Looking Back at Our First Close-up of Saturn

Ray Bradbury at the 1980 Voyager Saturn Encounter at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Chris Gainor photo

This entry records my impressions from my visit in November 1980 to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, for Voyager 1's encounter with Saturn. It is adapted from an article I wrote for Spaceflight magazine in August, 2004, on the occasion of the Cassini spacecraft's arrival in orbit around the ringed planet. In the ten years since, Cassini and the Huygens spacecraft it dispatched to the surface of Titan in 2005 have further revolutionized our views of the Saturnian system.


Cassini's arrival at Saturn marked the first visit by a spacecraft to the ringed planet in nearly 23 years. Only three spacecraft had gone there before, all of those visits taking place in a narrow two-year time span – Pioneer 11 on September 1, 1979, Voyager 1 on November 12, 1980, and Voyager 2 on August 26, 1981.

Pioneer 11’s mission was mainly as a pathfinder, proving that spacecraft could survive the rigors of passages through the asteroid belt, the Jovian and Saturnian magnetic fields, and Saturn’s ring plane. Its primitive imager gave scientists and the public only a taste of the views Jupiter and Saturn offered.

Both Voyagers had passed by Jupiter in 1979, providing stunning views of the planet and its moons, most memorably the active volcanoes on Io. As Voyager 1 approached Saturn in the fall of 1980, more than the usual amount of anticipation was in the air at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Much of the future of planetary exploration hinged on the success of this encounter, because Voyager 1 had the dual mission of passing close to both Saturn and its moon Titan, the only moon in the solar system known in 1980 to have an atmosphere.


Titan's importance was shown by the fact that Voyager 1's path by Titan would direct it away from the orbital plane of the other planets. Only if Voyager 1 succeeded in getting data from Titan on its way in toward Saturn would Voyager 2 be freed to take a path by Saturn that would direct it to Uranus and hopefully Neptune. A failure of Voyager 1’s Titan encounter would mean that Voyager 2 would be directed to pass close to Titan, and that path would exclude further Voyager planetary encounters.

We know today that both Voyagers succeeded – Voyager 1 obtained its crucial data from Titan and Voyager 2 visited in its turn Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 1’s encounter with Titan wound up raising more questions than it answered, and those questions inspired the European Space Agency to send the Huygens probe to Titan's surface in 2005 after riding aboard  Cassini to the Saturnian system.

I was privileged to be one of the journalists at JPL covering Voyager 1’s dramatic encounter with Saturn and Titan, and my memories of that event provide an interesting backdrop to the discoveries that Cassini and Huygens have been making. In a dispatch to my newspaper, I described the findings of those few days in November 1980 as a “knowledge explosion.”

When it came to coining superlatives to describe the encounter, I had plenty of competition.  In addition to the scientists and engineers at JPL, there was a crowd of nearly 1,100 reporters and science fiction fans, including a number of celebrities, whose activities were chronicled by a reporter from People magazine.

Science fiction great Ray Bradbury came to JPL and declared: “This is another of those days that will be remembered a billion years from now. We are privileged to be here and be a part of it.”

Carl Sagan, then at the height of his fame as the star of television's Cosmos, rubbed shoulders with the media horde to shoot segments for a news programme on an American TV network. Many past leaders of the space program, including former JPL director William Pickering, joined the crowd. A large British media delegation was headed by Patrick Moore.
California Governor Jerry Brown spent several hours at JPL on encounter day, accompanied by his science advisor, former Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart.

Brown repeated his contention, which even then sounded tired, that "resource efficiency and technological innovation are the keys to the future."

One of the biggest celebrities was a short, stooped man with a shock of white hair,
Clyde Tombaugh, who 50 years earlier had discovered Pluto. He autographed copies of his new book on a recent spate of discoveries about the planet he had discovered as a young man.

Most of the information was given out in daily morning press briefings, which drew standing room only crowds to JPL's von Kármán Auditorium. After scientists presented the latest photos and other data, journalists vied with one another for the first and best questions.
A large model of Voyager dominated one wall of the auditorium, and formed the backdrop for television news reporters and interviews. The crowds grew and contracted in direct relation to the proximity of the Nov. 12 encounter.

