TIME TO EXPLORE AGAIN: WHERE IS THE MADMAN WHO’LL TAKE US TO MARS? (2004)

In this time when our freeways are frozen in place, space travel suffers the same terrible winter. Years have passed since Apollo 11, with only faint cries for a lunar rediscovery, then Mars and beyond.

How can we thaw this deep freeze to unlock our vision so that we see the stars once more with the same fever that we knew that fabulous night we took the first Giant Step?

Let’s look at the situation five hundred years ago.

Columbus, financed by Spain’s royalty, sailed for India. King Henry VIII, jealous, paid Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot) to track Columbus. Francis I of France, thus provoked, hired Verrazano to do the same. Of the three, only Verrazano made landfall at what became Kitty Hawk. Incredible! Verrazano sailed west, and five centuries on, the Wright Brothers soared east to explore space and time.

There was, then, a confluence of kings who sent their ships to spice and gold. Today there is no such desire in our Congress or our president for similar goals.

What must happen next?

Can Science Fiction writers, inspirers of futures, cause a seed change in the American imagination so that, in turn, our leaders can be influenced? For remember when Admiral Byrd touched the North Pole, he cried, “Jules Verne leads me!” Where are the Jules Vernes, alive today to change our ways?

Let me make a list of some possible alternatives. Why not encourage our original competitor, Russia, to get back in the chase?

Signs indicate that there’s a slow return to Communist authority, which might well mean not only authoritarian politics that kept millions in bondage, but also the arrogance which caused them to circumnavigate space with Gagarin. Properly provoked and still aggravated at our “Tear down the wall,” might they not desire to beat us to Mars?

Or consider our two great enemies/friends. Germany, after all, lost two wars at our hands. France was saved from those two wars by our help. There’s every reason for those two nations to hate us.

Why not irritate some new Wernher von Braun in Berlin to invent a Mars rocket and beat us to a landing? And the French, stung by their defeats and the salvation we offered, mightn’t they want to send a foreign legion to the deserts of Mars?

And yet again Japan, an American-conquered nation, remembering the intrusion of Admiral Perry in Tokyo Harbor. And from the ruins of Hiroshima, might they not send a rocket to touch Phobos and Deimos and move beyond Mars to Centauri?

Or perhaps Canada, that invisible nation, ignored for centuries. Might they, in a macho gesture, fling themselves into space?

Or, most incredible of all, imagine that the Vatican decided that Pope John III wished to build a spacecraft titled the Holy Ghost in order to fly across the universe in search of the beginnings of Creation. With the Moon as base and Mars as second manger, that pope might move on to study the wellsprings of the cosmos.

What, then, would be the effect on our prejudiced secular America? Would we not build a bigger, better, and almost more holy rocket to follow the ecclesiastical dusts?

Or what if the Muslims … ?

But no, perish the thought.

Put all these together, shove them in tomorrow’s slot machine, and pull the handle. If the totals come up with three swastikas, three hammer and sickles, or three papal crowns with honeybee insignia, the results may well be the same.

What we need now is a competition of hatreds and loves. The final reward on Mars might well be not spices or gold, but the squashing of egos and a promise of immortality.

In any event, time is running out. Congress, as usual, is imitating Sleeping Beauty. It is time to waken from the slumber.

That footprint on the Moon is being filled with eternal dust and Mars still waits to have its canals filled with our dreams. Where, oh where, is the technological madman to wake us from our slumbers and provide us with the proper destiny?

Tomorrow morning, may that madman be born.