Pathfinder's marriage of cyberspace and outerspace may finally rescue NASA from its wayward faith in "manned programs."
On July 4 of this year, America's latest space probe, Pathfinder, bounced down onto the surface of Mars. To great media and public acclaim, it unloaded a tiny rover and began streaming back electronic images, bit by 2,250 bits per second, across 100 million miles of freezing void. You'd think from all the fuss that NASA had achieved some kind of a historic "first." In fact, the agency did this trick once before, during another July more than two decades ago, when a pair of Viking landers hunted for alien life on the Red Planet in 1976. So, what's new?
The answer lies on the outskirts of Pasadena, California, where NASA runs a compact research center, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Pathfinder was launched from Florida's monumental Kennedy Space Center seven months earlier, but JPL is where it was designed, built, and controlled with typical West Coast panache. JPL is the rightsized stuff - all computers and monitors and clean rooms, not a rocket engine or a launchpad in sight. This past July 4, the normally relaxed, almost collegiate facility was ground zero for a carefully choreographed media explosion. TV flashed Martian panoramas around the globe. JPL's Web site uploaded JPEGs by the millions. As camera crews hovered, engineering interns from UCLA and USC talked excitedly about their work on a new generation of ultracheap interplanetary probes, weighing only a few pounds, and propelled by little more than raw sunlight. "Very soon, we'll have a virtual human presence throughout the solar system," said a NASA spokesperson. "A merger between outer space and cyberspace. This will be a new universe for us to explore, built around real astronomical and planetary phenomena. And you'll never have to leave the ground to get out there."
But under the cool shade of JPL's olive trees and live oaks, a distinguished, slightly forlorn-looking white-haired gent in a smart red sports jacket waited quietly for any camera crews who might care to stop and chat. Buzz Aldrin, heroic veteran of the first Apollo lunar landing in July 1969, now a 67-year-old space consultant and part-time science fiction novelist, could have been a retired sales executive taking the morning air outside a senior citizen's center. And for that matter, the line he was peddling is distant indeed from the bright "faster, better, cheaper" crowd inside with their PCs and Dockers. What Aldrin wants is nothing less than to revive the multibillion-dollar dream that has lingered in the back of NASA's collective mind for decades: a manned mission to Mars, ETA inside a decade.
In a downsized world of shrinking federal budgets, that's a romantic notion - a long shot in more than just the time-and-distance sense - and Aldrin knows it. But it's just as romantic to look at the bright young people inside the building, steering remote vehicles across the Martian landscape with a mouse and a keypad, and assume that they hold NASA's future in their hands. That's because for all of JPL's stunning success, it's Aldrin's Buck Rogers buddiesin the rest of NASA who still hold nearly all the important cards. And for them, wiring the universe with cheap little cyberships just doesn't hack it.
Indeed, Pathfinder's very success opens up some fascinating - and disturbing - questions. Why has it taken NASA two decades - and billions of dollars on one or another space venture - to get back to something as basic as Mars? Shouldn't there be something more to show for all that than a fleet of half-billion-dollar-a-flight taxicabs that ferry astronauts to and from ailing Russian space stations - no further from our planet than New York is from Washington, DC? Is it time to reach for the stars again, starting with ambitious programs to explore our neighbor, the Red Planet? And if so, with robots or humans? Or should we put what billions we have into a new orbiting space station, in part to help keep the Russians from making mischief below? Maybe microships shotgunned across the solar system are the way to go? And who makes all these decisions, anyway? Who sets the agenda for space?
The answers to those questions are muddled and contradictory, because NASA is lost in space. Quite literally, the US$14 billion-a-year agency doesn't know where it's going.
Faster, better, cheaper?
The image generated by Pathfinder is comforting enough: 40-year-old NASA's gotten hip. At least, that's how it looks to the casual observer. Take, for instance, JPL's mission control center. Gone are the traditional rows of clumsy consoles, laid out like silicon suburbs. The whole setup's just a modest open-plan office, with a dozen PCs, a few SGI workstations, and a smattering of laptops. Twenty-five, at peak moments 30, fresh-faced kids run the whole deal.
In fact, NASA people these days seem not just younger, but different from the old Apollo-era stereotypes. There are no crop-haired fighter jocks with wind-scoured faces and Mojave Desert tans, barking terse acronyms into their headsets; no WWII-refugee rocketeers with German accents hovering darkly in the background. Just these kids, bunching around the water cooler, animatedly discussing the fun things they want to do on Mars.
