Try as we might to make anniversaries into occasions that look ahead, the impulse to look back is overwhelming, and that is certainly true for the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11’s lunar landing, on July 20, 1969.
In fact, from its origins, the space program has tended to look back. It looked back to Columbus for a legacy of exploration, back to America’s westering frontier for a past that it could project forward, and back to the memory of a murdered president who first sent the lunar lander on its way. The program’s most enduring images are not outward toward a futuristic space that was a practical void, but backward to Earth, and perhaps to a longing for another new world, or at least an Earth made anew. The images include the Earthrise, taken from lunar orbit by the crew of Apollo 8 in 1968, and the iconic Full Earth of Apollo 17, taken in 1972. The look back also frames the epic Voyager mission, when the robotic probe Voyager 1 commenced its trek, in 1977, by capturing the Earth and the Moon in a single image, and when it signed off its traverse across the solar system, in 1990, with a family portrait of the Sun and planets.
To those who believe the imperative to explore is hard-wired into our hominid genes or, for the deep ecologists of exploration, into the DNA of life since the first proto-lungfish crawled onto land, 40 years is barely the blink of an eye. But it is long enough to assess trends, and it is long enough to consider how sending rockets beyond the Earth’s atmosphere fits into the realm of contemporary exploration—what is emerging as the West’s Third Great Age of Discovery. The anniversary of the landing of Apollo 11 is a good time to evaluate a space program that has justified its great leap forward by its repeated looks back.
What does a look back to exploration history yield? Some observers believe that exploration is foreordained, and they see the chronicle as one of inevitable progress, though often with phases less vigorous than they would like. They are the lumpers of geographic discovery. The Apollo landers and Mariner probes are the lineal descendants of the Iberian caravels that set forth into the Sea of Darkness.
For those who think, as I do, that exploration is a cultural creation—that some societies are disposed to it more than others, and that societies may recede as well as expand—the chronicle is a realm for splitters. Caravels sink. Societies withdraw. New launches may occur within circumstances so different as to constitute whole new eras of exploration, in which contrasts matter as much as continuities.
In particular, ever since the probes to Atlantic isles and the African coast announced Europe’s seaborne discovery of a wider world, the history of exploration by the West falls into three coherent periods. Each Age of Discovery had its preferred geographic realm, its characteristic technology, its motivating rivalries, its grand gesture, and its peculiar bond to a sustaining culture.
The First Age—the fabled era of the Great Voyages, beginning in the 15th century and powered by a dynastic rivalry between Spain and Portugal—discovered the world ocean and how all the seas were joined. Of course there were some extraordinary entradas into the Americas and Africa, and the conquests of Mexico and Peru sparked aftershocks of exploratory zeal. But mostly geographic discovery depended on the ship. The age’s grand gesture was to sail around the globe; the Victoria, Magellan’s battered flagship, first did that. Cultural enthusiasms linked discovery with the emerging Renaissance. Francis Bacon made the voyage of discovery a metaphor in announcing the science that would replace scholasticism in his Instauratio Magna. Modern learning would explore whole new worlds, just as ships passing beyond the Pillars of Hercules left behind the dusty lore of the Ancients. Exploring became institutionalized.
Then it faded. By the onset of the 18th century, discovery had found the routes to the East that its sponsors wanted; the enterprise turned to codification rather than invention and regarded wanderlust as profligacy. Daniel Defoe put an itchy-footed Crusoe on a desert isle; Jonathan Swift mockingly sent Gulliver to new worlds, including an island floating in the clouds. In 1759, Samuel Johnson let Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, descend the Nile, only to learn he had known everything he needed before he left. An adventurer like William Dampier, who died four years before Robinson Crusoe was published, looks more like a buccaneer in search of booty than an explorer eager for new knowledge.
By the latter 18th century, geographic discovery was rekindled, sparking a Second Age of Discovery, suitably announced by the globe-spanning campaigns in 1761 and 1769 to measure the transit of Venus. Geopolitical rivalries revived and multiplied to embrace all those nations eager not only for trade but also for colonies. Britain assumed the competitive role Portugal had pioneered; it was the country the others challenged. A wave of circumnavigation, focused particularly in the Pacific, then spread over the continents with a surge of European settlements.
