The Voyager
spacecraft
The golden record
The golden record’s
cover, with ideographs explaining what it is and how to play it
NOVA’s “instant”
eclipse documentary was fairly interesting, but the show that was on after it
was incredibly intense and moving: The Farthest: Voyager in Space. It was a documentary on the
U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) project, initiated in
1972, to send two probes into the outer reaches of the solar system, Voyager 1
and Voyager 2, to explore the planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus (which just about
everybody on the program pronounced “YOUR-uh-nus” to avoid accidental
invocation of a part of the human body generally considered too gross to talk
about in polite company) and Neptune. It’s indicative of how far in advance a
project like this has to be planned — the people in charge of Voyager, NASA’s
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had to launch it in 1977 to take advantage of a rare
conjunction of the four planets they wanted to study, without which it would
have been impossible for one spacecraft to hit them all — that the President
who green-lighted the project was Richard Nixon, the President who recorded the
official greeting to anyone who might find the Voyager once it crossed out of
the solar system and reached interstellar space was Jimmy Carter (whose
greeting was, “This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our
sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We
are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours”) and it reached
Jupiter and Saturn during Carter’s Presidency but didn’t make it to Uranus
until Ronald Reagan’s and to Neptune until George H. W. Bush’s. It’s the sort
of long-term project that America’s current political convulsions make almost
impossible even to imagine — especially
now that we have a President who seems to go out of his way to trash and undo
everything that was done by his immediate predecessor, and who glories in
letting it be known that there’s a “new sheriff in town” and everything done by
previous administrations is up for grabs.
As an almost incidental addition to
the project, the Voyager team decided to include a phonograph record, pressed
in gold, that would include a representative sampling of Earth’s music and
culture, as well as encoded scientific data and images explaining who we are
and how our bodies function, as a modern-day equivalent of the fabled messages
in bottles left by sailors (director Emer Reynolds, who made this show for
Irish TV — and the fact that the documentary on one of America’s crowning scientific
achievements was made in Ireland speaks volumes for this country’s loss of any
sense of a collective vision! — included a shot of a bottle with a message in
it being thrown out to sea just to underscore the metaphor), and the scientists
behind Voyager were miffed big-time when the reporters asking them about the
project in press conferences had more questions about the record than about the
research that was, for the scientists, the main point of the effort. The most
controversial inclusion on the record was the song “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck
Berry, which Carl Sagan, one of the key members of the Voyager team (and,
because of his own TV show, was one of the few scientists of the 1970’s who
became a genuine celebrity), defended against charges that rock music was
“adolescent” by saying, “There are a lot of adolescents on the planet.”
Berry’s
inclusion became one of the central legends surrounding the project; in 1978 Saturday
Night Live did a Voyager segment on their
“Weekend Update” parody newscast in which the reporters announced that they’d
seen the first signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe: a message
was beamed back saying, “Send more Chuck Berry.” And in 1990, when the Voyager
team held a party to celebrate the successful fly-by of Neptune and therefore
the completion of the craft’s mission, Berry himself performed “Johnny B.
Goode” at their celebration. The main part of the program details not only the
suspense around Voyager — Voyager 2 was the first of the two probes to be
launched (which, the scientists recalled, drove reporters nuts even when they
explained that Voyager 1, though launched later, would be faster and therefore
would hit the target planets sooner) and the vibrations of the rocket that
launched it threw its computer circuits into a sort of electronic nervous
breakdown until the scientists on the ground sent it enough software patches to
get it going properly again. (One quirk of the Voyager projects was they had to
“freeze” the technology as it stood in 1972 and couldn’t upgrade to take
advantage of later advances in computing since there’d be no way to upgrade the
computer hardware aboard Voyager in space.) Voyager 1 had its own problem: a
leak in the rocket propellant made it unclear whether the craft would actually get
into the trajectory it needed for interplanetary exploration and it was
touch-and-go for a while as to whether the craft would be a success or a dud.
(I couldn’t help but think of the Mike Nichols-Elaine May routine in which a
rocket scientist is arguing with his mother and she says, “I read in the papers
how you keep losing them.”)
If nothing else, the show demonstrates that there
can be enough suspense and even danger in an unmanned space mission than in a
manned one; every time Voyager flew by a planet, it was touch-and-go whether
all systems would work and whether the spacecraft would actually be able to
communicate its information to Earth, whether Earth’s computers would receive
it, and whether the scientists would actually be able to make sense of the
images. Among the interesting things we learned from the Voyager probes are
that Jupiter and Neptune both have rings (though nowhere nearly as extensive as
Saturn’s); that Jupiter has lightning storms under its huge, mostly methane
atmosphere; that Jupiter’s moon Io actually has liquid water under its frozen
methane crust; that Uranus is boring but Neptune is one of the most
topographically fascinating objects in the solar system — as is its moon,
Callisto. The Farthest is a
magnificent program, beautiful and moving, not only in the sheer aesthetic
appeal of the actual Voyager photographs of the various planets but inspiring
in the way it was the sort of big, visionary project almost no one on Earth
today seems interested in pursuing: we stopped sending people past Earth orbit
in 1972 and, though we still make movies that assume we’ve gone to the moon (again) and past it to Mars,
there’s no serious effort being mounted by any nation — or anyone in the private sector, for that
matter, despite the forlorn hopes of Libertarian science-fiction fans that
heroic Ayn Randian entrepreneurs will step in where governments fear to tread
and start sending people into space again — to get us back or even to do the
kind of unmanned exploration of Voyager.