To cap the cheerful effect, Pathfinder looks disconcertingly like a kids' toy. In front of the gawking cameras, JPL's young engineers display a replica of the craft's robotic rover, Sojourner, which crawls across the Martian terrain, takes photos, analyzes rocks, and steers its own way past obstacles. It looks like a microwave oven wrapped in Christmas-gift gold foil, with six little wheels under its belly.
Every aspect of this latest mission is small, youthful, low-rent, inventive, and fast. JPL built, launched, and landed Pathfinder for just $171 million, plus another $80 million for a '60s-vintage Delta rocket to carry the thing - pocket change compared with Viking's $1.5 billion (and that was 1970s dollars!). It took 38 months from concept to touchdown, almost a Silicon Valley time frame. Indeed, even before last summer's consummately timed July Fourth extravaganza, even knee-jerk NASA bashers in Washington hardly bothered with Pathfinder. Says Mark Adler, one of the project's systems designers: "The trick was to stay just below the noise level of Congress."
Milking sacred cows
Pathfinder owes a lot of its success to Dan Goldin, NASA's administrator since 1992. He's not as youthful as the team at JPL, but for a man in his late 50s, his energy seems boundless - which you need to preside over an agency made up of perpetually warring fiefdoms, spread from coast to coast and littered with sacred cows, the space shuttle topping the list. Previous agency chiefs worked the traditional Washington way, cozying up to the politicians and making the right connections over lunch. Goldin, by contrast, is a street fighter, with the instincts of his Bronx boyhood still very much intact. At one famous 1993 luncheon, he attacked a high-ranking executive from one of the country's biggest aerospace companies, in full view of the other guests. "You've overrun every contract you've ever had with us!" he told the astounded businessman. "You'd never treat a private client the way you treat NASA. It's unacceptable!"
Goldin's biggest battles have been bitter rearguard actions against cost cutters in Congress, trying to preserve an annual budget that peaked at $15 billion in the "Star Wars"-driven early 1990s. But along the way, Goldin has also picked up a reputation for savaging his own people, with a tough-love philosophy that has included massive and sudden workforce reductions. NASA has just over 20,000 full-time employees, but 10 times that number of people work in private industries, on NASA construction and operational contracts. Soon after taking office, Goldin swiped away 55,000 of these private-sector jobs. And this treatment's not over. NASA wags say that the agency thinks and behaves like a $20 billion operation, on a budget that's only two-thirds of that. But if Congress and the Clinton administration have their way, another $3 billion in program funding could vanish by 2000. More jobs will have to go - the question is whose.
In his first year at the helm, Goldin had to take the flak for some legacy projects gone disastrously wrong. After a decade of development, the $1.6 billion Hubble Space Telescope finally made it into orbit - then beamed back out-of-focus pictures as a result of a completely avoidable manufacturing snafu. Then, in August 1993, a fuel-system blowout sent the $900 million Mars Observer - NASA's first shot at the Red Planet since 1976 - tumbling fatally out of control. It sent back no data at all.
Hubble, Goldin could fix - indeed, the televisual success of the eventual space shuttle repair mission almost made up for the initial mess. But the total loss of a billion-dollar chunk of Mars-bound hardware was another matter. As part of a wide-ranging management response, Goldin instituted a "faster, better, cheaper" initiative, including two major new programs: Discovery - comprising planetary missions such as Pathfinder, for less than $250 million apiece - and New Millennium, a broad initiative to bring NASA's whole aging technology base up to information-age speed.
Less money doesn't have to mean less activity. Goldin recognized early that too much cash had long been spent on jobs-for-the-boys bureaucracy. The focus needed to shift to technology - bang for the buck. And Pathfinder was a vital test of what has been, for many in NASA, a bitter truth: that it doesn't take thousands of middle-managing civil servants to build and fly spaceships.
One happy result has been to put NASA firmly back in the public eye. Under Discovery's ambit, Mars will be assaulted at 26-month intervals to take advantage of every suitable planetary alignment. Jupiter, Saturn, and even distant Pluto (the only planet in the solar system we haven't yet probed) will also be targeted. "We'll have a mission-of-the-month club," Goldin enthuses - while warning in the same breath that if any mission exceeds the $250 million figure, or takes longer than 36 months to implement, he'll pull the plug.
