Thursday, August 24, 2017

The Farthest: “Voyager” in Space (Crossing the Line Productions, HHMI Tangled Bank Studios, PBS, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Voyager spacecraft

The golden record

The golden record’s cover, with ideographs explaining what it is and how to play it


NOVA’s “instant” eclipse documentary was fairly interesting, but the show that was on after it was incredibly intense and moving: The Farthest: Voyager in Space. It was a documentary on the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) project, initiated in 1972, to send two probes into the outer reaches of the solar system, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, to explore the planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus (which just about everybody on the program pronounced “YOUR-uh-nus” to avoid accidental invocation of a part of the human body generally considered too gross to talk about in polite company) and Neptune. It’s indicative of how far in advance a project like this has to be planned — the people in charge of Voyager, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had to launch it in 1977 to take advantage of a rare conjunction of the four planets they wanted to study, without which it would have been impossible for one spacecraft to hit them all — that the President who green-lighted the project was Richard Nixon, the President who recorded the official greeting to anyone who might find the Voyager once it crossed out of the solar system and reached interstellar space was Jimmy Carter (whose greeting was, “This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours”) and it reached Jupiter and Saturn during Carter’s Presidency but didn’t make it to Uranus until Ronald Reagan’s and to Neptune until George H. W. Bush’s. It’s the sort of long-term project that America’s current political convulsions make almost impossible even to imagine — especially now that we have a President who seems to go out of his way to trash and undo everything that was done by his immediate predecessor, and who glories in letting it be known that there’s a “new sheriff in town” and everything done by previous administrations is up for grabs. 

As an almost incidental addition to the project, the Voyager team decided to include a phonograph record, pressed in gold, that would include a representative sampling of Earth’s music and culture, as well as encoded scientific data and images explaining who we are and how our bodies function, as a modern-day equivalent of the fabled messages in bottles left by sailors (director Emer Reynolds, who made this show for Irish TV — and the fact that the documentary on one of America’s crowning scientific achievements was made in Ireland speaks volumes for this country’s loss of any sense of a collective vision! — included a shot of a bottle with a message in it being thrown out to sea just to underscore the metaphor), and the scientists behind Voyager were miffed big-time when the reporters asking them about the project in press conferences had more questions about the record than about the research that was, for the scientists, the main point of the effort. The most controversial inclusion on the record was the song “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry, which Carl Sagan, one of the key members of the Voyager team (and, because of his own TV show, was one of the few scientists of the 1970’s who became a genuine celebrity), defended against charges that rock music was “adolescent” by saying, “There are a lot of adolescents on the planet.” 

Berry’s inclusion became one of the central legends surrounding the project; in 1978 Saturday Night Live did a Voyager segment on their “Weekend Update” parody newscast in which the reporters announced that they’d seen the first signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe: a message was beamed back saying, “Send more Chuck Berry.” And in 1990, when the Voyager team held a party to celebrate the successful fly-by of Neptune and therefore the completion of the craft’s mission, Berry himself performed “Johnny B. Goode” at their celebration. The main part of the program details not only the suspense around Voyager — Voyager 2 was the first of the two probes to be launched (which, the scientists recalled, drove reporters nuts even when they explained that Voyager 1, though launched later, would be faster and therefore would hit the target planets sooner) and the vibrations of the rocket that launched it threw its computer circuits into a sort of electronic nervous breakdown until the scientists on the ground sent it enough software patches to get it going properly again. (One quirk of the Voyager projects was they had to “freeze” the technology as it stood in 1972 and couldn’t upgrade to take advantage of later advances in computing since there’d be no way to upgrade the computer hardware aboard Voyager in space.) Voyager 1 had its own problem: a leak in the rocket propellant made it unclear whether the craft would actually get into the trajectory it needed for interplanetary exploration and it was touch-and-go for a while as to whether the craft would be a success or a dud. (I couldn’t help but think of the Mike Nichols-Elaine May routine in which a rocket scientist is arguing with his mother and she says, “I read in the papers how you keep losing them.”) 

If nothing else, the show demonstrates that there can be enough suspense and even danger in an unmanned space mission than in a manned one; every time Voyager flew by a planet, it was touch-and-go whether all systems would work and whether the spacecraft would actually be able to communicate its information to Earth, whether Earth’s computers would receive it, and whether the scientists would actually be able to make sense of the images. Among the interesting things we learned from the Voyager probes are that Jupiter and Neptune both have rings (though nowhere nearly as extensive as Saturn’s); that Jupiter has lightning storms under its huge, mostly methane atmosphere; that Jupiter’s moon Io actually has liquid water under its frozen methane crust; that Uranus is boring but Neptune is one of the most topographically fascinating objects in the solar system — as is its moon, Callisto. The Farthest is a magnificent program, beautiful and moving, not only in the sheer aesthetic appeal of the actual Voyager photographs of the various planets but inspiring in the way it was the sort of big, visionary project almost no one on Earth today seems interested in pursuing: we stopped sending people past Earth orbit in 1972 and, though we still make movies that assume we’ve gone to the moon (again) and past it to Mars, there’s no serious effort being mounted by any nation — or anyone in the private sector, for that matter, despite the forlorn hopes of Libertarian science-fiction fans that heroic Ayn Randian entrepreneurs will step in where governments fear to tread and start sending people into space again — to get us back or even to do the kind of unmanned exploration of Voyager.