Apparently lost and 15 billion miles from Earth, NASA’s Voyager 1 calls home.
Last week, NASA made news twice. First, it announced that it had reestablished reliable radio communication with Voyager I, now more than 15 billion miles from Earth, almost beyond the grip of our solar system.
Think about this.
Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 when we were still getting used to transistors! It has outlived its life expectancy by 10 times. It’s the little engine that could. Designed initially to probe Saturn and Jupiter, it is now the most distant man-made object in the universe. It is currently traveling at 38,000 miles per hour. It stores data on a clunky eight-track tape system. The spacecraft is no larger than a small compact car. It has three small nuclear reactors on board. At some point, perhaps as early as 2025, the last of those reactors will run out of oomph. Voyager 1 will continue to surf the cosmos (forever), but it will be an inert object, and we on Earth will no longer be able to communicate with it. So far in its 47-year voyage, Voyager 1 has taken thousands of photographs (alas, using 1970s photo technology), including the famous Pale Blue Dot family portrait of our entire solar system — taken in 60 frames on Valentine’s Day 1990. The late Carl Sagan (1934-1996) made the most of that photograph: see his remarkable 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.
Voyager 1 began to fail on November 14, 2023. The messages it was sending to Earth were suddenly gibberish. A radio signal takes almost a whole day (22.5 hours) to reach the spacecraft. And then 22.5 hours for Voyager 1’s reply to reach Earth. So addressing this problem required great patience.
Voyager 1 was offline for five months. NASA feared that it had finally reached the end of its spectacular life. Engineers and scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena have been “working the problem,” as NASA likes to put it, with muted feverishness since last November. Somehow, they figured out where something failed in one of the three onboard computers. It turns out to be a single chip. Think of what a chip was in 1977. Somehow, they designed a workaround, and somehow it worked.
Voyager 1 sends data back to Earth using just 12 watts of power, about the same wattage that runs the light in your refrigerator.
As I sit in front of my elegant laptop (unthinkable in 1977, barely imaginable in 1995), checking my facts on the internet (no such thing in 1977), and nonchalantly downloading photographs, wondering if the Wi-Fi at my RV campsite will work adequately (or work at all) when I try to push “send,” I have two essentially identical responses to this nearly unbelievable story about human ingenuity.
First, the contemporary vulgar one: “Are you $#@@% kidding me?” SOMEHOW, we fixed a computer in a tiny capsule wandering outside the boundaries of our entire solar system, traveling at a speed that would zip an airplane around the planet Earth twice in one hour … a few bytes at a time with a 22.5 hour delay between every tiny dollop of code in either direction!
And yet there is lead pipe-polluted water in a range of American cities.
Here’s the better response. It comes straight out of the greatest piece of Renaissance English literature, Hamlet:
“What a piece of work is a man!
How noble in reason.
How infinite in faculty.
In form and moving how express and admirable.
In action how like an angel.
In apprehension how like a god.
The beauty of the world.
The paragon of animals.”
Don’t tell me we were better off before the Neolithic Revolution! It’s a fabulous story, another outstanding achievement for science, America, and humankind. And by the way, stay tuned!
And yet there is one more amazing thing to contemplate. At some point, and not very far in the future, Voyager 1 will die. But thanks to the genius of Carl Sagan, the spacecraft carries the famous Golden Record, the most audacious time capsule, the most far-reaching message in a bottle in history. The Golden Record contains 115 images, an hourlong brain wave scan of Ann Druyan (Sagan’s brainy wife), and a multicultural medley of sounds, including Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto, percussion music from Senegal, an aria from Mozart’s Magic Flute, Navajo night chants, Peruvian panpipes, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, African pigmy chants, Beethoven’s fifth, as well as Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode. The record also stores a variety of natural sounds, ranging from birds, whales, surf, wind, and thunder, and celestial greetings in 55 languages ancient and modern.
What a piece of work is “man,” and what a man was Carl Sagan.