The deeper bond, however, was cultural, as the historian William H. Goetzmann elaborated in New Lands, New Men: America and the Second Great Age of Discovery (Viking, 1986). Modern science, expanding into a Greater Enlightenment, changed how people saw the world. It sent explorers to new places and revisited familiar ones with new insight. The grand gesture of this new age was to traverse and inventory a continent.
With his mesmerizing five-year trek to South America and Mexico, from 1799 to 1804, the German Alexander von Humboldt redefined the explorer as naturalist and Romantic hero. Appropriately, he dined with Thomas Jefferson a month after Lewis and Clark departed St. Louis with their own Corps of Discovery. Replacing the missionary and conquistador, the naturalist and surveyor saw old places with new eyes, such that even previously visited sites could be rediscovered. Humboldt was lionized as a second Columbus, the scientific discoverer of the New World. To an extraordinary extent, the whole culture refracted its enthusiasms and intellectual curiosity through exploration. Art, literature, science, commerce, politics—the explorer was not only reincarnated, but transmigrated up the realms of cultural passions. Painters like John James Audubon and George Catlin sought to recover the fauna and peoples of the new lands, and Frederic Edwin Church to put onto canvas the South American marvels Humboldt had described in words. The personal narratives of an expedition routinely became best sellers. For Americans in particular, natural wonders like a discovered Yellowstone or Yosemite took the place of hoary cultural monuments as an expression of nationalism. Settler societies like those in Australia, Canada, and the United States granted explorers status as Moses figures, prophetic guides for folk migrations to promised lands.
Then, once again, the process stalled. By the end of the 19th century, the Second Age ran out of new lands. Moreover, Antarctica, the last, posed a cultural barrier as great as its geographic one; the traditions of discovery could reach but not grasp the ice. There, the Second Age figuratively (and often literally) died. Even more unsettling, an intellectual revolution—in a word, modernism, with its dismissal of past verities and passion for novelty—began to rework the Enlightenment as the Enlightenment had the Renaissance. Revolution swept field after field, as modernists turned from the everyday realities that suited the Enlightenment explorer to atoms, quasars, genes, mathematical logic, a world stripped of the organizing perspective that had guided its vision.
The lull in new lands was matched by a lull in intellectual interest in geographic discovery. Modernism preferred to follow Sigmund Freud into the unconscious rather than Henry Morton Stanley into the Congo or John Wesley Powell through the Grand Canyon. The culture of the Second Age delaminated. Then Europe plunged into a global civil war and depression; the internal rivalries that it had long directed outward now returned, like a scorpion stinging itself, to make Europe the Dark Continent. The surge that had characterized the Second Age ended in the rhythms of normal science, in adventurers like Roy Chapman Andrews, of the American Museum of Natural History, searching less for new places than for second chances, and in a few forlorn treks amid an afterglow of history.
But new technologies and new geopolitical rivalries kick-started the enterprise once again. Ice, abyss, and space—three new realms became accessible to geographic discovery. Vehicles to carry people or their instrumented proxies across Antarctica, into the deep oceans, and beyond the Earth, along with remote sensing devices to extend their reach, catalyzed a Third Age, one effectively announced by the International Geophysical Year (1957-58), a worldwide program of research that echoed the transit-of-Venus campaigns two centuries earlier. It was during IGY that Sputnik was launched and the space race commenced. Within a dozen years, Apollo 11 landed on the moon.
Once again, though, exploration must engage more than new geographic realms and technologies. It requires a dynamic of external rivalries and internal drives, all embedded within a sustaining society. In this case, that society featured a popular culture that continued to bond to an earlier vision of exploration and an elite culture of modernism that did not. For good or ill, the Third Age is modernism as explorer. That alliance is a shaky one, for while modernism has sought out the new, it has tended (especially in its early phases) to look within rather than out and is better known for dismantling the apparatus that had served the Second Age so well than for rebuilding a replacement. Revealingly, the early modernist revolution occurred during the lull between the Second and Third Ages. If exploration is to thrive as vigorously as in the past, it will need strong bonds. A reconnection with a greater (or rebooted) modernism will be necessary.
