The Red Planet

...But for the most part, Mishkin's book describes that hard and unhappy place where engineering and management meet, and in time it becomes draining to read of the constant compromises between technical brilliance and budgetary reality...

...The Pathfinder mission was ultimately a success, and the rover's pictures of the Martian surface proved extremely popular on the Internet...

...Mishkin describes months of frustration ending in flashes of creativity, and the occasional ingenious acts of jury-rigging that resulted in minor advances in mobility or navigation...

...But soon the press and the public got bored—and after two months of driving around looking at rocks even the rover's makers started to tire of it...

...In the earliest days in space, robotic probes were routinely expected to open the way for human explorers...

...For three decades, human explorers have been mothballed and the task of exploration has been left to machines...

...Wilcox, for instance, invented a camera-stabilizing contraption made of baby bottles and car oil...

...In directing NASA to plan for new missions to the moon and beyond, the president has selected an inspirational challenge...

...At research stations in the Canadian Arctic and the deserts of Utah, teams of volunteers simulated stints on the Martian surface, while conducting cartographic, geological, and biological research forays like those that might be involved in a Mars mission...

...Kept in storage through the 1970s by a technician who repeatedly disobeyed orders to junk it, the rover found its way back to Wilcox in 1982, when he was working as an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory...

...He drove it into a ditch...

...exploration had been scaled back because of the political impetus to fulfill President Kennedy's promise to land a man on the moon...

...But NASA soon deemed it unnecessary to send a remote-controlled vehicle to the moon before sending humans, so the robotic rover was moth-balled...

...Andrew Mishkin's Sojour-n^'r gives the history of one such robot intended for exploration, the six-wheeled rover that landed on Mars on July 4, 1997, as part of the Pathfinder mission...

...But after that goal was met, support for space petered out—and when the Apollo 17 astronauts left the moon in 1972, the era of human space exploration ended...

...They argue that while robots can do an admirable job of poking and sniffing and photographing, exploration remains a fundamentally human activity—one dependent upon hands, legs, eyes, and intuition...

...The full measure of this challenge will only be known to future generations, who may remember this as the moment when we shed our timidity and set out again for the stars...

...Yet in the past decade, several critics of the robots-only school have come to conclude that the real work of exploration and scientific research can only be done by humans on the ground...

...Since then, human activity in space has been limited to orbiting the Earth in shuttles, capsules, and stations...

...For instance, some complex scientific equipment doesn't hold up well in dusty conditions like those found on Mars...

...Mishkin, a leader of the group that developed the rover, tells of the dozens of engineers who contributed to the project—one of whom was Brian Wilcox, who had played with the moon rover as a boy, now a grown-up playing with a new rover...

...Now, in M^^^ on Earth, Zubrin fills us in on what he's been doing since then...

...Some observers of NASA have used the success of the Sojourner Rover— and this year's bigger and better Mars rovers—to argue that the robotic approach to space exploration is the right one...

...By the late 1960s, robotic Adam Keiper is managing editor of The New Atlantis...

...They also tested equipment that would be vital to such a mission, like space suits, motor vehicles, and toilets that incinerate waste...

...Zubrin describes the 1998 founding of the Mars Society, and the group's decision to begin an ambitious program of "Mars analogue" research— that is, the construction of habitats comparable to those that would house early astronauts on Mars, tested in conditions similar to those found there...

...His father, a manager at General Motors, had led the team that built the robotic vehicle, and Wilcox got to play with it on a moonscape mock-up...

...And vegetarian astronauts can make life difficult for their omnivorous crewmates...

...One of the engineers operating the rover told Mishkin, "I'd have to say I was among those people, thinking, 'How long is this going to go on?'" To stay interested, he had to remind himself repeatedly that he was controlling a vehicle on another planet...

...Part of the debate has been settled by President Bush's announcement on January 14 that the United States is going to resume the task of space exploration abandoned three decades ago...

...One crew used robotic rovers to scout out a site before tramping in to explore it themselves...

...When he went to the drugstore to buy the parts he needed, the cashier "wondered just what Wilcox was going to be feeding his baby...

...Why spend money to risk human lives on a job that robots can do just as well, or perhaps better...

...That plan was elaborated in meticulous detail in Zubrin's 1996 book The Case f^^r Mars...

...For instance, Robert Park, the University of Maryland physicist known for debunking bad science, has said that the "scientists that command telerobots" have become "virtual astronauts" and "the explorers of today...

...They found that "the robots missed much essential information about the site—for example, the presence of lichens—and all the valid information they did return was readily apparent to the crew within the first minute of their arrival on the scene...

...The simulations—which are still going on—have yielded practical conclusions that planners of real Mars missions would do well to heed...

...This time, he developed a video and computer control system that would keep it from going astray...

...The most prominent of these critics is Robert Zubrin, the engineer who presides over the Mars Society, an international organization devoted to seeing humans sent to the Red Planet...

...Sleep cycles should be uniform, not in shifts, so the explorers can work on projects together...

...The researchers also had experiences that bolster Zubrin's conviction that robots are inferior explorers...

...The story of Wilcox's rover illustrates the shifting moods of the American space program...

...In 1989, after President Bush's plans for missions to the moon and Mars sank under the weight of a $450 billion price tag, Zubrin helped NASA develop an alternative plan that could get us to Mars sooner for a fraction of the cost...