There was activity in the press area almost around the clock that week as Voyager 1 sent home a seemingly ceaseless stream of photographs that flashed in their raw forms onto television screens at the Voyager control centre at JPL.

Following the daily press briefings, reporters lined up to pick up their own copies of the best images. The photo office just outside the auditorium was adorned with a cartoon showing a hand clutching a photo of Saturn sticking out of an ocean surface, circled by shark fins. Most reporters still used typewriters and telephones to file their stories, since the internet, word processors, portable computers and even fax machines were still in the future.

Even before most reporters arrived for the encounter, Voyager 1 had sent back dramatic photos showing the structure of Saturn’s rings, including ringlets and hundreds of divisions that showed the rings to be similar to a phonograph record. Late in encounter week, scientists had found between 800 and 1,000 ringlets circling Saturn within the six major ring systems extending 480.000 kilometres from Saturn.

As Voyager flew by, the rings had more stunning surprises. The Cassini Division and the Encke Division were found not to be gaps in the rings at all, but ring systems that do not reflect as much light as brighter rings.

Intertwined "braids" and “knots” in the outermost ring appeared to defy the laws of orbital dynamics. “Spokes" were found in Saturn's major ring, apparently caused by interaction between the rings and Saturn's magnetic fields. Talk of shepherd moons filled the air at JPL.
“In this strange world of Saturn’s rings, the bizarre becomes commonplace,” said Dr. Bradford Smith, the head of Voyager’s imaging team.

Saturn's atmosphere defied predictions that it would be topped by haze, and instead revealed Jupiter-like bands, storms and spots.

Saturnian moons Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys. Dione. Rhea, Hyperion and Iapetus, were found to be made up mainly of ice, and all with the exception of Enceladus, which was not well placed for Voyager 1’s cameras, were seen to be peppered with craters.

Mimas, the closest large moon to Saturn, was photographed with a crater 130 km across, one quarter the diameter of Mimas. A photo of the crater and its central peak drew gasps at a press conference and a comment from Dr. Smith: “This is not an optical illusion.” Soon photocopies of the Mimas photo, complete with additional lines to make the moon look like a dead ringer for the Death Star from Star Wars, circulated around JPL and elsewhere.

The photos of Titan, on the other hand, were a disappointment. Titan's orangeish atmosphere obscured the surface. But Voyager’s instruments found Titan’s atmosphere to be deeper and denser than expected. Expectations of a methane atmosphere were dashed when Voyager’s instruments showed that Titan's atmosphere is made up mainly of nitrogen, the element that makes up 78 per cent of Earth's atmosphere. Methane makes up a few percent of Titan's atmosphere and dominates the haze atop Titan's clouds.

Titan, which long had been thought to be the largest moon in the Solar System, lost its title due to Voyager’s measurements to the Jovian moon Ganymede, although the matter remained in some question pending information on Neptune’s moon Triton.

As Voyager 1 moved away from Saturn, Dr. Smith proclaimed himself “stunned” by the images. “I cannot recall being in such a state of euphoria over any previous planetary encounter. We have learned more about the Saturnian system in the last week than we had in all previous recorded history.”

The amazing photos and data from Saturn and Titan opened the door for Voyager 2 to fly on to Uranus and Neptune. And the following August when Voyager 2 arrived at Saturn, the crowds of press and celebrities at JPL were even larger than for Voyager 1.

But despite Voyager’s success, apprehension hung over JPL the week Voyager 1 went by Saturn. Everyone knew that Voyager 2’s Saturn encounter would be the last planetary encounter by a U.S. spacecraft for at least five years. It was already being labelled by some pessimists as "the last picture show.”

The U.S. space program was ending a decade that began with the heights of Apollo on the Moon and Mariner at Mars, followed by years of cuts that grounded both NASA’s human and planetary programs.

President Jimmy Carter had shown little interest in space exploration during his term of office. And eight days before Voyager 1’s arrival at Saturn, Carter had been defeated in the 1980 presidential election by Ronald Reagan, who ran on a platform of major reductions to government spending.

 As a result, concerned NASA officials were present in force in the von Kármán Auditorium to court reporters in hopes of tapping public support.

