Times change. In this post-Berlin wall, pre-International Space Station era, the race to Mars is a steeplechase with one team of earthlings competing against the laws of the universe and the stringencies of national budgets. If anyone wants to get to Mars, goes this ““Star Trek’’-like rhetoric, everyone has to cooperate. And, for the moment, everyone is. Says Alan Ladwig, NASA’s associate administrator for policy and plans: ““The Russians are playing as an international partner, not as a competitor.''
The mission to Mars is too complex to manage alone. ““Thirty years ago, if you were simply the first to get a spacecraft to Mars or take a picture, that was a big deal,’’ says John Pike, director of space policy for the Federation of American Scientists. ““Now the investigations are complicated and elaborate.’’ That means countries have to rely on each other’s expertise. An upcoming Japanese mission to Mars will carry U.S. instrumentation, for example. The Mars 96 probe that Russia plans to launch in November is full of European hardware and will transmit data back to Earth via the U.S. Global Surveyor.
The money for a space race just isn’t there anymore. With the end of the cold war, neither the U.S. nor the Russian government needed showy space programs. ““Cooperation would be mutually beneficial,’’ says Nikolai Sanko, head of the Mars 96 project at the Russian Space Agency. ““We have financial difficulties, and NASA does not have mountains of gold, either.’’ The real issue for the Russians now is whether to lend their giant Proton rocket to the high-minded exploration effort when they can charge $100 million per liftoff to launch satellites instead, according to Roald Segdeev, a physicist at the University of Maryland and former director of the Russian Space Research Institute. ““Who is making the final decision? The government, people like [Prime Minister Viktor] Chernomyrdin. These people are very market-oriented. They don’t need to flex their muscles to show the world that Russia is a superpower.''
In fact, the way to act like a superpower has changed. On Earth, exploration was motivated by a combination of greed, desire for turf and national machismo. But to get to Mars, ““we have repressed claims of sovereignty,’’ says Yale historian Graham Burnett. ““It’s possible that the kind of uneasy nationalism that works at the South Pole [shared by several countries] might end up working on Mars.’’ This is a new kind of nationalism–participation in the international community counts more than throwing technological weight around.
Quite a concept: scientists from all over the world working together for the betterment of humankind. It sounds like science fiction. But then again, six weeks ago, so did life on Mars.
