The Vinyl Frontier Read online

  He was still a working stiff at Cornell. He would receive the NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement for his studies of Mars with Mariner 9. He had chaired US delegations to a US/Russian conference, he was awarded the Prix Galabert, the international astronautical prize. He was also now editing the planetary journal Icarus, which he had launched. And let’s not forget he was also a working husband and father. By the mid-1970s Carl had three sons: two by his first wife, evolutionary theorist and biologist Lynn Margulis; and Nick, with his second wife Linda. Indeed The Cosmic Connection is dedicated to his sons.

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  The Grand Tour was approved in 1971, then cancelled the following year, before a cut-back version was green-lit the year after that. By the mid-1970s NASA’s primary targets for the mission had become Jupiter and Saturn.

  Voyager’s principal investigator into low-energy charged particles, Tom Krimigis,5 describes the meeting where a NASA rep pitched the Grand Tour to President Nixon. With estimated costs in hand, he explained the unique situation, how planetary alignments offered this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a moderately thrifty tour of the gas giants. It was pointed out to Nixon that the last time the planets had been so aligned, at the start of the 19th century, President Jefferson had been at Nixon’s desk, and he had blown it. Nixon, to give credit where credit’s due, said all right but asked that NASA visit just two planets. Fine. NASA had a deal.

  Now, imagine you’ve just told your mum that you’re walking to a friend’s house down the road. But in your bag you’ve stowed secret provisions, a couple of apples and a Hershey bar, as unbeknownst to her you are intent on a much longer journey to another friend’s house in the next town. It was a little like that.6 The possibility of directing a ship on to the more remote gas giants, should it survive the encounter with Saturn, remained in the background as a driving ambition – an almost-but-not-quite-secret agenda, designed into the fabric of the mission from the beginning.

  Two important JPL figures at this time were Edward Stone and John Casani. In the mid-1970s Ed Stone was Voyager’s project scientist. Judging from contemporary photographs in the JPL Archive, Stone often favoured a brown suit jacket with a check design. He looks thin and good humoured – the way scientists look in comic books and Marvel films. He would go on to chair mission press conferences into the 1980s and ’90s, hold the position of JPL director for 10 years, and make regular appearances in 2017 for Voyager’s 40th-birthday celebrations.

  Casani was born in Philadelphia, studied at a Jesuit high school, entering University of Pennsylvania as a liberal arts major before joining the military. He switched to an electrical engineering major, graduating in 1955, and joined pre-NASA JPL, when it was still administered by the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, having already worked on multiple Mariner and Pioneer missions.

  In October 19747 the entire JPL Voyager team was conducting a comprehensive Mission and Systems Design Review – in other words a survey of problems that needed solving. The survey covered a lot of ground, from computer command systems, and communications, to how the probes might fare in the extreme environmental conditions to which they were to be subjected (including radiation levels encountered by the Pioneer probes). Then, once a problem was identified, it would be allocated to the appropriate mission team, who then had until March 1975 to come up with a solution in time for a final design review. The October survey highlighted 116 concerns.

  At the time of the sitrep, Casani was Chief of Division 34 – JPL’s Guidance and Control Division. It was he who, using one of NASA’s standard Concern/Action forms, highlighted that there was at present no plan to include a Pioneer-like message with the probes. He added the three-word solution: ‘Send a Message!’ I’ve attended meetings where I’ve raised something trivial just to avoid seeming like a waste of space. I’ve also deliberately reframed a point that had already been made by someone else, in order to seem like I’m contributing. Now, I’m not suggesting for a second that this was Casani’s motivation, or that the problem he raised was trivial. I’m merely trying to point out how, to this layman at least, when put alongside the enormously complex problems that must have faced those NASA technicians during the months of design review, the existence or not of a message to the cosmos was like a band member worrying about T-shirts before a song is written.

  Casani’s suggestion wasn’t acted on immediately, of course, but it was recognised as an important consideration. NASA might have had its fingers singed by the reaction to the Pioneers, but there had been a reaction. It had generated publicity, interest. It had excited the world’s popular imagination.