 Angelo Guastaferro, NASA's director of planetary programs, surprised many reporters when he asked them for suggestions on how NASA could improve its image and get support for more missions to the planets.

And a press conference marking the culmination of the Voyager program became a discussion of the causes of the looming hiatus in planetary exploration.

Bruce Murray, then the director of JPL, said Voyager showed the potential of what America can do, but explained the hiatus this way: “As a people, we broke our concentration.”
Andrew Stofan, another NASA official, blamed over-optimism in the development of the space shuttle, which was then still five months away from its first flight. While the vast amounts of money needed to develop the shuttle in the 1970s starved other programs, Stofan added that NASA had ordered only enough large launch vehicles to support programs until the shuttle was due to begin flying in 1979.

Guastaferro said one casualty of the Shuttle delays was the Galileo spacecraft, which had been scheduled for a shuttle launch in 1982 toward a mission in orbit around Jupiter.
The NASA officials also discussed how shuttle problems were delaying the Solar Polar mission, a two-spacecraft international effort, and how political problems were besetting the Venus Orbiting Imaging Radar (VOIR) spacecraft.

"What scientists want to do in the later part of this century will be more difficult to describe and defend" than the Voyager missions or the 1976 Viking landings on Mars, said NASA’s John Naugle. Those future missions included a Saturn orbiter, a Titan orbiting imaging flight, and encounters with comets. NASA was talking with European nations about sending a mission to Halley's comet in anticipation of its close approach to the Sun and Earth in 1986.

As we know now, NASA’s planetary exploration program was put on the back burner for most of the 1980s, with the exception of Voyager 2, which encountered Uranus in 1986 and flew by Neptune and its moon Triton in 1989. Voyager 2 found Triton to be smaller than Jupiter’s four large moons and Titan, although Triton was found to possess a thin atmosphere.

NASA did not launch any new planetary missions until 1989, when the shuttle returned to service following the Challenger disaster in 1986.

Galileo was launched that year and it didn’t begin its mission at Jupiter until 1995. The Solar Polar Mission was reduced to the European Ulysses spacecraft, which was launched from the shuttle in 1990. VOIR was replaced by the less ambitious but very successful Magellan spacecraft, launched by the shuttle in 1989. A European spacecraft is exploring Venus from orbit today, and an American spacecraft is orbiting Mercury.

NASA never did launch a craft to Halley’s comet, but European, Soviet and Japanese spacecraft probed the comet, followed by NASA spacecraft that have since visited other comets. This week the European Rosetta spacecraft went into orbit around a comet.

After a two-decade hiatus interrupted only by the failed Mars Observer spacecraft, NASA returned to Mars in 1997. Among the many spacecraft that have gone to Mars since then, two rovers are today roaming the surface of the red planet.

And now Cassini is entering its second decade of exploring the Saturnian system. Together with Huygens, Cassini picked up on the exploration of Titan where Voyager 1 left off in 1980. In less than a year, the New Horizons spacecraft will give humanity its first close-up view of Pluto. 

Voyager 1 image of Tethys, Dione, and Saturn, November 3, 1980. NASA photo

The 45 that Rocketed with Apollo 11, 45 Years Later

Forty-five years ago this week the hottest song in the English-speaking world was an apocalyptic tune that looked forward to a future of warped human life, resource depletion and ultimately a harsh judgement from the almighty.

In that final summer of the 1960s, an unknown folk rock duo from Nebraska found themselves the owner of the top spot in the Billboard's Top 40 chart for six weeks. Despite their best efforts, they never charted another song.

The song, "In the Year 2525," rocketed to the top of the 45 singles charts in the U.S., Canada, Britain and Australia just as Apollo 11 and its astronauts prepared to blast off for the first landing of humans on the Moon. In my view, the timing of the two events was not a coincidence.

Officially known as "In the Year 2525 (Exordium and Terminus)," the song was written in a half hour in 1964 by Rick Evans of Lincoln, Nebraska. Four years later, Evans was in a duo with his friend Denny Zager, who reluctantly agreed to Evans' urgings to record the song. Zager and Evans recorded the song on Truth records in Odessa, Texas, and after the song became a local hit, RCA Records signed the duo and soon the song began its ride to the heights of popularity.