Such a reconciliation is possible. The Antarctic ice sheet might have given even minimalists like Barnett Newman pause; and the banded swirls of Jupiter, up close, might be mistaken for abstract expressionism. So it is with philosophy, and the self-referential character of modernism’s paradoxes, so many of which hinge on the problem of self and other, or of self in relation to observed self; that, too, suits the character of Third Age exploration, in which we are talking to ourselves, or through robot surrogates.
The deeper difficulty, however, is not only that the first generation of modernists showed little interest in geographic exploration, but also that exploration enthusiasts have tried to retrofit contemporary expeditions with the intellectual kit of earlier ages, as though astronauts to Olympus Mons, on Mars, will recreate Humboldt’s ascent of Mount Chimborazo, or a probe to Europa can somehow replicate Lewis and Clark over the Lolo Pass. The age’s software and its hardware remain out of sync. The outcome can be unintended irony or outright parody, particularly when projecting mass migrations to Mars or the stars. Such misalignments matter because the strength of exploration derives from the density of its cultural bonds. It needs high culture as well as pop, and art and literature as well as science and engineering, if it is to rally sufficient motive force to propel it to the Challenger Deep and the surface of Titan, one of Saturn’s moons.
Again, the disconnect need not exist. The quickening pace of activity, the rush into new worlds, the awkward alignment of understanding with discovery—all justify calling this era, ours, a Third Great Age of Discovery. It’s an age still aborning. The paradoxes of modernism are ideal for terrains without people or even life and for encounters in which there is no Other. It’s an age that can rightly look back to a heritage of Western exploration and trace an authentic pedigree.
It’s harder to look ahead. Space is doubly tricky because it boasts its own subculture, one rife with utopianism, apart from any connections with geographic discovery. For exploration, the future is likely to continue its shift from space to abyss, as the deep oceans claim an ever larger share of discovery. They are closer, cheaper to explore, amenable to robotic probes, joined to military and commercial ambitions, and, since the 1970s, severed from fantasies about permanent colonization. The search for new life turns up tantalizing hints about suitable contexts on Mars or Titan, like the presence of ice or methane, but it has unveiled whole new biotas, habitats, and biochemistries in the ocean depths, from black smokers and giant squid to organisms that don’t metabolize by oxidizing hydrocarbons. The Third Age had its transition in Antarctica; it will flourish most robustly in the oceans of Earth.
The exploration of space will continue, but increasingly its costs and meager returns will compel choices among competing perspectives of how to do it, which are proxies for why we should care. The founding visions were personified by Wernher von Braun (1912-77) and James A. Van Allen (1914-2006). For von Braun, the ultimate purpose was extraterrestrial colonization, the expansion of humanity beyond Earth. For Van Allen, space exploration was science by newer means: rockets to carry labs and instruments beyond the distorting aura of the atmosphere. What was for the former a necessary romance, was for the latter an extravagant and pointless adventurism. Von Braun’s vision put people at the center and led to Apollo, the space shuttle, and the International Space Station; Van Allen’s looked to robots, lofted telescopes like NASA’s Great Observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope, into orbit, and dispatched spacecraft like the Mariners and Pioneers throughout the solar system as flying labs.
So long as cold-war rivalry and ample money powered NASA, the two visions could coexist. The first successful American launch, Explorer 1, in January 1958, led to a famous photo in which both von Braun and Van Allen, together with William H. Pickering, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, lift a full-scale copy of Explorer over their heads. The first planetary flyby—of Venus by Mariner 2—occurred in 1962, the year John Glenn rode Friendship 7; the lunar landing by Apollo 11 came a few months after Mariners 6 and 7 had flown to Mars.
But the rivalry between the two visions was intense. Since the Apollo program shut down, NASA has consistently claimed about 1 percent of the federal budget, and the costly demands of the manned space program have stripped away the funds for everything else. The tension worsened as the Reagan administration sought to scrap planetary exploration and move more of the space program to the military. The covert competition became public when the space shuttle Challenger exploded on launch as Voyager 2 completed its near encounter with Uranus.
