The Magazine

The Red Planet

Reaching out to Mars.

Feb 2, 2004, Vol. 9, No. 20 • By ADAM KEIPER
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Sojourner

An Insider's View of the Mars Pathfinder Mission

by Andrew Mishkin

Berkley, 333 pp., $21.95

Mars on Earth

The Adventures of Space Pioneers in the High Arctic

by Robert Zubrin

Tarcher/Penguin, 351 pp., $28.95

BRIAN WILCOX was twelve in 1964 when he drove his first lunar rover. His father, a manager at General Motors, had led the team that built the robotic vehicle, and Wilcox got to play with it on a moonscape mock-up. He drove it into a ditch.

But NASA soon deemed it unnecessary to send a remote-controlled vehicle to the moon before sending humans, so the robotic rover was mothballed. Kept in storage through the 1970s by a technician who repeatedly disobeyed orders to junk it, the rover found its way back to Wilcox in 1982, when he was working as an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This time, he developed a video and computer control system that would keep it from going astray.

The story of Wilcox's rover illustrates the shifting moods of the American space program. In the earliest days in space, robotic probes were routinely expected to open the way for human explorers. By the late 1960s, robotic exploration had been scaled back because of the political impetus to fulfill President Kennedy's promise to land a man on the moon. But after that goal was met, support for space petered out--and when the Apollo 17 astronauts left the moon in 1972, the era of human space exploration ended. Since then, human activity in space has been limited to orbiting the Earth in shuttles, capsules, and stations. For three decades, human explorers have been mothballed and the task of exploration has been left to machines.

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