But the Discovery program also begs a larger issue: For a truly faster, better, cheaper approach, the fattest budget-cutting target of all is people. They need desks, occupying office leasehold space. They require constant air-conditioning and generous government pensions. They want space to park their cars. They're damned expensive, especially when you call them "astronauts" and make their "office" a $2 billion space shuttle or a $30 billion orbiting space station - let alone an interplanetary vehicle whose main achievement would be to dig some rocks and leave a few footprints on Mars.
One careful driver
Mark Adler should drive a black BMW convertible. A smart, preppy-looking guy with glossy dark hair, wire-framed spectacles, and a nicely chosen suit, he could pass for a venture capitalist looking for a hot new start-up in Silicon Valley. In fact, he develops systems architecture for JPL's Martian programs. "We all have to multitask," he explains with a self-deprecatory smile that isn't anything of the kind. "One minute you're deep in mission planning, and the next you're doing public relations."
JPL staffers change roles in more fundamental ways practically from hour to hour. Jennifer Harris, for instance, was the flight controller during Pathfinder's terrifying descent through the Martian atmosphere. The instant it touched the ground, she had to switch from hypersonic flight dynamics to the snail-like crawl of the Sojourner rover. Says Adler: "Everybody knows the entire mission back to front. We don't have the luxury of Viking's squads of specialists." Viking tied up a thousand NASA staffers and contract personnel for the better part of eight years. Pathfinder's team, by contrast, peaked at 269 people; six months from now, they'll all be working on new projects. Adler sees even this eventually shrinking to a logical minimum. "In five years, you'll have somebody sitting under a tree with a laptop, tapping into a radio dish. That one person will be working an entire mission."
One reason is software. A key JPL innovation has been to replace expensive handcrafted code with commercial off-the-shelf software - COTS, for short. The current favorite, proven on Pathfinder, is WindRiver Systems's VxWorks, an embedded real-time OS with excellent multitasking and, most important of all, flexibility. VxWorks's earthly applications range from running traffic signals to fly-by-wire aircraft: fast, high-risk activities not all that different in operational terms from spaceflight. For Discovery missions, it navigates, runs internal systems, and manages communications with Earth. And the same OS can be adapted for future projects. "From now on, we won't have to write a new OS from scratch," says JPL's Lloyd Keith, who handles liaison with WindRiver. "We've leveraged future costs against Pathfinder, because commercial companies have done the work already."
But with this low-cost proprietary solution comes a higher element of risk. A single, relatively low-end RAD6000 chip ran Pathfinder the entire mission, from its seven-month deep-space cruise through atmospheric descent and landing to communicating with the surface rover and with Earth. Budget constraints forced the gamble of flying with no backup - a violation of NASA's basic creed. But JPL had a brief to take risks. "It's not like a space shuttle," says Keith, "with five computers all running the same program, checking each other's results. You've got people aboard that thing, and they need a guaranteed control system. But if Pathfinder's chips fry, then all you've lost is $250 million. Nobody ends up dead."
Solid-state spaceships
Even bigger innovations may lie just ahead. Discovery, after all, is leaner and cheaper than the old way of doing business, but its vehicles are still what we think of as conventional spacecraft - an agglomeration of fuel tanks, rocket engines, gyros, a plethora of wiring, and endless subsystems. After the basics of propulsion and communications are taken care of - roughly 80 percent of the total carrying capacity - what room remains is crammed with scientific instruments, almost as an afterthought: a "payload" rather than a fundamental part of the vehicle. From a scientific point of view, it's too much ship and not enough passengers. Hence one of the key aims of NASA's New Millennium program: to redefine the term spacecraft.
How about a ship no larger than your desktop PC, with guidance, propulsion, and instrumentation all embedded in one solid-state component, costing a mere $20 million? One system now on the CAD screens at JPL looks like the sort of compact guidance box you might find in a missile nose cone. It's almost jewel-like in its precision. Each corner has a protrusion about the size and shape of a sugar cube: microminiaturized thrusters, no more powerful than a hummingbird's breath. Powered by internal heating elements, the little cubes shoot vaporized ammonium salts through tiny nozzles, each controlled by a valve directly embedded in a microprocessor chip. A spacecraft has to be small indeed for these to work. So be it: add solar panels for power, and the proposed "guidance package" - the size of a cereal box - is actually a fully fueled spacecraft, weighing in at about 8 pounds.