Just before Apollo 11 left for the Moon on July 16, 1969, "In the Year 2525" became number one in the United States, and it still held that spot a month later during that other major event of the summer of '69, the Woodstock Music Festival.

To me, the song reflected the conflicted feelings many people had about the first landing on the Moon, an event that confronted many people with the future and the hopes and fears it engenders. Although the Moon landing was ultimately seen to be a positive event, many questioned the need to go there.

The 1960s was a decade that awoke many controversies over social issues, including civil rights, women's rights, the need for wars such as Vietnam, and questioning of technological progress in the form of the environmental movement. Among the spectators at the Kennedy Space Center as Apollo 11 departed for the Moon was a group of civil rights leaders protesting spending on space travel at a time when so many Americans, particularly African Americans, were living in poverty.

For millions of people watching astronauts flying to the Moon, an event torn out of the pages of science fiction, Zager and Evans' song expressed the concerns they felt about the direction humankind was going. For some, it recalled other science fiction tales that they had absorbed from books, pulp magazines and movies.

Even before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon, Apollo had become a major cultural milestone. That started seven months earlier, when Apollo 8 astronauts circled the Moon and returned home with images of the Earth rising over the lunar surface, which drove home the fragility and isolation of our home planet. 

The drama of Apollo 11 was heightened by the great danger the astronauts faced by flying so far away from home, something that was forgotten or trivialized in  the celebrations that followed the successful completion of the flight. 

Forty-five years after that historic milestone, historians and others are still debating the meaning of Apollo 11. Many people now argue that Apollo may not have been the great historical turning point that many believed at the time.

In an effort to explain why humans have stuck close to home since the last Apollo astronauts returned home in 1972, some people have suggested that Apollo represented a 21st century event that took place prematurely in the middle of the 20th century. That may well be true, but it remains a matter of conjecture.

And one reason why humanity stepped back after its first move into the cosmos could be that too many people looked at the future and didn't like what they saw. "In the Year 2525" reflected many people's concerns about where humankind was going.

Whether the hopes of Apollo 11 or the fears of "In the Year 2525" represent our future remains a topic of lively argument.

In my opinion, Zager and Evans wouldn't have been even a one-hit wonder without Apollo 11. And whether that would have been a good thing - well, that's another matter!

Switching Off Space Missions

Canada's MOST satellite, launched in 2003. CSA image

When Canada's first satellite, Alouette 1, was launched in 1962, engineers estimated that it would last for a year. Alouette was so advanced that some Americans expected that the satellite would operate for a far shorter time, but in fact it was still going strong ten years later when Canadian officials ended the mission and turned Alouette off. The same fate awaited Alouette 2 after a decade of service, and when Canada's third satellite, ISIS-1, had completed 15 years on orbit, control was turned over to Japanese scientists who continued its research for another five years.

From the beginning, Canada has had the enviable problem of what to do with robotic spacecraft that keep operating long beyond their projected lifetimes, an issue which has popped up again with Canada's first  astronomy satellite, known as MOST, which has been in orbit since 2003. MOST (the acronym stands for Microvariability and Oscillations of STars) is a low-budget satellite about the size of large suitcase that tracks individual stars for long periods of time to detect minute variations in light levels that reveal what is going on inside the star.

Although MOST, which has been nicknamed the Humble Space Telescope, doesn't take pretty pictures like the more famous Hubble Telescope, it has produced solid, important and often surprising science for astronomers. The astronomers who operate MOST, led by Jaymie Matthews of the University of British Columbia, understandably want MOST's mission to continue.

Even a low-cost $10 million satellite needs $300,000 a year to operate, and now Matthews is looking for corporate support to keep MOST in operation. Funds from Europe are also being sought to present MOST from being switched off on September 9, and I wouldn't be surprised if the MOST scientists also look into crowd funding.

This issue isn't restricted to Canada. In the United States, with its wide open budget battles between NASA, the president of the day, the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives, threats are often made to prematurely end robot missions. Hubble itself was in danger a decade ago, but in that case, the issue revolved around whether it was safe to send one more space shuttle servicing mission to Hubble before the shuttle program ended in 2011. In the end, NASA relented in the face of public demand, and launched a shuttle servicing mission that extended Hubble's life to the present day.

