Read an Excerpt
FOREWORD
The historic Soviet Sputnik mission in 1957 began a spectacular era of space exploration. We found out right away, with many early failures, that space exploration is a hazardous adventure, and even today we aren’t able to perfectly accomplish each mission. Before Sputnik, everything we knew about our solar system came from ground-based telescope observations and from analysis of meteorites. The space program changed that forever, since it provided us the opportunity to study our solar system more thoroughly, to travel to distant objects within it and to study those objects up close to discover how the solar system was created and how it has evolved. With the ever-increasing ability to reach and navigate to more distant objects, we began a series of missions with always new and better instruments. Each new mission built on what we had learned from its predecessor. In order to thoroughly explore an object of interest, we developed a mission sequence—flyby, orbit, land, rove, and return samples—with each step creating new technologies and tackling new challenges in order to accomplish the next mission. At times we would be so bold as to skip some steps, like landing the Huygens probe on Titan without having the benefit of a precursor orbiter providing us with detailed surface maps and allowing the selection of a safe landing site beforehand.
What a historic time we have just completed and yet, in many ways, it is just the beginning. With the tremendously successful flyby of the Pluto system by the New Horizons spacecraft in July 2015, humankind completed its initial survey of the solar system within sixty years. Solar system exploration has always been, and continues to be, a grand human adventure that seeks to discover the nature and origin of our celestial neighborhood and to explore whether life exists or could have existed beyond Earth. Rod’s book captures this excitement, reliving missions that NASA and the Soviets launched, and some that never left the drawing board, while also looking into the immediate future for our next steps. I, too, am fascinated by space history. We all know that history will repeat itself if we let it, and we just have to avoid our past mistakes. As Rod so aptly put it, this is “a magnificent tale of exploration and discovery . . .” It is fully worthy to be examined and enjoyed.
James Green
NASA Chief Scientist
INTRODUCTION
"You maniacs! You blew it up! Oh, damn you . . . God damn you all to hell!” and so on, rants Charlton Heston at the end of The Planet of the Apes. That’s at the end of the 1968 classic film, in the scene where he’s discovered that he is stranded not on some strange planet enlivened by parallel evolution, but has in fact returned home to a post-nuclear-holocaust Earth.
I thought much the same, however, on July 15, 1965, when the first images of Mars were returned to Earth.
This book got its start on that day, when Mariner 4 destroyed the Mars of the Victorians and the romantics. In mid-July of that year, the first American probe to reach the planet flew by, sending back twenty-two black-and-white images over the next few days. While grainy and low-resolution, those few images—showing less than one percent of the surface—changed everything. That was the day that the Mars of Giovanni Schiaparelli, Percival Lowell, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, to name just a few of the many who had dreamed about Mars for decades, vanished. In place of those dreams was a dry, cratered, and frigid desert of a planet. The atmosphere was much thinner than we thought, the temperatures lower than we thought, and the presence of standing liquid water impossible. Bye-bye, friendly neighbors on another world. Farewell vast oceans and sprawling forests. See you later, little green men. Tata, advanced alien civilization and your planet-girdling canals.
I was just eight years old at the time—too young to fully understand the more complex ramifications of those first images of Mars, but surely old enough to know that the red world imprinted on my brain by the likes of Ray Bradbury and Wernher von Braun—visionaries at the extremes of our Martian visions—had vanished forever.
What did we get instead of Martian canals, neighbors in space, and a second home? We got the truth—at least a part of it. Over the next few decades, in remarkably short order, more planetary explorers—robots sent mostly by NASA, but also by the Soviet Union—reconnoitered the red planet and slowly revealed more of its secrets. Mars is indeed dry, desolate, and windswept, but it holds far more water than could have been expected, locked up in the poles and in subsurface glaciers, and it has a much more complex geological history than was first hinted at by Mariner 4. That first look took something away from us, but the many orbiters and rovers to visit the planet since have given much back. Mars is a compelling, if forbidding, place.
And so it has been with the rest of the solar system. It is at the same time far less friendly and hospitable than we had hoped, but more fascinating than we could have imagined. It took over fifty years to reach the rest of the planets. Pluto (once a planet, now classified as a dwarf planet) was imaged by the New Horizons spacecraft in 2015, using a flyby trajectory hauntingly like Mariner 4’s. That was the last of them—every planet from Mercury, nestled next to the sun, to Neptune and even (dwarf planet) Pluto had been imaged and investigated. We had done the easy part. Now it is time to go back to the most compelling places we’ve seen—the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, with their warm, subsurface oceans; the subterranean glaciers of Mars; the hydrocarbon oceans of Titan—and explore these places in detail. Answers about the very origins of life in our solar system may await us there, and the most primary questions concerning our existence and place in the universe may be answered.
This book is the story of the exploration of the solar system, told in historical detail with occasional “flash forwards” to missions planned for the near future. Like its companion book about the human spaceflight programs of the last sixty years, Amazing Stories of the Space Age, the book is a mixture of programs that were flown in the past, some that were planned but never flown, and others that will be flown in the near future. Interplanetary Robots covers primarily the efforts of the US and Soviet space programs, as those two superpowers have done most of the heavy lifting in planetary exploration to date. It has been impossible to write about every mission and program—there are simply too many to document in a single book—but the major ones are discussed.
Interplanetary Robots has been a guilty pleasure to research and write, but as with all such efforts there will be errors within. I take responsibility for most of them. It’s traditional for authors to say “any errors are mine,” but, in truth, go to any five primary sources while researching the space age—go ahead, I dare you—and you will invariably find disagreement on dates, spacecraft mass, and a lot of variability in who-said-what and when. Add to this the occasionally inaccurate, fading memories of people who were there, working on the programs, who have been interviewed, and you can understand how errors will sometimes creep in. It is inevitable, and all that space authors can do is consult multiple sources, ask knowledgeable friends to proofread the book, and hope. After all, the men and women who were building and flying these amazing machines were not, for the most part, thinking about perfect recordkeeping for the historians who would come later—they were thinking about getting the job done, flying the mission, and gaining the maximum science return from the heavy investment of tax dollars. Records can be incomplete at times, and some disagree with each other, but that’s not really the point.
At the end of the day, space exploration is not about dates and times, weights and measures, or facts and figures. It is a magnificent tale of exploration and discovery, and of the many thousands of incredible people who are behind these endeavors. It is about a compelling story well told, and that is what I’ve attempted to do. Other than that, any errors are . . . all mine (except for the ones all those other people made).
Please read and enjoy. If you like what you see—or in the unlikely event that you don’t—feel free to reach out and let me know on Facebook or via my website, www.pylebooks.com. And don’t forget to leave a few reviews at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and the other online book outlets—authors live and die by reviews. I do read them and respond in time.
And now, let’s take a trip through the solar system with the people and machines who have explored it with ingenuity, drive, and passion, as we join with the interplanetary robots on their incredible journeys into the great void beyond earth orbit. It’s a voyage well worth taking, and I assure you that your time spent with the remarkable people and machines who have journeyed to its vast reaches will be well spent.