  The Voyager mission at this moment was known as Mariner-Jupiter-Saturn 1977, or MJS 77. Even with the abbreviations it was a clunky name. Just compare it to Explorer 1, Viking 2, Mariner 1. They sound cool. Mariner-Jupiter-Saturn 1977 sounds like a lumbering triple-vinyl concept album. It’s a utilitarian name that encapsulates the plan – that a Mariner-class ship is off to Jupiter and Saturn – but otherwise sounds dull as all hell. Or at least that was the opinion of Casani, who was promoted to become JPL’s new project manager in 1976, and immediately began bucking for a more imaginative name.8

  Unsurprisingly, he met plenty of resistance. Think about it. You’re in a band called Gauntlet. With a name like that, you probably play old-school heavy metal. You’ve built up a following, landed regular support slots at local venues, worked on logos and T-shirts, have plans to book studio time for a first EP any day now. Suddenly your new bassist, who only joined the other day and has only just mastered that tricky middle section in ‘Pox Ridden’, pipes up with: ‘Gauntlet is a rubbish name. Let’s call ourselves The Gaunts.’ It’s really annoying. It’s annoying because you’ve spent a long time working with your current name, you have an emotional attachment to that name. You’re invested. You have patches sewn into your jacket, badges on your lapel and a new, just-printed T-shirt. But it’s most annoying because deep down you know the upstart bassist is right.

  Casani wanted a name that marked this mission out from its predecessors. This was not a mere iteration of the Mariners. Despite the fact that the plan was to save money where possible and to avoid too much tailored engineering by using extant hardware for the new probes, this wasn’t Mariner 5.0, or Pioneer 3. It was a pair of brand-new probes going on a trip to the outer planets. This wasn’t another Rocky sequel. It was Rambo.9

  Casani was a popular leader. He took over the Voyager project reins from Bruce Murray. Murray was a brilliant man who had pitched hard for the Grand Tour, but he was more scientist than leader, a man who gravitated towards ‘push’ rather than ‘pull’ behaviours, more rock than sponge. NASA’s director of planetary programmes Robert Kraemer described him as someone ‘not known for his timidity’. That’s not to say Casani was popular because he was some fluffy pushover. Far from it. In talks, press conferences and public appearances he gave off natural, inclusive charm, built around military-grade steel. Speaking in 2009 to a NASA leadership academy, he summarised what he saw as the essential ingredients for managing successful space projects: ‘Toughness … because this is a tough business. It’s a very unforgiving business. You can do a thousand things right. But if you don’t do everything right, it’ll come back and bite you.’

  This tough upstart bassist pushed through the name-change resistance – a ‘firestorm’ according to Voyager’s Grand Tour. Indeed the MJS team had already gone through a contest to select a working ‘MJS 77’ emblem for the mission, and the winning emblem had been picked. None of this derailed Casani and in the spring of 1976 they held a second competition, this time for a new name, with a case of champagne going to the winner. MJS had finally become Voyager – although NASA did not officially accept Voyager as the new name for the two spacecraft until March 1977.

  So by 1976 the project team had a nice new name in the offing. They had a nice new boss. And they had Casani’s three-word call to action: ‘Send a message.’

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  Between Pionee
r and Voyager, both Carl and Frank Drake worked on other space-bound messages. Indeed, if you think of the Pioneer plaques as humankind’s first postcard to the stars, Frank was about to send our first email.

  Frank was already famous in astronomy circles, not least for his Drake Equation – a formula that summarised all the variables relevant to establishing the number of intelligent civilisations that existed in the galaxy. It was a thought experiment, an attempt to look up at the vast heavens, consider all the factors that made life a possibility, predict how many stars might have planets suitable for harbouring life, and therefore how many civilisations there might be. It was originally conceived by Frank as a tool to stimulate debate at the first meeting of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) at Green Bank, West Virginia, in 1961 (the site of the first modern SETI experiment, ‘Project Ozma’, the year before) rather than as a genuine attempt to come up with a number. According to Keay Davidson’s Sagan biography, as Frank spelled out his equation for the first time on the blackboard, the sounds of talking behind him gradually diminished. The 10 attendees (Dana Atchley, Melvin Calvin, Frank Drake, Su-Shu Huang, John C. Lilly, Philip Morrison, James Peter Pearman, Barney Oliver, Carl Sagan, Otto Struve) called themselves ‘the Order of the Dolphin’ – inspired by Lilly’s recent work on dolphin communication.

  Frank had been using his Order of the Dolphin buddies as a sounding board, testing out ideas for messages designed so they might be understood by an alien race, looking for some construct that could form a common ground for communication. Ultimately this led to Frank’s first interstellar email, sent on 16 November 1974. It left Arecibo in Puerto Rico10 at the speed of light, heading towards a cluster of stars that it should reach … ooh, in about 25,000 years. Now, anyone who’s read or seen the film adaptation of Carl Sagan’s novel Contact 11 will know that radio signals have been leaking out into the cosmos for decades. But Drake’s Arecibo message was much more deliberate than that. Like the Pioneer plaque before it, and with elements of the Voyager message that was to come, it was designed to be decipherable by any being, using the universal language of mathematics.

