Don’t look now, but the eighties are almost upon us. Which means that the usual Chicken Little end-of-the-world doomsters are rushing in circles, colliding with themselves and shouting, “Head for the hills, the dam is broke!” Here comes 1984. Watch out, there’s Big Brother.
Bulrushes and sauerkraut.
Nineteen eighty-four will show up, but not as a Kremlin gargoyle or an Orwellian beast. We have, for the time being anyway, knocked Big Brother into the next century. With luck, and if we keep our eye on the ballot box and our chameleon politicos, he may never recover. Meanwhile, just beyond 1984, a truly grand year awaits us. Nineteen eighty-six will be a special time. Why special and why grand? If 1984 once symbolized the worst of man, 1986 might just possibly symbolize nothing but the best. For that is the year we earthlings will enjoy a close encounter of the fourth kind.
A visitor from beyond will park itself on our solar doorstep for some few months, then vanish like some Christmas ghost. We will not see it again for another seventy-six years. How shall we react? In one scenario we will toss ourselves high in celebrations to meet this ghost. We will stand forth in space and wave the cold beast in. We will laugh in its face. We will probe its icy flesh and swirl our technological matador’s cape as it rushes by us at some hundred thousand miles per hour. We will pierce its heart with the finest, brightest swords that science can forge, then offer to crowds around the world the secret of the birth of the solar system.
In another scenario we will watch an artist’s conception of the event on television, our faces illuminated by the pale light of the tube. A commentator will mourn, “Maybe next time.”
The visitor, of course, is Halley’s comet. The villain is Congress, which must approve the funds for this grand scheme. And who are the people who would play tag with the cosmic train? The amiable “mad” scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Those are the same wild folks who helped bring you Mars Viking landings I and II. The folks who remind me of the old Bob Hope–Jerry Colonna routine in which Hope shouts at the sky, “Colonna, what are you doing up there?”
“Building a bridge—starting at the top.”
“But,” cries Hope, “you can’t do that!”
Colonna shrugs and turns to his workers. “All right, boys, tear it down.”
But the blueprinters at JPL won’t tear anything down. They are used to building imaginary bridges, starting at the top, then riveting a foundation under the dream before it blows away.
Those are the folks who want to build a bridge to Mars, who would send a probe there that would return with samples from the surface. Those are the folks who want to build a bridge to Titan to sample the atmosphere of Saturn’s most literary moon. They would orbit Jupiter, land on Mercury, and send a robot to summer camp on Mars. They are dreamers who, when they awake, try to sell their dreams to NASA and a skinflint Congress.
If Congress wants to share the dream of a Halley’s-comet encounter, it will have to reach into its purse and pull out some $500 million. And it will have to do so in the near future. If it waits too long, there won’t be time for the experimental draftings, the many test failures, and the final successes that plague and reward such grandiose exercises. The bureaucracy that made Big Brother possible will kill the dream.
One plan to rendezvous with Halley’s comet has already bitten the dust. In 1977, scientists at JPL were toying with the idea of a solar sail, a giant kite, a stringless wonder, with all our souls as its endless tail. The sail was to be powered by the light of the sun.
Pure sunlight can do that? It can. Light rays exert pressure in the form of protons—massless particles. When these particles strike a surface, they are, in effect, a supersonic wind blowing against a sail.
The original comet-intercept plan was simple and elegant. The sail would be a thin breath of Mylar plastic skinned out over some aluminum spider that might well measure as much as half a mile wide. This vast experiment would be tucked in special shuttles and launched into space. There astronauts would scramble to unfurl the beauty, raise the sail, finish out the kite, then hop back into the shuttles and let the sun push the sail with its massless winds. Set free, the sail would be controlled and balanced by vanes.
Slowly it would build speed, until it reached the hundred thousand miles per hour necessary to make the rendezvous. Unlike normal rockets, which are limited in the amount of fuel they can carry and in their final speed, the solar sail would find its fuel in space.
To reach rendezvous speed, a launch would have to have been made by 1981. The seed money should have been granted in 1978. It didn’t happen. NASA looked at the comet-intercept project, compared the benefits with other priority projects (including another comet project), and crossed off the solar sail from its 1978 shopping list.