This year NASA has made known a plan to end the mission of the Spitzer Space Telescope in 2015. Spitzer, one of the "Great Observatory" missions that include Hubble, images celestial objects in the infrared and has been flying a limited mission since coolant in its camera ran out in 2009. Now it is under threat of being shut off due to "constrained budget conditions."

Even well-known missions, including Mars rovers and the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn, have been threatened with curtailment for budget reasons, although their high profile status has usually saved them. 

Other ongoing missions have not fared so well. For example, the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Packages that were deployed on the Moon by astronauts from Apollos 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17, were switched off on September 30, 1977, for budgetary reasons (Apollo 11's seismometer had lasted only a short time). 

In the case of MOST, one feels for the great work being done by its scientists, and wonders what might be discovered if MOST were given a longer lease on life. But other Canadian astronomers with other research interests are waiting with varying degrees of patience for funding for their own space-based instruments, which might get the go-ahead for launch and discoveries of their own when the MOST funds are freed up. 

An even better solution would be for our federal government to spend more on space, but with austerity being the order of the day and the decision being left to a government not known for its enthusiasm for science, that is a distant dream.

On a happier note, we are currently watching the resurrection of a spacecraft whose switch was turned off seventeen years ago. ISEE-3 (for International Sun-Earth Explorer) was launched in 1978 into a highly unusual 'halo' orbit around an Earth-Sun Lagrangian point. After its original mission ended, ISEE-3 was repurposed as the International Comet Explorer and became the first spacecraft to encounter a comet, in this case Comet Giacobini-Zinner in 1985.

This year a private group of space enthusiasts, including engineers and scientists, many of them former NASA employees, launched a crowd funding effort. More than $150,000 has been raised, and after NASA agreed to the plan and the reboot team dug through archives to determine how to contact and operate the spacecraft, they fired ISEE-3's thrusters last week for the first time since 1997.

Still more work needs to be done to make this project a success, but it offers a glimmer of hope to those whose spacecraft has been turned off or faces termination by budget.

The RASC Looks Back and Looks Forward

Lauri Roche of the RASC Victoria Centre and Dr. Jim Hesser of the DAO cut the special birthday cake. Chris Gainor photos

The Victoria Centre of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada celebrated its 100th birthday in style last weekend with a highly successful RASC General Assembly that brought RASC members to Victoria from across Canada.

General Assembly participants looked back with an excellent panel in the Centre of the Universe at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory on the life and work of John Stanley Plaskett, who founded the DAO a century ago. Dr. Jim Hesser, who recently retired as DAO director, spoke about how he regularly encountered Plaskett's spirit at the DAO in the form of the high calibre research there that has put DAO astronomers in the front ranks of world astronomy. Other panelists, including Plaskett biographer Peter Broughton, spoke about Plaskett's life and times.

The evening also featured a barbecue capped by a birthday cake in the shape of the famous dome enclosing the Plaskett Telescope at the DAO. And Victoria Centre historian Bill Almond marked the completion of his long-awaited history of the Victoria Centre, which is now available for download at the centre's website.

The General Assembly included what was called the strongest session of papers presented at a GA in years, starting with a discussion of Mi'kmaw traditional calendar and going on to many other topics, including RASC Archivist Randall Rosenfeld's talk about how Victoria Centre members held a symposium way back in 1931 on life elsewhere in the universe. A highlight of the paper session was 10-year-old Nathan Gray from Nova Scotia talking about the success he and his sister Kathryn have enjoyed discovering supernovas.

What about the looking forward? There was a session on Canadian astronomers' 2020 vision for new projects in the coming year. Those include a major update to the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, a cloud computing scheme for astronomical data known as CANFAR, and a plan for a Canadian space telescope, CASTOR, along with participation in major international astronomy programs, including the Thirty Meter Telescope, the Serro Chajnantor Atacama Telescope and the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope. On top of the many new programs in work or just coming on stream with Canadian participation, this vision means Canadian astronomers have exciting work ahead as long as they continue to enjoy support from the federal government and the public.

