Quirks & Quarks

By Bob McDonald, host of the science radio program Quirks & Quarks.

The entire Space Age has happened within my lifetime, which could be interpreted as, either I’m really old, or the Space Age is remarkably young. I prefer the latter.

I remember, as a six-year-old, seeing the bold headline on the front page of the newspaper, “Russians Send Artificial Satellite Into Outer Space”, or something like that. Beneath it was a large diagram, showing the Earth surrounded by a big circular arrow with a round metallic sphere at the point of the arrow. I was old enough to appreciate that something important had happened, not fully understanding what impact Sputnik would have on the world.

Actually, few people at the time had any idea how much the dawn of the Space Age would change our way of thinking, and more importantly, how differently we would see ourselves from the high perspective of space. No one could imagine that humans would step on the Moon less than 12 years later; and as I watched the space race develop, I wondered if I would be the first to step on Mars.

It’s amazing how far we’ve come in space in the last 50 years, and it’s amazing how far we haven’t.

Today, standing on Mars is still science fiction. The dreams and promises of going to the Moon and beyond have not happened because the original incentive for going there has evaporated. Sputnik was not about science or space exploration - it was about weapons of mass destruction, an arms race that was taken into space.

Sputnik itself was just a simple radio transmitter inside a shiny ball, half a metre across. Its sole purpose was to make itself known to the world, which it did very successfully. But the rocket that boosted it into orbit was the real story. The R-7 Vostok Intercontinental Ballistic Missile was bigger, more powerful, and faster than anything the United States had at the time. To lift an object above the Earth’s atmosphere and park it in orbit is the ultimate military high ground. From there, you can drop a nuclear weapon anywhere on the planet. No one is out of your sight. Of course, in weaponry, size matters. So Sputnik 2, launched less than a month later, weighed half a metric tonne and carried a dog. Not only could the Soviets put a weapon in orbit, they could put a big one up there.

The reaction to that threat, with a one-upmanship race to the Moon, spurred the most astonishing technical achievement in the history of humanity.

Fortunately, it also spun off a manned space program. Considering the unknowns - the risks of flying new technology into very hostile environments - it’s amazing we got away with it. But once that small step was taken on the lunar surface, the race was over and the open chequebooks, which the rocket scientists had become used to, were closed. Since then, the space program has struggled to keep the momentum going without that cold war mentality driving it.

As a child of the Space Age, it has been an incredible journey, watching humanity leave the planet. As a kid, I learned the language of space … orbital rendezvous, trans lunar injection, atmospheric re-entry. I stayed up and watched the live transmissions from the Moon, all of them, not just the first one.

Then later, as a journalist, I’ve had the privilege of meeting some of the people who’ve been there: Buzz Aldrin, who was on the first Moon landing; Harrison Schmidt, the only scientist to work there; Gene Cernan, the last man on the Moon. But one of the more interesting astronauts was Bill Anders, who flew on Apollo 8. It didn’t land but it was the first mission to leave planet Earth altogether and circle the Moon. Bill told me about taking the now famous Earthrise picture when they first emerged from the far side of the Moon. That iconic image of the blue marble, floating in the blackness above an alien horizon, struck a deep chord - not only with the astronauts, who hadn’t even planned to take that shot, but with all of us on Earth who got the first self-portrait from a distant world.

It’s no co-incidence that the entire environmental movement started after that picture was taken in 1968. We saw our planet as a single living organism, floating in a very large dark space. We are one.

Since the six Moon landings, the human space program returned to Earth and stayed there, developing even more expensive ways to go around and around the planet a few hundred kilometres up. Fortunately for science, there has been a parallel space program that has followed the footsteps of Sputnik, the fleet of robots that have explored the rest of the solar system.

While a lot of attention was focused on the Russian’s ability to put dogs and humans into space, they were also the first to send robots to Mars and Venus. The Americans followed suit with an unmanned program, but the big difference was how the scientists from both countries co-operated, rather than competed with each other, to explore the planets. It’s a tradition of openness that continues today, producing a tremendous wealth of new knowledge about the worlds around us. Now we see the Earth in its full environmental context of the solar system.

Today, there’s talk of sending people back to the Moon, maybe to Mars - but at what cost?

Each flight of the space shuttle is now about a billion dollars, which is a lot to go only 400 km up. The next 50 years will likely see a move away from expensive, government-funded space flight and over to the private sector. There’s even a new competition to spur the industry. The X-Prize Foundation, which put up $10 million for the first privately built passenger spaceship, is now offering $30 million for the first private robot mission to the Moon.

Entrepreneurs and industrialists will find cheaper ways to reach space, while space tourists pay for it. The science and true exploration will come from robots, which will continue to go where no human can go.

So, while the reasons for going into space have changed since Sputnik, my childhood dream of going there myself may actually come true. Except I won’t be going to explore the great unknown or prove how powerful my country is. I’ll be going there just for the fun of it.

- Bob McDonald

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