Exploring the Solar System

The images and data streaming from the Cassini spacecraft as it begins its four-year exploration of Saturn and its system of rings and moons bring back some of my fondest memories as a C&EN reporter. As C&EN's West Coast bureau head in the 1980s, I covered the Voyager 1 and 2 encounters with Saturn and Voyager 2's subsequent explorations of Uranus and Neptune.

Current C&EN West Coast Bureau Head Elizabeth Wilson was at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif., for Cassini's insertion into orbit around Saturn. "It was fantastic being at JPL," Wilson says. "Cassini is a remarkable engineering feat, and it is an excellent example of how successful robotic missions can be. The sense of awe at what humans can accomplish was almost overwhelming."

I remember similar feelings of awe during the Voyager missions. Those missions preceded the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, and they utterly changed our perceptions of the four gas-giant planets. Jupiter's ring, Io's volcanoes, Europa's tantalizingly smooth surface; Saturn's plethora of moons, the small "shepherd" moons that shape the intricate system of rings; the complex uranian and neptunian systems--all were unknown, unforeseen, and utterly breathtaking. Like the 1995–2003 Galileo mission to Jupiter before it, Cassini will rewrite the textbooks on the outer solar system.

I have another, not nearly so pleasant memory from my coverage of the Voyager missions. On the morning of Jan. 28, 1986, after wrapping up my stint at JPL covering Voyager 2's encounter with Uranus, I was driving from Pasadena to Santa Barbara to attend a Gordon Conference on metals in biology when I heard the news on the radio that the space shuttle Challenger had exploded during its launch into space, killing all seven astronauts on board.

High school science teacher Christa McAuliffe was one of the astronauts who died that day. Her ascent into space was supposed to demonstrate that space travel had become, in the era of the shuttle, routine. The Challenger disaster and the loss last year of the space shuttle Columbia and its crew conclusively demonstrated that human space flight is anything but routine and probably never will be.

In the past two decades, our knowledge of the solar system has been increased beyond measure by the Voyager, Galileo, and Cassini missions to the outer solar system; by the Hubble Space Telescope; and by robotic missions to Mars--first little Sojourner, and now the much more sophisticated and ambitious Spirit and Opportunity explorers.

By contrast, manned space missions have contributed almost nothing to our store of knowledge, and they have led to two awful tragedies that claimed the lives of 14 astronauts. The International Space Station is, to the knowledgeable, a scientific failure. Stanford University physics professor and Nobel Prize winner Burton Richter recently characterized the scientific experiments being conducted on the space station as "ant farms in space."

Just last week, the New York Times reported that "NASA's emergency plan to use the International Space Station as a safe haven for shuttle astronauts whose craft cannot safely return to Earth would carry a high risk of failure if it were ever tried." It turns out that the space station lacks sufficient support systems and supplies to keep the shuttle and the station crews alive for long enough to mount a rescue mission.

In light of this, NASA's new plan to establish a base on the moon and subsequently mount a manned expedition to Mars is as wrongheaded a commitment of resources as can be imagined. Does anyone really think a lunar base would be any easier to build or maintain than the space station? Does anyone really think that a lunar base could somehow be used as a launching pad for a Mars expedition?

I'm not sure carbon-based life forms will ever belong in space. Our silicon-based robots are much better surrogates for extending human senses and exploring the solar system and deep space. It's time that we pull the plug on the pointless and wasteful romantic fantasy that is manned exploration of space.

Thanks for reading.

Views expressed on this page are those of the author and not necessarily those of ACS.