The GA was rounded out with well-attended talks by Dr. Laura Ferrarese of the National Research Council on galaxies, Dr. Andy Pon of the University of Leeds on star formation regions, and CBC's Bob McDonald on tourism in space. And finally, the RASC held business meetings that included the installation of a new president, James Edgar of Melville, Saskatchewan.

The next RASC General Assembly takes place July 1 to 5 next year in Halifax. I'm already looking forward to it.

RASCals enjoy a barbecue at the Centre of the Universe

Canada's Amateur Astronomers Gather in Victoria

A scene from the 1998 RASC General Assembly at Pearson College in Metchosin. Chris Gainor photo

This week amateur astronomers from across Canada are converging on the University of Victoria for an annual gathering that goes back to 1960.

Called the General Assembly of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, this meeting moves from one locale in Canada to another each year. Last year, it took place in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and next year it is slated for Halifax, Nova Scotia. The GA has previously taken place in Victoria in 1972, 1981, 1988, and 1998.

Part of the meeting is business - the Annual General Meeting of the RASC takes place there. But it is also a place for great guest speakers and for papers presented by RASC members. And there is plenty of socializing going on as well.

The RASC got its start as an informal grouping of astronomy enthusiasts in Toronto in 1868, and the  and during the early years, it was a Toronto organization. The Society was formally incorporated in 1890 and in 1903, the society won its royal designation from King Edward VII and took on the RASC name. By then astronomy clubs in other Canadian centres began to join the RASC, and it evolved from a Toronto group into a national society that today includes astronomers in all parts of Canada.

Each local club affiliated to the RASC is known as a Centre, and today there are 29 centres spread out amongst Canada's 10 provinces. About 4,200 people belong to the RASC. 

This year, the Victoria Centre is celebrating the 100th anniversary of its creation, although I have found that efforts to set up an astronomy club in Victoria actually began in 1907. By 1914, the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory was under construction on Little Saanich Mountain, and the presence of this world-class observatory, along with the arrival fifty years later of the University of Victoria and its physics and astronomy department, has ensured the durability of the Victoria Centre.

For much of the history of the RASC, it held a formal Annual General Meeting in Toronto, but in 1960 the first GA took place in Montreal. I first joined the RASC while I was finishing grade school, and attended my first GA in Calgary in 1968. While many of the people I met there are gone, there will be two or three other participants from that meeting who I'll catch up with at this Victoria GA.

Astronomy has changed a great deal in those years, and so has the RASC. In the 1960s it was a mixture of amateur and professional astronomers, but as the ranks of professionals grew in the 1960s and 1970s, they organized their own professional association. Fortunately, many have chosen to remain with the RASC. The instruments we amateurs use today are far more powerful and sophisticated than what we had in the 1960s, which means that amateurs are playing a bigger role in formal scientific work than once was the case. And the astro photos taken by many of my friends in the RASC today can compete with almost anything else taken from Earth.

The Centres provide a place for members to come together for shared astronomical activities including star parties and public outreach, such as the Saturday night observing that will take place this summer at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory. The Society produces publications such as the annual Observer's Handbook, the Observer's Calendar, the RASC Journal and others. For such a large country as Canada, RASC provides a rare opportunity for Canada's amateur astronomers to congregate.

With the arrival of online resources and social media, not to mention the many changes taking place in Canadian society, we in the RASC are working hard to keep up with relevant events and services. Fortunately, new technologies are making amateur astronomy more exciting and accessible.

Ten years ago, I was president of the Victoria Centre, and now I am the Second Vice President of the RASC. To my RASC friends from the rest of Canada, welcome to Victoria! Anyone else who is interested in the RASC is invited to our two public lectures during the GA, which goes until June 29. Further information is available at victoria.rasc.ca

Mars is Still the Goal, but a Distant One

Ideas for sending humans for Mars have been around for many years, including this 1960s NASA concept. NASA Image.

On December 19, 1972, the astronauts of Apollo 17 strapped themselves into their couches and rode their Command Module through a high-speed re-entry to a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. The three astronauts were returning from a highly successful expedition to the Moon, and the end of their flight marked the last time that humans ventured beyond low Earth orbit.

More than four decades have gone by since the end of Apollo, and since then supporters of human space exploration have looked to the day when humans will again strike out beyond the environs of Earth.

