Cumbrian Sky

WELCOME TO CARNIVAL OF SPACE #54 READERS!

Well, here we are… a little over eleven days until Phoenix lands on Mars and the interest is (finally?) starting to mount Out There in the normal world. Of course, spaceflight enthusiasts have been counting down the days, hours and minutes until Phoenix lands for ages already, but until the past couple of days it’s had quite a low public profile. But yesterday there was a big NASA Press Briefing, shown live on NASA TV, and this morning Phoenix is big news across the internet’s news sites, and will no doubt start to creep into TV news reports soon, too. Soon we’ll be into single-figures-days away from another landing on Mars, and our first view of a whole new part of the Red Planet, Barsoom’s arctic.

Hopefully.

It’s easy to forget – or, more honestly, ignore – the fact that landing on Mars is hard. Very hard. Mars has killed more spaceprobes than it has allowed to live. It actually seems to take a perverse pleasure in allowing scientists and engineers to invest years, sometimes even decades of their lives in missions that fail at the very last moment. Am I the only one who’s noticed that, apart from in one case - the ill-fated Rusaian Phobos mission, which plummeted back into Earth’s ocean after launch went horribly wrong - Mars cruelly waits until probes actually arrive at Mars before murdering them? It’s as if the Red Planet plays with the men and women involved in these missions, and sits back and waits, bides its time, like a spider hiding in a shadowed crack in a wall, before striking. Think about it. Mars Polar Lander… Beagle 2… Mars Surveyor… all launched without a hitch, all cruised through interplanetary space without incident, but then, finally, when Mars was literally almost close enough to touch, after the hard work of designing, building and launching the probe were months and years behind them, and the people involved in the missions were starting to believe that they had Done It, Marsreached out with its hand and either swatted the probes out of the sky, or closed around them and made them vanish into the dark, leaving control rooms and labs full of bewildered men and women with “What happened?” and “That’s not fair… not fair…” expressions on their faces.

Does a similar, cruel fate await the men and women behind Phoenix? We’ll have to wait and see. Phoenix either will, or won’t, land on Mars and work, it’s as simple as that, there are no grey areas. In fact, it’s probably best not to think of the number of ways the mission could go wrong, or fail altogether. Every time I watch that brilliant computer animation showing Phoenix’s Entry, Descent and Landing I run through a mental checklist of potential Mission Killers, I just can’t help it. The atmospheric entry could go wrong – an error in entry angle of just a degree would either doom the probe to a fiery death in Mars’ atmosphere, or sentence it to exile in space after skipping off it and barrelling back out into the darkness uncontrollably. If it survives re-entry, the parachute could fail to open properly, or just not open at all, and Phoenix would slam into Green Valley like an egg dropped from the top of a skyscraper. If the parachute slows the probe, Phoenix could fail to detach from it, which would mean a really bad day for NASA. Even if that goes well the braking rockets could fail, and we’re back to the Humpty Dumpty scenario. And even if all those things go perfectly, Phoenix could land on a boulder, or in a trench. And even if it lands on ground as flat as Keira Knightley’s chest, a mechanical fault could mean the robot arm stays stubbornly locked in place, or the camera mast doesn’t deploy, or the solar panels don’t unfold, or… or…

Or, it could all work perfectly, and in the early hours of May 26th I’ll be sat here at my computer, gazing, open mouthed, at the first images ever taken of the north polar region of Mars, and seeing the Red Planet in a whole new – arctic – light.

Either way, we’ll know in less than two weeks.

Two weeks doesn’t sound very long, but boy it feels like an eternity, doesn’t it? I don’t know about you, but I’m in full on calendar- and diary- and wall-planner watching mode. If you’re anything like me you’re feeling a heady, sickening mixture of excitement, fear, impatience and dread. And if that’s how I – a humble spaceflight enthusiast – am feeling, how on Earth are the men and women involved IN the mission feeling? What must it be like for them, to have come all this way, to have been a part of this adventure, to have invested so much time, money and belief in the little spaceprobe now hurtling towards Mars, and know that it could all end in a moment, so many millions of miles away that they wouldn’t even know their dreams had died until several minutes later?

