Whitey on Mars
by J. Daniel Janzen

With everything going so well here on Earth, President George W. Bush has continued his oedipal quest for success where his father failed with last week's announcement of plans to put a man on Mars. When the first President Bush announced the same goal back in 1989, the mission quickly ran afoul of a $400 billion price tag and was never spoken of again. This time, with an administration that never met a deficit it didn't like and a congress that excels in acquiescence, money is clearly no object.

It's easy to get excited about a Mars mission — it has an unbeatable gee-whiz factor. Still, for a civic undertaking, the reasoning behind it isn't as self-evident as in the case of, say, polio eradication or Head Start. And the economic, political and cultural implications of the venture are significant — and unknowable — enough that it's worth asking a few questions before we light the candle. Why? Why now? And is this really a good idea?

Even during the Apollo Mission, some called the space program a waste of money when so many problems remained unsolved at home, a position expressed by Gil-Scott Heron:

A rat done bit my sister Nell with Whitey on the moon/ Her face and arms began to swell but Whitey's on the moon/ Was all that money I made last year for Whitey on the moon?/ How come there ain't no money here? Hmm! Whitey's on the moon.

The "why now" part is a little easier. Why, when manned space exploration has been dead for decades, when the United States is already running deficits that the IMF calls a risk to the global economy, is the president suddenly so determined to put Americans on the Red Planet? Is Mars a member of the Axis of Evil? Is there an alternative to Islamic oil to be found there?

For years, NASA has been known primarily for blunders ranging from the absurd to the tragic; even the agency's few successes often centered around corrections to previous boners. Now, with the Mars Exploration Rover Mission, the dogged rocket scientists have finally got one right, not with an egghead telescope or who-cares comet flyby, but with an actual planet — the main prize.

By riding on the rover's coattails, the president can try to move the conversation away from the Iraqi quagmire, the jobless recovery and the impending trillion-dollar deficit, and showcase his grasp of the Vision Thing just in time for the Democratic primaries. And nothing says "presidential" quite like outer space. You don't even have to deliver the goods; it's enough just to issue the challenge. When you think of the moon landing, which president do you think of — Nixon, the man then in the White House? Or JFK, the guy who dreamed the dream?

Not to say that this was an impulsive move; Bush first mentioned Mars last September, in the course of the soul-searching that followed the Columbia tragedy. But we wouldn't be talking about 2018 if the rover had met the same fate as its predecessor and the concurrent European attempt. "My foreign policy is a disaster, the domestic situation is worse, but hey, my outer space program is on fire!" (Meanwhile, Al Gore can cry over his Eagle Nebula photos about the announced plans to let the Hubble space telescope die quietly in orbit. Apparently, researching the origins of the universe is all well and good, but there's no future in it).

As it happens, the Mars initiative didn't gain quite the traction that Bush was hoping for, polling so poorly that it was omitted entirely from the State of the Union Address. Still, now that the issue has been raised, the most fundamental question of all remains to be answered: Is going to Mars a good idea? Like human cloning and the splitting of the atom, it's the kind of threshold that can't be uncrossed; to take the decision for granted would be a profound abdication of civic responsibility.

Perhaps because of its proximity to heaven, there is a tendency for people to assume that anything that happens in space will automatically be noble and good, above the fray of terrestrial strife, as when Apollo and Soyuz left their differences on Earth and joined as one high above. Although it had been fueled by the heat of East-West rivalry, the golden age of space exploration was characterized by a certain one-world high-mindedness. This sentiment is encapsulated in the Moon Treaty ratified in 1979, which declares all celestial bodies but our own to be forever disarmed and proclaiming that:

The exploration and use of the moon shall be the province of all mankind and shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries, irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific development.

In the days of Carl Sagan's "Cosmos," space was the province of corduroy-and-patches scientists, a place to be explored with the reverence and care of an archeological expedition. But at the dawn of a new century, idealism is harder to come by, and the current administration has shown little proclivity for acting within a framework of international cooperation. It's hard to believe the Moon Treaty would stand any more of a chance than the Kyoto Protocol or the the UN Charter when push came to shove. Already, a long-standing international taboo against nuclear technology in space hasn't stood in the way of the hubristically named Project Prometheus, a planned propulsion system based on just that.

With ads on the side of spaceships, private lunar expeditions and serious talk of asteroid mining, commercial exploitation seems a likely outcome for Mars. The economics involved makes the scenario seem remote at this point, but the same would once have been said of today's robust satellite industry (one with all the star power of long-haul trucking). Like everything else, the actual work on Mars will be outsourced to private industry, which will generate massive profits by proceeding in a profitable manner, which may or may not accord with the preferred ethical, scientific or communitarian manner. Who is to monitor what happens so far beyond the eyes of home, where no civilian Web cam can reach?

Extrapolating from our experience with our own planet, we can safely assume that Mars will have its natural resources converted into pollution with all deliberate efficiency, and provide the backdrop for endless disputation and warfare among earthly tribes. Not to mention an even more dire possibility: contamination. Think of the supreme irony if, after yearning so long to detect extraterrestrial life, we were to snuff our own with a load of Martian smallpox blankets. Avoiding contamination is a matter of religion for project team members, but their past record is far from perfect, and it might take only one accident this time around. A fine kettle of fish we'd be in then, left with a decimated population split between two ravaged planets.

Then again, Titan is supposed to be nice.

E-mail J. Daniel Janzen at jdaniel at flakmag dot com.