Most people who support space exploration look to Mars as the target, a fact that was underlined early this month when the Committee on Human Spaceflight of the U.S. National Research Council (not to be confused with the National Research Council of Canada) issued a major report on directions for the U.S. human space program.

The report is the latest in a long series of reports commissioned by NASA, Congress (as in this case), presidents, and advocacy groups looking into the state of space exploration since the end of Apollo. While these reports have sometimes been commissioned in the hopes of stirring action or to give the illusion of action, none has so far hastened the day when astronauts will pull away from Earth orbit.

But this latest report discusses some home truths that are worth considering in relation to the current state of America's human space exploration program. First is the matter of public opinion. The report reviewed public attitudes to space exploration over the years, and found that consistently, more Americans think too much is spent on space than those who think too little is spent on space.

While it is true that most people have an inflated idea of how much money is spent on space  (NASA's budget is well below one percent of the budget of the U.S. government), it is hard for politicians to ignore public opinion, particularly when there are so many competing priorities for public dollars, many of them which are capable of creating great political controversy.

The highly expensive Apollo flights to the Moon are popular in retrospect, but polling data from the 1960s show that the public did not enthusiastically support spending on that program. Historians (including myself) are looking into the roots of Apollo, and increasingly we are finding that the race to the Moon was more a series of coincidences that for a few years vaulted space exploration into the realm of national security, always a high priority spending item, rather than being a major milestone on humanity's inevitable march to the stars, as many people believed at the time.

In a time of continued recession in the economy and austerity in U.S. government spending, the odds of NASA winning new funds for human space exploration are not great. NASA's human space exploration funds are being consumed by the International Space Station and efforts to build a replacement spacecraft for the space shuttle.

The report also set Mars as the "horizon" or long-term goal for U.S. astronauts, not a surprising goal but one that involves a number of complications. While previous administrations, including both Bush administrations, had set a NASA a goal of going to Mars, the Obama administration is pursuing an asteroid capture mission that would use robot space vehicles and the new Orion spacecraft being developed by NASA. This plan is not popular in Congress, where many space advocates want more of a focus on Mars.

But as the report suggests, there are a number of ways to get to Mars. It lays out three possible paths, including a Mars mission following an asteroid mission as proposed by the Obama administration, a mission to Mars following a return to the Moon, and a Mars mission following a step-by-step set of missions including the Moon and an asteroid.

These suggested approaches run contrary to ideas advanced by Mars flight advocates such as Robert Zubrin, who has been urging NASA to forget the Moon and any intermediate targets, and instead focus on a mission to Mars. 

Two highly publicized private initiatives are taking the Mars direct approach. One, which was promoted by Denis Tito, the millionaire who in 2001 became the first private individual to buy a trip into space, has foundered on funding problems, while another involving a one-way trip to Mars, continues despite the many questions hanging over it.

The report suggests that NASA continue to work with international partners, but this is problematical because U.S. government agencies are prohibited from working with China, today's rising space power, and cooperation with Russia is in jeopardy because of the crisis in Ukraine.

One message I take from this latest report is that Mars remains an elusive target, not only because of its great distance and the challenges involved in getting humans to Mars and back, but mainly because of a persistent lack of public interest in paying the price for such a mission.

Book Review: The War on Science

The War on Science:

Muzzled Scientists and Wilful Blindness in Stephen Harper's Canada

By Chris Turner

Greystone Books

The ham handed efforts by Stephen Harper and his Prime Minister's Office to control government information have rightly caused outrage both inside and outside Canada, particularly because often the messages that do go out are misleading and are designed purely for the benefit of Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada.

As a historian, I join my colleagues in opposing the Harper government's attacks on the Library and Archives of Canada, the census conducted by Statistics Canada, and other services needed by historians to do our work. Moreover, the Harper government is working to promote an historical view of Canada that caters to the prejudices and blind spots of the Conservative 'Base,' in opposition to new directions emerging in Canadian historical research.

Canadians regularly see the Harper government use every trick in the book to advance its agenda, including shutting down Parliament and abusing its rules and traditions, using taxpayers' money for partisan advertising, and shouting down or removing all sources of independent oversight and advice, including those created as part of Harper's own accountability promises made before he took office in 2006. The bottom line of these efforts is to exercise relentless control over all messages emanating from the government to suit the political needs and whims of the prime minister.

