The long cruise continued. On December 15, 1977, Voyager 1 passed Voyager 2. Some 445 days remained before it would make its closest encounter with Jupiter.
CAPTAIN VOYAGER
In 1632, having crossed the South Atlantic six times and the North Atlantic twenty, sometimes as a crewman and some as a captain, Samuel de Champlain set forth his conceptions of the ideal expeditionary commander, or what he termed the good seaman. He should be “above all” a “good man, fearing God.” He would not blaspheme, would attend to liturgical duties, and if possible retain a “churchman” to keep his crews “always in the fear of God, and likewise to help them and confess them when they are sick, or in other ways to comfort them during the dangers which are encountered in the hazards of the ocean.”9
The captain should be robust, alert, inured to hardships and toil, “so that whatever betide he may manage to keep the deck, and in a strong voice command everybody what to do” and should do so as “the only one to speak, lest contradictory orders, especially in doubtful situations, cause one maneuver to be mistaken for another.” He should share dangers, duties, and rewards. He should be able to eat whatever the circumstances permit. He should avoid drunkenness. He should not delegate by default. He should know everything that concerns the ship, for “great care and constant practice” are the means of safe passage. He should have practical experience “in encounters and their consequences.” He should be “pleasant and affable in his conversation, absolute in his orders, not communicating too readily with his shipmates, unless with those who share the command. Otherwise, not doing so in time might engender a feeling of contempt for him.” He will punish evildoers, reward achievers, and avoid occasions for envy, “which is often the source of bad feeling, like a gangrene which little by little corrupts and destroys the body,” and can spark outright conspiracy or worse. He should, in brief, lead by both skill and example.10
The nature of geographic exploration left little slack for fumbling or fussiness; and to the extent that the perennial attraction with exploration resides with the character of the explorers, not simply with destinations reached and collections gathered, how they achieve their goals has as much interest as whether they reached them. What exploration could not tolerate was irresolution in purpose, and what leaders could not overlook was insurrection within the corps. Yet uncertainty was the norm and unrest a commonplace, the one often inspiring the other. Unable to locate the Strait where forecast, Magellan nearly fell to mutiny at Puerto San Julián in Patagonia. Henry Hudson, endlessly promising successes he could not deliver, was set adrift by crews in his eponymous Bay. Inadequate leadership was as lethal as rebellious crews; expeditions with weak captains could expect to suffer and fail like Bering’s second voyage to Alaska, the crew shipwrecked and wasting away on Bering Isle, practically within sight of their destination port on Kamchatka. Expeditions led by indomitable captains were almost certain to succeed, no matter the cost, as Henry Stanley’s extraordinary traverses through Africa demonstrate.
People judge exploration by the explorer as much as the things explored. The perennial fascination is not simply with destinations reached and collections gathered, but with how explorers achieve their goals. By the self-conscious end of the Second Age, even explorers openly accepted this standard. Apsley Cherry-Garrard described his intrepid band as “artistic Christians,” as keen to test themselves with winter journeys around Cape Crozier as to unveil the mysteries of evolution as expressed in penguin eggs. The greatest expeditions had both great personalities and fabulous quests. Which is why the Third Age stands so awkwardly.
What is the personality of Voyager? What is the meaning of its leadership? Where is the commanding presence when a captain is called upon not to stare down a smoldering mutiny but to upload a software patch? Where is the moral drama of exploration? Where is that second, latent act of discovery, the unveiling of character? Who can be named as leader when a single Voyager of discovery will continue across a score of bureaucratic and careerist lifetimes? What might be the defining traits of great explorers—their invincible will, their curiosity, their passion for fame—was here hardwired into computers. Yet Voyager has variants of all these features.
What an act of transfiguration requires, however, is what many engineers and most philosophers disdain: anthropomorphizing a robot, even if only indirectly as a device by which to refract beliefs, passions, and intentions. It means having Voyager stand as a cipher for the hundreds of people and dozens of leaders who assembled, remotely navigated, and advised the spacecraft, and who shared its encounters with new worlds—who could supply the perception that pixilated images could merely copy. It means investing in a machine such virtues as fortitude, resolution, and discipline. There would be no impressive, fallible, undaunted explorer to stand on the quarterdeck or the mountain pass and issue commands, record first contacts, and meditate on the panorama before him. The explorer was being replaced by the public he traditionally reported back to.
Its small rebellions, blown circuits, and cranky scan platforms remind us that the Voyager spacecraft did not make itself, nor was it birthed from cyborgs. It was a very human creation, and as much as a painting or a novel or a political constitution, it embodies the flawed character of its creators. To give expression to such a machine was an act of imagination and passion, and to guide it was leadership of a high order. Ultimately it was the project managers who commanded: Harris “Bud” Schurmeier (1970-76), John Casani (1976-78), Robert J. Parks (1978-79), Raymond Heacock (1979-81), Esker Davis (1981-82), Richard Laeser (1982-87), Norman Haynes (1987-89). They got Voyager to Neptune and pointed it beyond, where another succession of project managers is today overseeing a vastly reduced crew staffing a vastly diminished vessel as it plunges into the new Sea of Darkness that lies beyond the solar system.