What we're looking at here is the throwaway "microship," adaptable to a wide range of multivessel voyages, from a flyby of Pluto to a scratch-and-sniff survey of an asteroid. Lose half a fleet, and you've still got a mission. If one vehicle goes AWOL, there's still four, five, a dozen more, working the same brief. The same thumbnail-sized CCD cameras that can scan the high atmosphere of Neptune or snap the tail of a passing comet will also act as navigational star trackers. And such an armada approach yields a gigantic scaling of scientific capability: flying in formation, thousands of miles apart, a fleet of microships becomes a wide-based interferometer for high-resolution radio and optical observations.
There's more. Reducing the weight of the spacecraft means reducing the size and cost of the launch. Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Virginia, has already developed a booster no larger than a cruise missile. Pegasus drops from beneath the wing of a Lockheed L-1011 Tri-Star at 39,000 feet, then blasts into space, for a fraction of the cost of ground-launched rockets. After a couple of spectacular failures, Pegasus is now working well. NASA has optioned 10 flights over the next four years, at $14 million a shot - a quarter the cost of the cheapest possible conventional launch.
Alternatively, microships can hitch rides, a dozen at a time, aboard more conventional workhorses - say, the old ground-launched McDonnell-Douglas Delta rocket that lofted Pathfinder. Attached like limpets to other, heavier payloads, once in orbit they'll separate, fire small kicker motors, and be on their way. Microships could be flying in force soon after the turn of the millennium. Their likely first destination: the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, for a look at the possibilities of mining them for valuable minerals.
JPL's Lloyd Keith envisages future missions "where we strap 20 landers to the main module and then send them down to different locations on the target planet." At the same time, multiple orbiters will survey the planet, yielding "complete, dynamic virtual models in real time." And it won't just be the experts who benefit. Imagine watching a direct video feed from a balloon platform over Mars, swooping over the epic canyons, craters, and volcanos; or having your high school class check the latest storms on Jupiter; or finding out, just seconds after NASA itself, that a chemical test for organic compounds - the stuff of life - has registered positive among the methane ice fields and silicate rocks of Saturn's mysterious moon, Titan. As the analysis beams in, a camera scans Titan's blue-green sky. Despite the hint of frozen mist hanging in this alien air, you can clearly see mighty Saturn through the haze, crowned by its many delicate rings ...
If the hit rate on Pathfinder's Web sites last July is anything to go by, NASA has a potent new way to win terrestrial hearts and minds. And consider as well that astronomy is one of the few scientific fields where amateurs often make major discoveries, from new comets to unusual stars. Public access to raw data will only accelerate that process. "The space program was always supposed to be public property," says Mark Adler. "Now it really can be."
I can fly myself, thanks
New Millennium's microships need more development - especially electronic circuits and software - before real missions can be firmly assigned. But an interim vehicle, Deep Space 1, is being readied for launch next July, in part to begin testing some of the technology. DS-1's mission will be three-fold: to fly within four miles of the asteroid McAuliffe; to pick up a gravity-assist from Mars four months later, slinging it through the outer realms of the solar system; and then to rendezvous with comet West-Kohoutek-Ikemura in July 2000.
DS-1 will be the first spacecraft to navigate autonomously - it will communicate with Earth only if there's a problem. Except for brief periods to downlink high-baud-rate digital data, small Earth-based receivers will suffice to monitor DS-1's simple "I'm all right" beacon signal. And that wipes out another big cost: keeping the expensive megabowls of NASA's Deep Space Network on permanent standby.
JPL's expert on autonomous systems, Bob Rasmussen, calls DS-1's semi-intelligent software a "remote agent." The package, another adaptation of WindRiver's VxWorks OS, is split into three main elements. Planner is a "personal organizer" that runs the mission clock, gears the vehicle for long-term deployment of equipment, and doles out precious electrical power to the various systems aboard. Ground controllers need only to send up a simple command - to take photos of an approaching body, for instance. Planner then works out the details and passes them on to Smart Executive, which carries them out. Watching over both is Livingstone, a fault-analysis routine that continuously compares the craft's behavior against a stored virtual model of desired parameters.