This muzzling is a particularly controversial in the area of science, as explained in The War on Science by journalist and recent Green Party of Canada candidate Chris Turner. Relying heavily on the work of the shrinking group of journalists covering science in Canada and a few interviews with key scientists who were willing to talk, Turner has served up a concise critique of the Harper government's efforts to fit scientists into the straitjacket of its media messaging.

The War on Science focuses on science related to the environment, where Canadian government researchers who have been examining the development of climate change have run head on into the Harperite goal of creating economic wealth through exploitation of oil and gas resources, the primary culprits in the jarring climatic changes that are already changing life on Earth. 

Many Canadians are already familiar with Harper government measures that have led to scientific institutes being shut down or severely cut back, notably the Experimental Lakes Area in Ontario, and that have seen those researchers who still have government jobs being forced to to run every public statement through media minders with direct connections to the Prime Minister's Office. Canadian government science is being subordinated to politics, as Turner persuasively argues.

Even outside the area of environmental science, the Harper government has damaged Canada's scientific assets. The National Research Council of Canada, which has nearly a century of distinguished research behind it, is now being reduced to being a "concierge" for Canadian businesses seeking scientific help. This directive threatens the NRC's work in basic scientific research that has historically led to economic benefits, but fits in with Harper government spin that it is focused on creating jobs.

In criticizing the Harper government's treatment of science, Turner does miss a number of nuances. Peer reviewed science is without a doubt superior to politics as a means of judging the quality of science, but even peer review and the scientists who carry it out are not without fault or bias.

And while the Harper government has taken political control of science to a new level, this problem did not begin in 2006 when the Harper took office.

As Turner discusses in his book, politics has trumped reality at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans for many years as powerful economic interests caused previous Liberal and Conservative governments to ignore or suppress the real scientific findings that our fish stocks were in danger. The result of this massive failure was the collapse of Newfoundland cod fishery in the late 1980s and more recently the fragile state of salmon fisheries on the West Coast. The Harper government has imposed massive cuts, including the destruction of libraries, on this department. 

The sad story of DFO isn't the only one. Another federal department (missed by Turner) with a long history of politically-driven research is Health Canada, where powerful commercial interests, including food producers and the pharmaceutical industry, have called the research tune for decades. Health Canada has long suffered from the governments putting the desire to be seen as friendly to business above the need to protect the public.

And like many other countries, when Canada has been at war, its scientists were enlisted in developing new weapons and means to counter other weapons. 

The history of government-supported scientific research in Canada before 2006 is not as straightforward as Turner would have us believe. But it is true that the Harper government has taken political manipulation of the government's scientific work to a whole new level. And this trend is even more ominous because it is happening for reasons of pure politics to satisfy a group of people, the Conservative 'Base,' many of whom have difficulty accepting numerous realities of the twenty-first century such as climate change.

There is also a whole other story, yet to be told, about how Canada's once-proud Conservatives have fallen under the sway of the Alberta oil industry and the young market-worshiping zealots who populate the Prime Minister's Office.

Even more worrying is the growth of faith-based politics around Canada, the United States and elsewhere at the expense of fact-based policy. The controversial Quebec Charter of Values promulgated by that province's former separatist government, and numerous other provincial initiatives around the country have been designed to appeal to voters' fears and prejudices. Policy being driven by the Tea Party Republicans in the United States is undermining scientific research there, as well as America's position as the economic powerhouse of the world.

Despite its limited scope, The War on Science contains an important message that should be considered by all thoughtful Canadians.

"There is a wager implicit in the Harper agenda's war on science," Turner writes. "The Conservative government is betting that meticulously message-disciplined rhetorical attacks, carefully stage-managed public pronouncements, and glossy Economic Action Plan announcements on every Hockey Night in Canada broadcast will distract the Canadian public from noticing the full toll of the evisceration of governmental science and environmental stewardship until it is too late to be undone." 

Turner concludes by expressing his hope that Canadians will ensure that the Harper Conservatives will lose their bet, a hope I share as the consequences of the political manipulation of Canadian science hit home.