But I’m convinced that all will be well, and that Phoenix will touchdown safely in the rock- and boulder-free heart of Green Valley and show us a new Mars. I’ve got all my Phoenix websites bookmarked and I’m telling everyone who will listen (and many who won’t!) about the mission. I’m writing pieces about Phoenix for the paper and describing its mission in my Outreach talks. Soon I’ll be recording slots about Phoenix for my local radio stations, and I’ve already started putting together the Outreach talk I’m scheduled to give at my local Museum on May 31st, leaving its end section blank, ready to be filled withthe first images sent back in triumph by Phoenix from the martian arctic. 

There’s now a lot of public interest in Phoenix, a lot of it because, mistakenly, many people believe it is actually going there to look for living, breathing martians. But people do seem genuinely interested in and excited by the prospect of a new probe landing on Mars and sending back new pictures. Maybe it’s because the twin Mars rovers have been so successful, and their photographs have been splashed across websites, newspaper front pages and magazine spreads for the past four years. Maybe it’s because there’s just generally more interest in “space” now, thanks to the steady flow of incredible images from the Hubble Space Telescope and better online and TV coverage of the shuttle’s missions to the space station. Maybe it’s because NASA has been shouting from the rooftops that it is planning to send people back to the Moon, at last… Whatever the reason, there are now a lot more people looking forward to this mission than there were when the rovers landed four years ago.

But one thing hasn’t changed. There are still people who are protesting at the cost of the mission, who tell me that exploring Mars, exploring space at all, is a waste of money, that the money spent on "space" would be “better spent here, on Earth, solving OUR problems”…

I used to enter into a debate with such people and convince them that space exploration was a worthy, noble pursuit. I used to try and describe the scientific benefits it brings, the advancements in knowledge and understanding. I used to make the case that exploration is in our nature, encoded into our DNA in a way, that mankind is a curious species that is always impatient to see over thenext hill, past the far horizon, etc etc. And I still do, and I find that many people are genuinely interested to hear how the exploration of space has helped mould and shape our modern world, with the super fast computers, mobile communications and satellite technology we all take so much for granted.

But sometimes I realise I’m wasting my breath and sense that no matter how good a case I make for the continuing exploration of space they’re just not going to buy it. They’re very comfortable sitting up there on their high horse of indignation and outrage, and no matter how hard I pull on their leg they won’t come off it. So now I try a different tack.

I serve them up a huge dish of guilt, accompanied by a generous side order of hypocrisy.

I make them feel guilty about even daring to criticise the cost of space exploration when the way they live THEIR lives, the things THEY do, the choices THEY make all make them hypocrites.

I let them have their say first, of course, I let them dig their offended hole with their great big heavy shovel of morality, let them puff out their chests and lecture me on how much good could be done down here on Earth with the money spent “up there”, and then I tell them that they don’t have the right to lecture me about money being “wasted” on space when they make decisions, and buy things every day, that cost a lot more money – a LOT more money – than is spent on space.

“Do you ever buy a newspaper?” I might ask. Yes? Well, every newspaper is 80p you could have chosen to put in a charity collection box, or tin, but didn’t. You didn’t NEED a newspaper, but you decided you wanted one.

Do you ever rent a DVD from your local video store? You do? Fine. But every time you hand over £4 to the spotty assistant behind the counter that’s £4 you could have donated to a charity appeal for earthquake, famine or disaster victims. But you didn’t. You hired that movie instead.

Every time you buy a pint of beer, or a glass of wine in your local pub, that’s money you could have donated to pay for AIDS drugs in Africa. Every time you buy a tin of food for your cat or dog, that’s money you could have given to a Romanian orphanage. Every time you treat yourself to a takeaway Chinese or Indian meal, or a pizza, that’s a tenner you could have given to help street kids in Brazil, or Mexico; every time you buy a lipstick, or a bottle of aftershave, to make yourself look or smell nice, that’s cash you could have given to a charity paying for sight-restoring operations for the blind in India. You make choices, and purchases, a dozen times every week that spend money that could be spent on “better things”, but you see nothing wrong with it. Yet you want to take money away from space exploration, which helps us in so many practical, scientific and humanitarian ways? Give me a break.

Am I being a bit harsh? I don’t think so. Actually, truth be told, I don’t care. We have no choice but to explore space. We can’t live on this island planet forever, we simply have to get off at some point. And if some people want to stand in the way of that because they want to be hypocritical well, I’m sorry, but they’re fair game.

(please scroll down the page - orclick here - for part 2 of this post)

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