The scientists at JPL were undaunted. They had an alternative propulsion system on the drawing boards: the ion drive, a galactic butterfly that can spin sunlight into electricity, to emit a soft violet blast. Like the solar sail, it finds its fuel in space. Dr. Ken Atkins, head of the comet-intercept program at JPL, pulled the ion drive out of the hat and said, “Lo, we can’t build up speed to rendezvous, but we can cut across the path of the visitor and drop an instrument package down the throat of the comet.”
And just for a touch of class, the JPL plan offered a two-for-one shot: The ion-drive craft could fly by Halley’s comet and then, two years later, rendezvous with Tempel 2, a bright little visitor that drops by every 5.3 years. We could pace the comet past Mercury without setting ourselves aflame, then tag along when it moved back out to hide itself in the mine-shaft universe.
The project can be done; the only question is, will it be done?
That depends on the president and/or the Congress. The latter is questionable. Space is low down on their priority scale.
Why should we spend half a billion dollars on a comet? Because we must confront the mystery. What is a comet? The question runs back beyond Bethlehem, before the birth of the pharaohs.
Is a comet a somewhat soiled but mighty snowball hurled from the left hand of God some winter morning He has long since forgotten? Is it the breath of some old sun now dead but whose final sigh still comes to whisper ’round our yard? Is it a halation of dusts and interplanetary cinders, fragments of meteoroid flaked from some chance encounter with a far planetary system?
The commonest theory, advanced by Fred Whipple in 1950, describes cometary bodies as blizzards of frozen gases and nonvolatile solids. Small comets are a few hundred meters in diameter. The largest measure twenty miles across. As a comet enters the solar system, the sun heats the frozen sphere. The solar wind blows the debris into a tail a million miles in length.
The scientific community is very interested in the Comet Rendezvous Program. It is likely that the debris caught in the frozen grasp of the comet head is primordial. As old as the universe. The Halley probe could analyze the dust by spectrometer and magnetometer. Cameras could give us a view of the birth scars of the solar system. It is an opportunity too important to pass up because of mere economics.
Of course, there are other comets. The boys at JPL have come up with several alternative missions between now and the turn of the century. But Halley’s comet is so American. Indeed, when I first heard of the project, I suggested calling the probe the Mark Twain. Why?
Well, now, Mark Twain was born in 1835, when Halley’s comet tore across the sky to welcome him. Doubtful of miracles, suspicious of heaven, nonetheless Twain later predicted he would depart this Earth when the comet came back to fetch him. It did, and Twain did, in 1910.
Halley’s comet has a power over men’s imaginations that far exceeds shuttle diplomacy or the best of prime-time television.
At the core of our Mark Twain celestial explorer would be cameras and multipurpose devices to photograph the comet, take its temperature, and, with luck, knife through to its bright interior. The instrument package we would hurl into the face of Halley’s comet is doomed—at fifty-seven kilometers per second, the comet devours everything in its path. Another fate awaits the surviving part of the ion-drive craft. It will head out beyond the orbit of Mars, turn tail, and play catch-up with Tempel 2 in 1988. The two will head together for the sun—and for six months we will listen in on their conversation. The ion-drive craft may be captured by the comet, or it may wander off onto a solo journey. It depends on the courtship of gravity.
Then again, perhaps we can hurl these robot devices in such a way as to track the Tempel 2 comet on its entire circumnavigation of our solar system. Playing dead for a good part of the journey, our sensing machines could be programmed to reactivate in what might be called Project Lazarus. In the far mortuary reaches of space, we could call them awake so as to test the vision of Jupiter’s giant red eye or shake the frost from Pluto’s back porch.
Think, then, when these long-distance runners return to speak in tongues late in the twenty-first century to tell us of far attic places where we as living flesh cannot follow. Someday, yes, our flesh will landfall Pluto and beyond. But for now our riddle-solving electric children must roam the vast star meadows to graph the heartbeat of Halley’s cosmic beast.
What’s holding up this grand cosmic parade?
As in the past, cash in the box.
With a military budget sucking $129 billion away from cities, away from schools, away from hospitals, that inevitably means away from space, time, comets, and our possible future survival.
Plus, we have been in a down cycle from overexposure to moon landings, astronauts, and the thousands of hours TV networks poured on us, ladling out multitudinous facts but little insight. We have had our feet and minds, as I have often observed, encased in Cronkite. Without poets, philosophers, or even smart political observers such as Eric Sevareid, the cosmic question goes a-begging year on year.