Like 2001's superintelligent HAL, the remote agent is programmed to refuse instructions from Earth if it thinks its human masters are demanding something erroneous. Should that happen without cause, a lobotomy may be in order. "If the remote agent won't cooperate for some reason," Rasmussen says drily, "then ground control can get into a surgery mode and transmit replacement software."
Of two minds
So has NASA repented its Apollo-age ways and finally locked onto the technology of the new millennium? Sadly, no. The agency has traveled down the road of robotic brilliance before, only to turn back each time in favor of costly manned efforts. The two Voyager probes, steered by JPL in the late 1970s and '80s, beamed back stupendous images from Jupiter and Saturn during their tour of the solar system. Eight-year-old Galileo, with half a billion miles on its odometer, is even now swinging complex loops among the Jovian moons, after hurling an atmospheric probe into Jupiter itself. Launched this past October, Cassini is on its way to Saturn, where it will dispatch a lander to Titan after an epic six-year journey.
Despite these wondrous achievements, the lion's share of NASA's budget still goes toward putting humans in space - with no apparent goal other than showing it can be done. The agency's flagships, the winged shuttles, are running fairly smoothly at the moment, but nothing can solve their basic flaw. Crammed with temperamental, high-maintenance 1970s technology, the fleet of aging spacecraft can fly eight missions per year at best, for $350 million a throw - the entire cost of Pathfinder and then some. And maybe more to the point, they can never take us farther than 200 miles into space.
But the shuttles are relatively sane compared with the real maniac in NASA's attic: the International Space Station, aka ISS. Last year, the General Accounting Office put its tab at $85 billion by 2010. Even allowing for inflation, it's easily the most expensive space program in history.
So while JPL and a few other field centers explore technology for 2000 and beyond, the bulk of NASA's shrinking budgetary throw weight goes to a project founded on the vague space-colonization fantasies of the Eisenhower era.
Part of the problem is Washington: ISS is impossible to cancel. Boeing has the $5.6 billion prime contract. Rockwell and McDonnell Douglas have picked up hefty subcontracts. Even in the best of times, that is a formidable collection of interests. With the end of the Cold War, aerospace spending is in freefall - and mergers have left fewer companies with ever larger shares of the pie. ISS is now one of the largest aerospace opportunities in the world, and none of the participants will give it up without a fight. Which still doesn't address the question of what started this all in the first place.
Space pork
The International Space Station was never really about science or even about space exploration. Ronald Reagan set the ball rolling in his 1984 State of the Union speech, purely as a snub to the Soviets. "I am directing NASA to develop a permanently manned space station," he proclaimed, and invited other like-minded countries to participate. The stated purpose: "Expand freedom for all who share our goals."
Reagan's original 10-year deadline has come and gone, and not a single piece of the football-field-sized ISS has yet reached orbit. Ironically, one of the reasons the ISS program still exists today is to serve as a diplomatic linkage with Moscow. The Russians are building the first module, a "functional energy block," on a $190 million subcontract from Boeing. They're also supposed to contribute other modules on their own. But being famously strapped for cash, they're running eight months late. Even Goldin won't touch this one - Moscow is sensitive to criticism, you see. So instead of fostering better ties, ISS is actually contributing to East-West tensions.
Goldin has fought hard for ISS. Two years ago, he persuaded Congress to put its funding on a more secure basis - $2.1 billion per year until the final elements go into orbit in 2002. That will bring the total cost to a staggering $26 billion. And that does not include actually operating ISS once in orbit; nor does it count substantial contributions of hardware and cash from the European and Japanese space agencies.
The funding pledge was firmly pegged to Goldin's assurances of no further delays. But with the first module still stuck in the factory, the initial launch - from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan - has slipped from November 1997 to next June at the earliest. Meanwhile, NASA is hurriedly adapting an old spy satellite power stage to take over in case the Russian energy block falls through entirely. Cost: $150 million, "borrowed" from other areas of NASA because all ISS funds are already spoken for. Many of the agency's best friends in Congress - including Representative James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin), the powerful chair of the House Science Committee - are losing patience.