Yet there is a third strategy epitomized by that Voyager mission and its successors. That vision is represented by Pickering, overseer of Voyager, in the picture with von Braun and Van Allen. The planetary program differs from the von Braun program in that it offers no segue to colonization; its emissaries are robots. It differs from the Van Allen agenda in that its interplanetary expeditions must trek far to their sites; their essence is the journey. They are expensive, they require elaborate support, they may take years to reach their destination, and their scientific payoff may be only marginally different from what orbiting telescopes might deliver. Viewed only in terms of research accomplished, hugging the outer shoreline of Earth with orbiting telescopes may yield bigger returns than venturing into the deep ocean of space. When Voyager 2 left Neptune, the Voyager twins had discovered 26 moons on their traverse of the solar system; the Hubble telescope has since discovered 48 (most the size of asteroids).
What the great interplanetary missions offer, however, is a thicker cultural bonding. They do science, they celebrate national achievement, they maintain a weak bond with the space subculture, but they do so as exploration, in the form of a journey that resonates with deeper cultural yearnings. The medium matters: This remains a voyage of discovery, perhaps even a kind of vision quest. Its purpose is not simply to gather data about cosmic rays or the magnetic field of Neptune. Rather, it retrofits the old genre with new technology. It provides a vehicle that contemporary software and hardware can share.
“Back to the future” may thus be the evolving motto of space exploration. The coming era will less resemble Apollo than it will the armadas of the First Age—expensive, elaborate endeavors that sought new routes to old ambitions and looked to trade, not settlement. Scientific data will become the spices and gemstones of the Third Age; and automated outposts, its coastal factories. In the absence of an Other, we won’t need a Self. We will anthropomorphize the robots.
When Apollo 11 landed, the partisans of human space travel looked avidly ahead. They could envision space stations, lunar colonies, and a permanent presence on Mars. It didn’t happen. That ambition was a misreading that confused exploration with colonization. If settlements do sprout up here and there, they will very likely resemble Antarctic bases, which, after a century, remain transient sites to conduct the business of science and national prestige. In space, as in the deep oceans, human discoverers will yield to machine surrogates.
As we look back, Apollo seems less the advent of a bold new future than an anomaly. Advocates insisted the adventure was analogous to Columbus sailing to a New World; critics thought it might resemble the Norse in Greenland. The critics were right. At least for exploration history, Apollo was a misplaced quest, like those endless expeditions that sought a Northwest Passage through Arctic ice, an undertaking that in time became its own goal apart from any deeper social purpose. They searched because it was there, because they wanted—they needed—it to be there.
The paradox of space exploration may not be that its partisans looked too far into the future, but that they looked too eccentrically into the past. They sought to justify the project by appeal to evolutionary hard-wiring, to an epoch of European colonization, to the history of American exceptionalism, to a heritage of exploration they thought ultimately divorced from any particular culture. Yet Apollo led only to the shuttle, an American Concorde, finally with no purpose other than to build a space station, whose own purpose was to justify the shuttle. In odd ways, the project looked back, not ahead, seeking to run machines with the cultural codes of earlier eras, like downloading golden oldies onto a shiny iPod.
Had they truly looked to the future, they might have sought a bond with the complex culture of modernism and its discontents. They would not have projected Manifest Destiny onto Mars, or sought to stuff a Columbus manqué into a spacesuit. Perhaps the defining image of Apollo 11 is the full-frame photo of Buzz Aldrin. What you see is a spacesuit on the Moon. The tinted visor is down, and it reflects back the shrunken image of Neil Armstrong taking a picture of Aldrin. It is just such self-reflexive paradoxes that characterize the Third Age, and that the von Braun program brushed aside.
The Voyager mission suggests how an alternative might have happened. If its greatest images have looked back—even its discovery of volcanoes on Io was the outcome of back-sighting after its encounter with Jupiter—it has continued outward. It continues today. It carries the future of space exploration with it.