What was Voyager? To those who built and guided it, they were Voyager. They made it happen; they told it what to do and received its responses; they interpreted its discoveries. And yet Voyager was something more. It existed with or without them; they had to grant it a degree of autonomy; and they sent it where no one truly knew what it might encounter. It was capable of reprogramming, which is to say, of learning and discovering. It has lasted far beyond its life expectancy, which was guaranteed only to Saturn, but which proponents hoped would extend to Uranus, and might, just might, last to Neptune, but which is persisting through the heliosphere.
Voyager did things no one predicted, found scenes no one expected, and promises to outlive its inventors. Its autonomy did not reside solely in its primitive software and magnetic tape memory, but in its capacity to inform, and inspire, and to force us outside the ordinary. Like a great painting or an abiding institution, it has acquired an existence of its own, a destiny beyond the grasp of its handlers. If it had no consciousness of itself, it could provoke consciousness in others. The mission, with its implausibly grandiloquent Grand Tour completed, continues; the spacecraft, so obviously a piece of engineering, endures as art; a project sold as science persists as saga.
JPL AS EXPLORING INSTITUTION
The deeper threat on long voyages, however, was a loss of discipline. The problem was not so much insubordination by the onboard computers as inattention or slacking on Earth. It was one thing for a spacecraft to coast; another for its commander, in this case, mission control at JPL, to go on autopilot.
At Pasadena the sense congealed that the crisis had passed. The Voyagers were launched, they were working, they would cruise through a veritable void for eighteen to twenty-two months before beginning their first encounters with Jupiter. The tension lifted. Attention turned to the next project. Operations relaxed, planning fell behind, anomalies passed by without prompt action. In December 1977 a tricky maneuver was aborted when it demanded a management decision that no one on the flight-control quarterdeck could give. In April 1978, with mission attention directed to malfunctions in Voyager 1, the officer of the watch forgot to send the mandatory weekly message, which prompted Voya
ger to default to safe mode. There were good reasons why classic expeditions adopted military discipline.11
Such breakdowns forced a NASA-mandated reorganization upon JPL. If it was to function as an exploring institution, it had to recognize that operations were continuous, not limited to launches and encounters, and that even quasi-autonomous spacecraft required a vigilant chain of command. Orders had to be restated, adjusted to circumstances, and enforced, even if they took the form of software patches and uploads. While Voyager could not put into port for an overhaul, JPL’s mission crew could. Even as the spacecraft sailed on, the administration was in effect careened and scraped.
The fact is, while the Voyagers might travel in a vacuum, they were not created in one; nor could ideas, however heroic, express themselves of their own volition into scan platforms and antennas. They were the work of people organized into institutions. With particular force, Voyager was an enterprise of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It may well constitute JPL’s finest hour. But when JPL failed to meet routine obligations, the episode not only threatened the mission but exposed the peculiar status of JPL within NASA.
The facility began in 1936 when a small group of enthusiasts organized themselves around Hungarian émigré Theodore von Kármán, a founder of aerodynamics, then a professor at the California Institute of Technology. The Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, as it became known, evolved into a major center for rocketry and, as Clayton Koppes observes, “could plausibly claim that they—not Robert Goddard or the German V-2 experimenters—laid the foundation for the development of American rocket and missile technology.” In 1944 Caltech operated the embryonic facility for the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps, one of a growing archipelago of labs run by universities under military contract. The facility changed its name to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 12
But while JPL developed the nation’s first tactical nuclear missiles, Corporal and Sergeant, a postwar status as a military shop became less attractive, particularly granted JPL’s association with Caltech. The lab’s real passion was for space exploration. As early as 1945, its WAC Corporal succeeded in escaping Earth’s atmosphere, a first. It supplemented missiles with payloads and, together with von Braun’s group, launched Explorer 1, America’s first successful satellite. Once it was amalgamated into NASA, the way to the Moon and the planets opened, and JPL sent by itself or assisted in sending Ranger, Surveyor, Pioneer 4, Mariner, Viking, and Voyager.13
Its partisans early appreciated that propulsion was only as good as guidance: that was the difference between a rocket and a bomb. When it was reorganized in 1944 into JPL, the lab began acquiring expertise in tracking, telemetry, and the kind of communications and electronics that made missile guidance possible. The program flourished under William Pickering, a New Zealander with a physics PhD from Caltech, then a professor in its electrical engineering faculty involved with IGY’s Upper Atmosphere Research Panel and early plans for an orbiting satellite, and finally director of JPL from 1954 to 1976. When military (and later NASA) support for rockets went mostly to von Braun’s group, JPL reoriented itself to emphasize satellites and guidance systems. Its research into solid-fuel rockets may have given the lab liftoff among space institutions, but it thrived by designing spacecraft and the electronics that made it possible to communicate with, guide, track, and instruct the payloads once off Earth. And travel to other worlds was what JPL’s staff wanted.
