Well, like almost any kid my age, I've been fascinated with the idea of
rockets and interplanetary traveling, so I remember very vividly
the Orson Welles broadcast of the men from Mars.
In October 30, 1938. It's been redone a couple of times...
I thought it was a double spoof: first you had the broadcast, and that was
a great story, typed as being a newscast and so on, and then later on they
would interrupt the programming later on that evening with reassurances
telling people no, it was all show, and I said, Orson Welles is really
very clever: he not only got his spoof into the first hour, he also got the
spoof of the interrupted broadcast. I thought that was a spoof too,
I couldn't believe anybody would take it seriously.
There was also a cable TV movie recapitulating it and that was very
amusing. It's a rather poor quality recording as a matter of fact.
Well, so, I can use that to tie down...as a kid of 13 I knew enough
about Mars and so on to know what was probable or possible or not, in
that story. The immediate provocation was that space was there, that in
1957 I in fact had an opportunity to see Sputnik at a very early time,
because I was in Australia, and in the southern hemisphere it was visible
for a few days before it was visible in the northern hemisphere, so it
made quite a stir, and so I saw a satellite in orbit, and I said ok, the
space age was about to begin, we better start thinking about what we can do
with it as an experimental tool, and what precautions we need to take.
And I was mostly concerned about the latter, so when I got back to Wisconsin
in 1958, I started a successful campaign to be sure that there would be
a doctrine of quarantine for space missions, so that we wouldn't carry
terrestrial bugs to Mars, and we wouldn't let material come back
from the planets to the Earth without taking very stringent precautions.
That was the protective part of it. I was the first to introduce the issue
but it got a lot of attention very quickly, and it actually ended up being an
international treaty to consult about making those arrangements.
That put me in touch with the newly developing space agency, and it became
obvious to me that they didn't have the foggiest idea what they were
going to do about biological issues, so I organized a couple of committees
to advise them on biological aspects of the future space exploration,
biological science and at one point they said listen, you've been a very
useful critic, you've been a very useful commentator, so why don't you
put some of your own effort into designing some of the experiments, and my
colleagues thought I was crazy that we would have vehicles to Mars
somewhere at the end of the 21st century, but I knew better. And the
timetable is roughly what I predicted it to be. I have a sense of how
rapidly technology progresses. And I wanted to be sure that when that was
done, it was done right. I was never a great fan of huge expenditures
to space, and I'd argue against it, as a matter of fact, but once that was
settled, that it was going to be this huge investment at least I would get
the best scientific deal from it as possible. I was not in favor
of the Apollo missions, I thought sending people to land on Mars was silly,
it accomplished no useful purpose, it was taking risks for the people
for a piece of showmanship, and I guess I still feel that way. The same
kind of investment in automated systems would have put us much further
ahead in robotics and computation and so on, and there'd be more side
benefits from it, and we would get more of the scientific data we wanted,
and if you want people in the loop, then for that kind of money
you could sell time to people on the ground so they could manipulate
joysticks and operate instruments across planetary space, but Mr. Kennedy
had different views on the matter, so I guess his vote counts more than mine.
I don't want to in any way demean the astronauts. I know a few of them,
and they are heroic people in every sense of the term, and I have a lot of
admiration for them. And what guts.