Mission to Nowhere

by Javier Castillo
19 January 2004

t is inarguably the greatest flash-forward sequence in cinematic history. An ancestor of humanity flings an animal bone into the air where it ascends, then gracefully descends before becoming a ship quietly orbiting the Earth.

With understated elegance, legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick sums up three million years of human evolution into a split-second framed synopsis: not much has happened.

So here we are in the nascent years of the 21st century, and our space program still consists of throwing objects into the air. Not content to litter the planet wherever he goes, mankind has successfully started to wrap the globe with miles of space debris that can be hazardous to shuttles and other satellites, forcing them into higher orbits. We have the Hubble Telescope which is set to expire in a couple years; the International Space Station that is by last accounts still leaking oxygen from somewhere. We have the space shuttle program with its aging fleet, still performing high school experiments while its crews watch the world pass from day into night in a matter of minutes. And then of course, we have our costly missions to Mars.

The recent success of the latest NASA mission was a welcome breather from a string of disasters starting in 1999. The latest Mars rover, Spirit, landed “safely” on the Martian terrain and managed to leave its cocoon of airbags to roll onto the surface, thus escaping the mysterious death of the British rover, Beagle, that never answered calls from home barely a week or so prior. NASA hopes to repeat this success on 24 January, when the second rover, Opportunity, descends from the heavens to the Red Planet to scour the land for...microbes. Germs. Little pieces of stuff that are supposed to shatter mankind’s perceptions to the core.

Puh-leeze.

Before I continue, let me make the necessary declaration that I am not a Luddite. I do possess a sense of exploration and discovery, but quite frankly, NASA officials wetting themselves over the latest pictures from Mars was too much. Why? Well, because they’re basically showing pictures from the last rover, Sojourner: deserts. Okay, deserts tinged red, but these images all look identical. In fact, there is nothing remarkable about these images other than they could have been taken on Earth somewhere. Except this time, we’re supposed to be thrilled beyond belief because these pictures are of better quality. More detail. More excruciating detail of rocks and dirt. Terrific. I can barely contain myself.

What Spirit is supposed to start doing is to wander the landscape and begin performing a series of carefully executed tests that are ultimately designed to see whether or not Mars once had life. Now, this may grip the imaginations of ten year-olds, but frankly, I’m a little non-plussed. Yes, I understand that such discoveries can give scientists a better picture of how life might have evolved (even in the form of microbes) and planetary formation, but really, we’re spending millions and millions of dollars to prove (maybe) that life existed millions of years ago somewhere else? Looking at Mars now, we can safely conclude there isn’t much there; that if life ever flourished in a warm climate, it has long gone, perhaps longer than even the human species has been crawling around Earth. We are, basically, looking for ghosts of needles in the haystack.

Now, President Bush has stepped in and announced his “vision” of sending man back to the Moon and to Mars. I realize that it’s purely a coincidence he should make this announcement during an election year, but like the pictures from Mars, I was duly unimpressed. It’s a lot of rhetorical posturing -- a feat given that rhetoric is not one of Mr. Bush’s strengths, but it played well to create a sense of exploration and discovery and more importantly, normalcy: we’re heading back to those halcyon days of the 1960s where America was in the lead of the space race and our men had the right stuff. It must give all those Americans who are uncomfortable with the daily death toll in Iraq a sense of relief. It’s phony, but such stirring moves are bound to make some people feel good.

Except Mr. Bush’s so-called vision comes with an extremely hefty price tag. Remember, gentle reader, that despite the media’s best attempts, the economy isn’t booming or growing at the pace they would have you believe. We are billions of dollars in the red and managed to make purchases on our national credit card in the form of tax cuts that the kids will have to pay. This proposed mission to Mars comes at the worst possible time, what with the so-called “war” on terrorism continuing, rebuilding Iraq requiring billions of dollars for years to come, and thousands of Americans who have stopped looking for work altogether. (Speaking of tax cuts, I was half-expecting Mr. Bush to say he would find funding for these new space ventures in the form of another round of cuts.)

There will never be a day when we have a spare couple billion lying around that we can use for space exploration. The money always has to come from somewhere, but now is not the time to expand NASA’s budget. Continuing to throw expensive pieces of equipment into orbit or onto Mars at the expense of growing numbers of homeless and people’s inability to get decent health care is a social failure of the greatest magnitude. And while we’re at it, why not try to elucidate the reasons for even being in space more clearly: NASA officials like to talk about how important it all is, but given the grinding poverty of people (not NASA’s fault) and the general state of the world, these high-school experiments and digging in the dirt for microscopic bits of what might have been is wearing quite thin. We cannot prepare people to colonize Mars if we continue to leave everyone behind here on terra firma.