As Oran Nicks recalled, JPL was from the outset “aching to begin planetary missions,” and it started with imagined missions rather than with existing capabilities. It would craft technology to suit missions, not limit missions to what was presently possible. JPL soon strengthened its communication capabilities with an eye beyond the sublunary realm. (Revealingly, it was the lab’s chief of guidance research, Eberhard Rechtin, who proposed a “visionary program of lunar and planetary missions” and, unauthorized, commenced improvements in antennas.) In July 1958 JPL submitted the formal request to back that vision with a “Proposal for an Interplanetary Tracking Network.” Five months later JPL proposed to a still-groggy NASA that it become the agency’s “major” facility for space flight, or as Director Pickering expressed it, “the national space laboratory.” Shortly afterward it dispatched for NASA’s approval Project VEGA, an upper-stage rocket and spacecraft, along with a bold package of probes to the Moon, Mars, and Venus; a meteorological satellite for Earth; and a small clutch of unspecified interplanetary missions. In January 1959 NASA accepted JPL’s concept for a deep-space communications network, and in March it approved Project VEGA, partially substantiating JPL’s bid as the prime center for extra-lunar space flights.14
The euphoria couldn’t last. VEGA got canceled, JPL sat awkwardly within the NASA administrative matrix, and after the elation over Explorer passed, projects stumbled. The lab faced rivals both inside and outside NASA. Director Pickering might proclaim that “it is the U.S. against Russia, and its most important campaign is being fought far out in the empty reaches of space,” and JPL might declare itself the nation’s primary institution for pursuing that contest throughout the solar system, but the reality was that the lab faced competition within the United States, and especially within NASA, as intense as any from its Soviet counterparts. 15
The difficulties were several, both institutional and intellectual, and they began at conception. The first lay in competing visions of “space”; but the most serious—the bureaucratic version of original sin—dated from the organic act of July 29, 1958, which created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and forced a merger of the erstwhile National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics labs with upstart facilities, mostly military. JPL now found itself competing with NACA’s old Ames Research Center, NASA’s new Goddard Space Flight Center, and even Langley Research Center, all of which had charges and ambitions with regard to satellites.
Unlike the others, JPL also had a costly and confusing affiliation with a university. From NASA’s perspective Caltech extracted maximum fees for minimal supervision. JPL had a managerial style that placed it outside the bureaucratic norm: its university connections, which were vital for many of its participants, conveyed a sense of academic freedom, intellectual élan, and institutional insouciance that budget-conscious and politically harassed bureaucrats at NASA headquarters found often annoying and occasionally dysfunctional. JPL’s sense of itself and its mission did not always agree with NASA’s. It all might be tolerated so long as JPL performed well. When Ranger spacecraft after Ranger failed, NASA stepped in. It would do so again and again, even during the Voyager mission, when it perceived that JPL’s demands for autonomy and Caltech’s nominal supervision interfered with programmatic needs.16
There was an alchemy at work, but whether of white magic or black depended on perspective. NASA wanted more programmatic discipline, JPL sought standing as an intellectual institution not simply a government job shop, and Caltech coveted the funds but worried about how to reconcile a contract lab with university purposes, particularly when military research continued at JPL, as it did, and brought with it requirements for secrecy. Defense spending would in fact increase as NASA’s budget plunged, a situation that worsened when the Reagan administration sought either to shift space onto the military or to privatize it. The three parties found themselves in a state of more or less constant turmoil. Major contract negotiations occurred in 1964 and 1966 as the planetary program began to hit its stride. They continued throughout the Voyagers’ traverse across the solar system.
Such confusions and contests have been common over the centuries and reflect the culture’s changing understanding of what exploration means and why it is done.
The Great Voyages had commercial and geopolitical purposes. There was, on one hand, an urge to open up and unleash discovery on the theory that the first comer would grab the most spoils, while, on the other, a concern that exploration serve its society, which argued for a controlling agency. Portugal placed oversight with the Concilho da Fazenda (Treasury), into whose
vaults the secret discoveries were entrusted. Spain gave primary responsibility to the Casa de Contracción in Seville. Both emphasized the commercial significance of voyaging and the implacable interest of the state. Competitors might unload duties onto chartered bodies such as East India companies, a Company of Adventurers, or outright privateers; and in the Second Age, scientific associations could become promoters and occasionally sponsors. Still, expeditions rarely diverged from government interests, nor did state-sponsored exploration stray far from military support, if not leadership. The major exception is the heroic age of Antarctic exploration that concluded the Second Age. But whether within or between countries, there was competition aplenty.
There was precedent for NASA’s dilemma during the Second Age, when exploring institutions proliferated and began to trespass on one another’s turf. Instead of interplanetary space, the contestants sparred over the near-nation Great Plains and intermountain space of America’s unexplored West. In the nineteenth century the United States had turned over most of the responsibility for exploring its continental acquisitions to the U.S. Army, and for oceanic probes, to the U.S. Navy. From 1836 to 1863 the army created a Corps of Topographical Engineers, which organized expeditions, surveyed in the company of naturalists and artists, and prepared composite maps, until the Civil War directed its talents to other landscapes. After the war, the army was keen to renew its role, even as civilians were claiming priority for more science-based institutions. What emerged were four separate programs that became known as the Great Surveys, each with a different sponsor. They soon began to crowd into one another.17
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