All of which begs a major question. Dan Goldin swept into NASA in 1992, slashing thousands of jobs and instituting his "faster, better, cheaper" policy on planetary exploration. He even cut costs in the manned program, awarding a unified shuttle-maintenance contract to a new private company, the United Space Alliance, thus taking day-to-day management of America's premier space program out of NASA's fidgety hands. In general, he shook things up all around. Why, then, is he still fixated on the costly, muddled, long-delayed space station?
The answer is murky, to say the least. Will the station be the launching pad for a trip to the Red Planet, the old "staging platform" theory? Umm, no: "Humans will fly to Mars," Goldin says, "but not yet." OK, so then ISS is about orbital science, right? Well, no. "We can do stunning science, but that isn't the justification."
Then what is? "The station is being built," he explains, "to see how people can live and work in space."
Eleven years into the Mir program, is that goal worth worth spending tens of billions of dollars to achieve?
The NASA collective
There's a funny thing about NASA: even at the less-is-more JPL, it's hard to find anyone to criticize the ISS, or, indeed, manned space exploration in general. Mark Adler will say only that "the robotic program could certainly stand a few more bucks." Lloyd Keith says politely, "Maybe we need a little more balance between the manned and unmanned efforts." Adler adds a note of political reality: "If the manned program went away, it's not obvious that the robotic program would benefit."
Of a Fire on the Moon, Norman Mailer's celebrated 1969 analysis of the Apollo program, describes how everyone at NASA seemed "subtly proud of their ability to serve interchangeably for one another ... I had never before encountered people whose modest purr of efficiency apparently derived from being cogs in a machine."
Indeed, but with Apollo and its Cold War imperatives long buried, what is that machine now for? Maybe those interchangeable cogs need to start arguing more vigorously about the direction they're taking? Maybe it's not enough for JPL to sit back and be polite with its pittance while the space station saps all the funds? Maybe JPL's young staffers should be saying, "Hey, we can explore deep into space today, much better, much cheaper, and get much more data than the rest of NASA, sitting in Earth orbit in expensive tin cans, going nowhere."
One former NASA insider, aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin, is speaking out - against the space station, anyway. Zubrin's complaint has little to do with cost. "I don't begrudge the money. If we didn't spend it on that, we'd waste it on something else. No, the station's not a diversion of funds, but of time. It's the preoccupying project of the 1990s, and meanwhile we're not thinking beyond it."
Zubrin, who now runs his own company, Pioneer Astronautics, says the biggest problem is lack of a clear mission. "Apollo had a goal: get to the Moon by 1970. At the other end of the cost scale, Pathfinder had a similar focus. Get to Mars, test some technology, and stick to budget. Projects with goals are always more effective, big or small." Zubrin points out that the shuttles were designed to service a station - and now the station's primary aim is to justify the shuttles. "It's like, OK, we have these big hardware programs, so what'll we do with them?"
Zubrin's no cybernaut - his own pie in the sky is a $20 billion manned mission to Mars. But he also relishes pointing out the paradox raised by Goldin's shifty justifications. ISS is supposed to study the effects of weightlessness on astronauts, as practice for a Mars mission. But those astronauts will never get to Mars - because the station's soaking up all the agency's funding! Zubrin's solution: Kill ISS, and pour all its manpower and money into reaching Mars in the next decade.
Yet even that doesn't address the basic question: Why, in a era of tight budgets, should we be putting people in space at all? Some day, surely, we'll undertake the mind-bogglingly difficult feat of getting humans to Mars. But in the meantime, in space terms, even 200 miles up is effectively still on the ground. Earth orbit is a dead end. The space station ultimately has nowhere to go, and nothing to do.
Meanwhile, today's technology can give us remote telepresence, cheaply and safely, on the very surface of alien planets. As for Zubrin and others who dream of humans on Mars, that's a project for some future age, when our technology is far more advanced. Mars needs to be preserved as a scientific and philosophical resource, not terraformed or cluttered up with habitation modules, empty food packages, and other terrestrial detritus. Robots make much less intrusive envoys. Those who dream of sending human colonists are simply running away from the more urgent issue - making our own planet more habitable, while we still have time.
If some future robot lander discovers life on Mars, then it will be even more important not to go rushing in with human explorers. Before we make a rubbish heap of Mars, let's first clear up our own backyard. Robots should explore the cold, inhuman depths of space, and make us all the more glad that we get to stay on Earth. For now.
