Space / Space Flight

Photograph by Constance Giamo

This fall a converted Russian intercontinental ballistic missile is scheduled to launch Cosmos 1, the world’s first solar sail spacecraft, into Earth orbit. Powered only by the pressure of the sun’s photons striking its eight massive Mylar-like panels, Cosmos 1 will be unique. It is the first space mission sponsored by a public organization, the 100,000-member Planetary Society, cofounded by the late Carl Sagan, and the first financed by a media outlet, Cosmos Studios, a science-based entertainment company run by Ann Druyan, Sagan’s widow and collaborator.

Why is Cosmos Studios financing the solar sail?

D: It’s highly cost-effective—a possible first in the history of space exploration for the price of a New York apartment. A less practical and more philosophical answer is that Cosmos Studios was conceived to awaken the widest possible public to the liberating power of science.

How much risk is involved in an untested technology?

D: There is a huge risk. It’s been a struggle for Cosmos Studios to support this. People who are a lot smarter than I am have told me there will be no way to monetize the solar sail. But I know it will pay off. Maybe instead of making money, we’ll make history. If it succeeds, it will be a naked-eye sky object day and night. You can’t hope for greater visibility than that.

Is this a slap at NASA?

D: No, because NASA’s mandate is not to provide leadership. It carries out the wishes of the administration and Congress. I love NASA. You could stack up what the men and women of NASA have achieved in just 50 years against the achievements of any other organization of humans in history and NASA would come out near the top.

Will Cosmos 1 stimulate private spacefaring?

D: I hope it will inspire NASA. I’m not comfortable with the privatization of space, which to me is just a repetition of our worst mistakes on Earth. I don’t think we should be high-tech conquistadores, staking out our territories. Instead, we are continuing an ancient human tradition, of seeking to know the immensity of the universe.

Is there any danger in a media company creating news? Isn’t that a form of privatization?

D: No, because we’re not saying that we want to control the news coverage of the project. We welcome as much coverage as possible. It’s a stimulus to the public and particularly to younger people to become involved in science, engineering, mathematics, and technology.

As a peace activist you have demonstrated against underground nuclear testing, yet Cosmos 1 will be launched from a converted Russian ICBM, and suborbital tests were launched from a Russian nuclear sub. Do you see any irony there?

D: No. This is converting swords into plowshares. You decommission a weapon of mass destruction, which carried as its payload the means of destroying everything we cherish, and you convert that into a bus that launches a spacecraft into Earth’s orbit, which is a means for exploring the universe. In the 1980s when that ICBM was commissioned, more than half the world’s scientists were working on weapons of mass destruction. Science has a lot to answer for in terms of the role it has played in our civilization. We’re trying to redirect that genius, that cleverness, that ingenuity, to exploration. This is exactly what Cosmos Studios is about.

Where do you hope our space program will be 20 years from now?

D: I hope it will be hugely international in terms of the cooperation on both the actual missions themselves and the conception of these missions because the scientific community is international. I hope that we will have gotten free of the dead end of the shuttle. I hate to call it that, but there were scientists like Carl Sagan and others who predicted in the late 1970s that this would be the case, and they were absolutely right. I hope we will begin to show some of the greater boldness that we showed in the 1960s and 1970s, with missions more like Voyager, Pioneer, and Apollo, using robotic spacecraft where appropriate, where the risk to life can be prevented, and confining our human missions to areas where we can make a special contribution.

What's the next step after Cosmos 1?

D: Once the mission is completed, we’ll sit down with our colleagues at the Planetary Society and we’ll evaluate where to go from here. There are a lot of things I would like to see Cosmos Studios involved in. One is a roving mission on the surface of Mars. It could send back real-time nightly imagery so that you could, for example, sit with your kids at the television and be a witness to the first human exploration and reconnaissance of Valles Marinaris, then take those roving eyes and send them across the surface to the poles. I think that would be a really worthy enterprise. We would like to tell the stories of this kind of scientific exploration and democratize them so that they are not the property of an elite few but instead belong to everybody.

The television series Cosmos still seems to resonate with people 20 years after it first aired. Why did it have such an impact?

D: It was a pioneering presentation in popular culture of what it means to take the lessons of science to heart. Carl was a peerless teacher because he never spoke to impress the audience with his erudite knowledge but to communicate the joy he took in coming to understand the great insights that science reveals. Cosmos was a kind of love poem to the scientific method as a way of seeing and thinking, not science as a collection of digested amazing facts. There’s a yearning for a spiritual vision of the universe that is not supernatural but which acknowledges that while we may be tiny and not central to the universe, we are part of a great story—much greater than our religious heritage ever conceived.