Meanwhile, because we are so busy building arms to sell to Arabs to scare the Israelis and selling yet further arms to scared Jews to rescare Saudi Arabia and friends, we have no time to stand and stare. We opt out of being philosophers. To think would seem to be the worst thing we might accuse ourselves of. To think imaginatively is beyond comment. Dreamers, we snort, stand aside! Reality is the only tonic. Facts are the only medicine. Yet we are full of facts; we burst with data and are not made well. Our spirit flags on the pole.
Can Halley’s comet play doctor to our souls? Can the ion-drive craft we build lift our blood and make us truly care about not just mere existence now but futures yet unplumbed?
Why bother? a voice cries from the balcony. Who cares? What’s all the fuss and star feathers about?
Very simply: We march back to Olympus.
How’s that again?
Well, now, we Earth people are great ones, aren’t we, for picking ourselves up by the scruff and heaving ourselves out of the Garden or off the holy mount? We shake ourselves together some facts and add them up to doom, don’t we?
Consider: Two thousand years ago, everything was all right with man’s universe. We inhabited a planet around which the sun moved as if we were central to its existence. The stars did the same. We were God’s navel, and everyone found us good to look upon.
Then along came various theologians and astronomers, and next thing we know, we’re evicted, both from Eden and from Mount Olympus. We found ourselves out in the rain with a bunch of demoted Apollos, Aphrodites, Zeuses, and Titans. It would take a few thousand years before we got around to naming some rockets for the lost gods.
Meanwhile, the astronomers told us that we were not central to anything. We were, in fact, inhabitants of a rather smallish rabbit pellet whirling about a minor sun in the subbasement of a galaxy that did not much care whether we came or went, lived or died, suffered or survived.
The knock on the head that this seeming fact gave us unsettled our egos for quite a few hundred years.
If Copernicus and Galileo and Kepler told us these things, they must be right. If Darwin added that we were merely a bright chimpanzee wheeling a Maserati or a Pinto along time’s highway, well, then, why bother to get out of bed in the morning?
But we have got out of bed, and we have gone to the Moon, and then we have reached up and fingerprinted Mars. And to those who look at data and say, Mars is empty, there is no life there, we shout:
There is life on Mars, and it is us.
We move into the universe. We name ourselves, along with our rockets, after old deities. We make ourselves central to existence, knowing not how far we must travel before we meet other mirrors of God staring back into His vast gaze.
For, you see, while facts are important, interpretation of facts is the final builder or destroyer of man and his dream. If we choose to find ourselves minor, or of no worth, the dust will burn and hide our bones. But if we choose to step back into the Garden, devour the apple, throw the snake out into the ditch, and survive forever out beyond the Coalsack Nebula, the choice is ours. We will build Olympus and put on our crowns once more.
That is what our encounter with Halley’s comet is all about.
So there you have it: 1986 coming on fast. Here comes our chance to reach up. We would gently touch the passing face of that cold creature, the looming features of that strange matter and force on its blind way ’round the cosmos. We would do so with that puzzled, infinite curiosity that is the beginning of love.
Do we miss this chance? Do we let time and space churn by without hastening to leap aboard? Do we keep our giant man-made pterodactyl home and lock our best dreams with it, in a box?
I think not. For some century soon, we will be falling out there ourselves. Our dear flesh will outpace that lovely comet.
Meanwhile, our fabulous machines must go for us, do for us, and come back smoking a pipe filled with incredible data, to tamp Mark Twain observations in our ears to lean us toward survival.
If our mind flies now, our machines fly later, and our souls fly to follow both in twenty-first-century salvation armies of space. And the higher we fly, the more 1984 will recede like a failed threat, an evil promise disconnected, a hell boarded over, a death done in and buried by life.
We will write a better book then. Its title will be 1986, and its hero will be the Great White Comet, and Huck Finn’s father’s kite will lay itself out on the solar winds to welcome it.
As for the comet, it will arrive like doom.
But it will go back out around with annunciations.
What will it announce?
Ourselves, of course, birthing ourselves back into the lap of God.
Telling Him that soon, soon, oh, very soon, we will drop in for a visit....
And stay for 10 billion years.