glamour factor needed to secure public support, and therefore funding. Complicating matters, NASA’s two camps could not be more unlike—macho jet pilots who fly for romantic reasons versus egghead scientists who articulate their passions in coldly rational language. These opposing forces compete head-to-head for a limited supply of money, and the unmanned side has always suffered a disadvantage. “It’s hard to get the public excited about plasma instruments,” says Mike Carlowicz, a writer employed by Raytheon to explain some of the physics research at the Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland. “They measure stuff you can’t see and most people don’t understand anyway.” Manned missions make for better TV, and as it happens, industry favors them because the cost of the redundant safety systems needed to ensure the welfare of the crews provides far more lucrative contracts. For all these reasons Houston has always received the bulk of NASA’s budget, though it is one of ten field centers. Most space scientists long ago became resigned to the situation, knowing they get their grants only because of the public’s infatuation with the astronaut corps. “We realized from the beginning that our work happens on the shirttails of the manned program,” said Robert Hoffman, a project scientist at Goddard. “To the public, NASA is the manned program. We wouldn’t exist without it, and it would be naive not to understand that.”
Yet projects initiated by the scientists at centers other than Johnson have contributed far more to our understanding of the solar system than any moon walk ever did. Consider the feats of the die-hard crafts Voyager 1 and 2, launched in 1977. They visited all the outer planets, beaming back reams of information, such as the news that Jupiter and Uranus have rings. At the moment, Voyager 1 is six billion miles from Earth, and Voyager 2 is five billion miles away—both far beyond Pluto’s orbit. Their radio signals are now so feeble that they measure just a fraction of one watt, but their outmoded circuitry is still sending home data. Scientists hope that around the turn of the century they will be able to define the boundary of the helio-sphere—where the solar wind meets interstellar space, signaling the end of the sun’s domain. More recently the Galileo probe generated intense debate among physicists and biologists by taking pictures of ice floes on Europa, one of sixteen moons that circle Jupiter. The ridges and dimples suggest that Europa harbors liquid water under its icy shell—in other words, that Europa may be home to life.
In the meantime, the repaired Hubble space telescope has produced a series of stunning images that are transforming notions about the rest of the universe. The Hubble wings around Earth at 360 miles above sea level, well beyond the distorting cloak of the atmosphere. After it was lofted up there in 1990, NASA discovered that the costly telescope had a defective lens, making it the butt of jokes about the agency’s incompetence, but in 1993 a hazardous, labor-intensive repair job fixed the problem. Since then the Hubble has revealed that space is teeming with large swirls of plasma, known as protoplanetary disks, thereby suggesting that the process of planet formation is common, rather than uncommon. The Hubble has also captured ghostly impressions of some of the most distant objects ever detected—stars so far away that by the time their light travels here, it is extremely old. These photographs offer physicists the best images available of what the newborn universe looked like just one billion years after the Big Bang.
The Hubble’s eye-popping results emerged around the same time the average suburban household discovered the Internet. When scientists began putting images from the space telescope onto a Web site, space junkies were delighted to find they could download shots of “Hula Hoop” rings formed by a dying supernova, of a celestial fireworks show caused by two spiral galaxies slamming into each other, and of stars birthing from towers of sculpted gas in the Eagle nebula. The site (www.stsci.edu) has gotten up to one million hits per day. The ensuing avalanche of response mail taught NASA officials that the Internet brought them into direct contact with their core supporters—space buffs of the world—without the agency’s having to go through the filter of the media, always cynical, always drawn to political controversy instead of scientific achievement, always prone to dumb down major findings.
As the unmanned successes mounted, it began to seem as if the new face of NASA was embodied by centers other than Johnson—perhaps by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where most of the planetary probes were designed. The JPL is run by Cal Tech professors and grad students whose appearance is the farthest thing from the trim military pilots—Birkenstocks, Bermuda shorts, and bad hair. No astronauts work here. In fact, the closest thing to a hero to emerge from the JPL was a cute little buggy named Sojourner, part of the Pathfinder mission to Mars that captured the imagination of millions on July 4, 1997, when nightly news programs showed footage of the lander bouncing to a halt like a giant beach ball. Later, scientists steered Sojourner around Mars by remote control while TV audiences looked on (a Hot Wheels copy of the rover became one of the best-selling toy cars in history). The mission was wildly successful, beaming back more than 16,000 images before the radio signals fell silent. As with the Hubble, the JPL team put most of the images Pathfinder sent back on the Internet. Again, it was a PR windfall: Citing the 200 million hits on the JPL’s Web site and its links in five days, the media proclaimed space “cool” again.
Despite these accomplishments, many of the scientists felt unappreciated. Every time they turned around, Goldin wanted more cuts. Were the faster, cheaper projects really going to be better? Voyager, Galileo, Pathfinder, and the Hubble were all built before Goldin’s reforms. Now NASA is pouring billions into incredibly costly projects on the manned side of the agency, such as the space station. Even before the success of the Pathfinder mission, some of the country’s most prominent researchers began to criticize the agency for misguided priorities. “The manned program is where NASA spends most of its money, and right now it’s the least justified part of its program,” Carl Sagan told Discover magazine two years before his death, in 1996.
But the manned program kept the backing of Dan Goldin, the only proponent who really mattered. Ever since his first days at NASA, when he researched electric propulsion systems for interplanetary travel (a goal that has yet to be accomplished), Goldin has been devoted to the idea of putting people in space. His years in industry—where entire companies are supported by the public’s appetite for space travel—only fed his enthusiasm. “Where is it written that America wants a program without astronauts?” he snapped after I repeated Sagan’s criticism. “I love the scientists, but some of them better get with the program. Let me tell you this, if not for the astronauts the Hubble telescope would be dead. Dead on arrival. Show me a robot that could have put the contact lens on the Hubble telescope, built by the scientists, who are so perfect.”
Birthing an Elephant
BEFORE NASA CAN CONSIDER A MISSION to Mars, the Johnson Space Center must put a manned space station into orbit. This is a tricky issue, though, because the agency rarely invokes Mars in arguments before Congress: It isn’t politic to speak of the station as a means to another venture that would be such a drain on the federal budget when NASA faces significant opposition to the space station itself because of its price tag.
The first phase of the project has consisted of Mir missions—sending American astronauts to the aging Russian station. During a press conference at the JSC in July, Andy Thomas, an astronaut with blond hair, a square boxer’s face, and a confident, articulate manner, talked about his 130 days on Mir. The incredible vistas he had seen were still fresh in his mind. “I saw the aurora australis, down in the southern hemisphere,” he recalled. “It was like a green curtain, swimming across the sky for hundreds and hundreds of miles. I also witnessed the fires in South America. To see the extent of the burning—the fires were just huge, greater than you could ever imagine.”
Within hours of his return, Thomas experienced the balance problems, nausea, and muscular aches that bother everyone who spends an extended time in zero gravity. “I still get aches and pains in my neck,” he said. “Curiously, the soles of my feet are very tender, like the feet of a newborn baby. I can’t stand in one place for a long time.” Harder to observe are the more serious health problems associated with spending a lot of time in space—bone degeneration and immune system problems—that doctors have been studying by poking and prodding the astronauts returning from Mir. As NASA gears up to launch its own space station, experiences on Mir have provided guidance on questions ranging from engineering details to where to put the crew’s exercise treadmill. Thomas suggested avoiding Mir’s gray-and-brown color scheme, which he found depressing.
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