BOOK
In Voyage to Mars, an exhaustive, occasionally exhausting, mostly entertaining, always enthusiastic overview of NASA's tight-budgeted effort to loose the Red Planet's secrets, Laurence Bergreen mentions the scariest space-exploration scheme ever hatched by ostensibly un-mad scientists. He says NASA has devoted serious attention to the idea of transplanting "human heads onto body stems." Kept alive on external support, a shipful of heads would be shot Marsward in the interest of saving "a great deal of payload weight."
A callow and unsympathetic observer might be tempted to suggest that maybe it's the Marsists (that's what they call themselves) who have lost their heads, but Bergreen is not such an observer. Given unprecedented access to NASA personnel and documents, he traveled 75,000 miles - all the way to Iceland (where the landscape is eerily like that of Mars), and hither and yon across the United States - and returned to type barely a discouraging word. If he met anyone he didn't like, he's not telling; a briefly critical observation is quickly smothered with praise, and nearly everyone is referred to by his or her first name. The book's hero, planetary geologist James Garvin, sends Bergreen into full swoon. "Jim" is likened to a man just returned "from another dimension in time and space ... endowed with the passion and restlessness of an old-fashioned genius." If there's anybody at NASA who takes umbrage at this book, he or she would have skin so thin that you'd need an electron microscope to detect it.
Voyage to Mars is no Right Stuff, either as a literary exercise - it reads like a very long, well-reported magazine piece - or as warts-and-all exposé. Still, it's hard not to get caught up in the spirit of the enterprise, and it's impossible not to like the irrepressible Garvin or admire his unself-conscious, unabashed commitment to Mars, a planet that growing evidence suggests may harbor "extremophile life" - primitive organisms that can survive under unimaginably harsh conditions. Such life already exists on Earth, mostly deep beneath the surface, usually very, very small in scale - most often microscopic. Bergreen is particularly engaging on the intense (and intensely personal) controversy - as yet unresolved - over ALH 84001, the Martian meteorite discovered in Antarctica in 1984 and trumpeted 12 years later by a few hopeful scientists as the carrier of 3.9-billion-year-old carbonates - in other words, the first proof of extraterrestrial life. In a heart-thumping, stomach-churning final chapter, Bergreen harrowingly relates what it would be like to be an astronaut - one with head and body still attached, one presumes - on the way to Mars. By the end, Bergreen's excesses of gung-hoism long forgiven, Voyage to Mars is likely to draw even the sourest reader into the ranks of cheerleaders. Mars or bust!
Voyage to Mars: NASA's Search for Life Beyond Earth by Laurence Bergreen: $27.95. Riverhead Books: www.penguinputnam.com.
STREET CRED
The Pen-Ultimate
Spice World
64 Love
Power Structural Engineering
"A Drift Net for Catching God"
Quit Staring at Me
The Big - 36-inch, 1,080-line, $2,700 - Picture
ReadMe
Music
Ring of Fire
Virtual Van Halen
Please Hold On - Sudden Stops Are Sometimes Necessary
Just Outta Beta
Tune Town
The Martian Extremophile Invasion Has Begun
Contributors