Now for Less Happy NASA News
Second, NASA announced that the two stranded astronauts — Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams — will now be spending another seven months on the International Space Station (ISS) because the Boeing Starliner’s thrust problems are too concerning to risk attempting to use the spacecraft to bring them back to Earth. It’s more terrible news for Boeing. Wilmore and Williams will fly home on a Space X flight — next year! They were scheduled to return to Earth after just eight days. Eight days + eight months. One hopes there are laundry facilities up there.
Wilmore and Williams are safe on the ISS, of course; and there is plenty of food and oxygen to accommodate them. No doubt NASA will devise a long list of important things for them to do during their strandedness. This may be good news for the two space explorers. Many other astronauts have reported that returning to Earth was one of the saddest experiences of their lives. Fair enough, but expectation is everything, and human nature chafes when circumstances beyond our control thwart the best-laid plans.
Think about these two extraordinary individuals.
They trained for several years to fly a brand-new vessel into space. After endless delays, problems, and cost overruns, they finally lifted off successfully on June 5. Now they are not lost in space, but they are definitely stuck in space. As astronauts, they are fully aware of the sacrifices they are asked to make for the privilege of serving humankind, but they do have lives — people back home — birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, parents, friends, obligations, needs.
Butch Wilmore, born in 1962, is married with two children. He has been to space three previous times for a total of 178 days. If he comes home in February (255 days or so after the June 5th launch), he’ll have spent a total of 433 days in space. (The record for most number of days in space belongs to the cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov, who spent 437 days aboard the ISS in the 1990s.) Heck, NASA may as well hold off their return journey until sometime in March 2025 to give Wilmore at least that endurance distinction in exchange for his troubles. It’s still an international space race after all.
Sunita (Suni) Williams is a pioneer in all sorts of ways. Born in 1965, she holds the record for the most number of spacewalks (EVAs) by a woman (seven) and the most elapsed time on spacewalks (50 hours, 47 minutes). In December 2006, she carried a copy of the Hindu sacred text, the Bhagavad Gita, to the ISS. That alone exemplifies the Enlightenment. Williams is married to a Texas federal marshal. They have no children. So far, no one has dared call her a childless cat lady, perhaps in part because she and her husband (repeat: a federal marshal!) have a beloved Jack Russell terrier named Gorby.
You know what they say on the airlines: “Your safety is our first priority.” We know many things; one is that Boeing cannot survive a space catastrophe. But we know, too, that space is an unforgiving environment, and there will be accidents. Strap a couple of people to a rocket filled with millions of gallons of the most volatile fuels technology can refine and put a match to it. What could go wrong?! There could be no space program if we insisted on 100% assurance that nothing catastrophic could go wrong. We’ve dodged the bullet on a number of occasions: Gemini VIII (spinning out of control, 1966), Apollo XII (the Saturn V rocket struck by lightning at liftoff, 1969), and of course, Apollo XIII (1970), and there have been three true disasters: Apollo I’s three astronauts asphyxiated in the command module during a pre-flight test (1967); the space shuttle Challenger (1985) and Columbia (2003).
There will be more. The wife of Apollo VIII’s commander, Frank Borman, went to a trusted official at NASA and asked about the likelihood of her husband’s safe return. In a rare moment of bureaucratic candor she was told 50-50.
I do not doubt that Boeing will figure out how to overcome the problems with the Starliner if it doesn’t just throw up its hands in the wake of another serious engineering and public relations disaster. The first airplanes crashed with great regularity. Now, except for the Boeing 737 Max, they almost never crash unless the pilot is insane or terrorists interfere.
We are living through the Second Great Age of space exploration. China, Japan, the EU, and India have joined the two international heavyweights. And the clunky old era of government monopolies on space flight has blissfully passed. The entrepreneurs are giving the new space age a brilliant creative edge.
And they are just getting started.
Meanwhile, Voyager rides the galactic waves.