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.
Andrew Mishkin's "Sojourner" gives the history of one such robot intended for exploration, the six-wheeled rover that landed on Mars on July 4, 1997, as part of the Pathfinder mission. Mishkin, a leader of the group that developed the rover, tells of the dozens of engineers who contributed to the project--one of whom was Brian Wilcox, who had played with the moon rover as a boy, now a grown-up playing with a new rover. Mishkin describes months of frustration ending in flashes of creativity, and the occasional ingenious acts of jury-rigging that resulted in minor advances in mobility or navigation. Wilcox, for instance, invented a camera-stabilizing contraption made of baby bottles and car oil. When he went to the drugstore to buy the parts he needed, the cashier "wondered just what Wilcox was going to be feeding his baby."
But for the most part, Mishkin's book describes that hard and unhappy place where engineering and management meet, and in time it becomes draining to read of the constant compromises between technical brilliance and budgetary reality. The Pathfinder mission was ultimately a success, and the rover's pictures of the Martian surface proved extremely popular on the Internet. But soon the press and the public got bored--and after two months of driving around looking at rocks even the rover's makers started to tire of it. One of the engineers operating the rover told Mishkin, "I'd have to say I was among those people, thinking, 'How long is this going to go on?'" To stay interested, he had to remind himself repeatedly that he was controlling a vehicle on another planet.
Some observers of NASA have used the success of the Sojourner Rover--and this year's bigger and better Mars rovers--to argue that the robotic approach to space exploration is the right one. For instance, Robert Park, the University of Maryland physicist known for debunking bad science, has said that the "scientists that command telerobots" have become "virtual astronauts" and "the explorers of today." Why spend money to risk human lives on a job that robots can do just as well, or perhaps better?
Yet in the past decade, several critics of the robots-only school have come to conclude that the real work of exploration and scientific research can only be done by humans on the ground. They argue that while robots can do an admirable job of poking and sniffing and photographing, exploration remains a fundamentally human activity--one dependent upon hands, legs, eyes, and intuition.
The most prominent of these critics is Robert Zubrin, the engineer who presides over the Mars Society, an international organization devoted to seeing humans sent to the Red Planet. In 1989, after President Bush's plans for missions to the moon and Mars sank under the weight of a $450 billion price tag, Zubrin helped NASA develop an alternative plan that could get us to Mars sooner for a fraction of the cost. That plan was elaborated in meticulous detail in Zubrin's 1996 book "The Case for Mars." Now, in "Mars on Earth," Zubrin fills us in on what he's been doing since then.