  Writing about it for National Geographic on the 40th anniversary, Frank’s daughter, science journalist Nadia Drake, described how the message was not publicised beforehand. It was a secret opportunity that had come out of the giant radio telescope receiving an upgrade. It was now home to a million-watt transmitter, and Frank’s message was the champagne bottle against the hull, marking the completion of the improvements.

  Frank’s message had to be simple. Language would be meaningless, so he planned instead to send a picture made up of shaded squares. Imagine the very first computer game you ever played. Or, if you’re a bit younger, think about how Minecraft looks. Frank’s message kind of looked like that, but black and white.

  The message was sent around 1p.m. You can listen to it now on YouTube. It starts with a long steady tone, then a long series of alternating warbles, before returning to the steady tone again. Those two-tone warbles indicate to the receiver either a zero or one. So if you knew the correct grid template, you would simply listen to the warbles and it would tell you which squares had to be black, and which should be left blank, to build up a picture. To give the alien receivers a clue about the correct template, the message was constructed from exactly 1,679 characters – a number that is the product of prime numbers 73 and 23. It was thought alien mathematicians should spot that the number could only be made by those two prime numbers, and so would try reconstructing the binary warbles in the correct template shape – a tall rectangular grid of 23 by 73 squares. Or to put it another way, you listen to 1,629 pulses, and build the pictorial message like a stack of Tetris blocks, in 73 lines of 23 squares, giving you a set of images.

  Frank packed a lot of information into his three-minute picture. It included numbers one to 10 in binary code, a depiction of DNA, a map of the solar system, four billion written in binary code (the world population at the time), the average height of a human, and the height of the telescope itself. Before it was sent, he wanted to see if someone who had no idea of the message’s contents could interpret it correctly. Who did he test it on? You guessed it: Carl. And Carl did pretty well, only stumbling over some of the biochemical data encoded in the message.

  Frank’s email is still on its way to M13, the Great Cluster in Hercules. And it’s important for our story as it shows one thing – that Frank’s focus was sending pictures to the cosmos, rather than sound.

  Carl, meanwhile, was working on a message to the future. NASA was preparing to launch LAGEOS (Laser Geodynamic Satellite), a satellite designed to measure continental drift. To allow it to make as accurate measurements as possible, it had to be put in a nice high stable orbit. During the design phase, it was realised that as it was to be more or less impervious to factors that cause the gradual decay of other satellites, its estimated lifetime before burning up in the atmosphere was around the eight-million-year mark. So NASA asked Sagan to work on a plaque, this time aimed at our distant human descendants – a greeting card to explain the where, when and why of the satellite. In Murmurs of Earth Sagan compares it to a giant golf ball, which the photos show is a pretty perfect summation.

  The LAGEOS capsule is much simpler than the Pioneer message. Designed by Sagan, it shows three representations of the continents of the Earth. The first shows them how they were arranged millions of years ago, the second how they appear now, and the third how we expect them to appear many millions of years hence. Just as Drake’s pulsar map on Pioneer had served to communicate both time and place to its audience, so this simple map communicated two things: first, it told the future earthling what it was for (to map the changing continents), and secondly, as continents move about an inch per year, it should be possible to calculate roughly when it came from.

  The message was etched on stainless steel sheets (about 4 by 7 inches) and installed in the satellite – one at each end of the bar connecting the two hemispheres that make up the golf-ball-shaped whole. The NASA press release, dated 15 April 1976, finishes: ‘Whoever is inhabiting Earth in that distant epoch may appreciate a little greeting card from the remote past.’

  NASA had again shown its willingness to engage with non-essentials. Yes, the agency wanted to save money. Yes, it wanted to have projects green-lit by Congress. But it also sought to inspire. And it was recognised that these messages and time capsules had great potential for generating column inches, interest and inspiration. With LAGEOS Sagan had successfully delivered another message within a NASA brief, in a very short space of time (like the Pioneer plaque, it was relatively last-minute). So when the call to action finally made it to the top of Casani’s in-tray in December 1976, it explains why Sagan was the first name that came to mind.

  When Casani called Carl, the conversation didn’t go anything like this:

  ‘Hi, Carl.’

  ‘Hi, John.’

  ‘Remember that Pioneer plaque you did?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Well, we need something like that for the Voyagers.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘There’s virtually no cash. And we’re short of time.’

  ‘Perfect. Leave it to me.’

  ‘Oh and Carl?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘No nudes.’

  *Click*

  Carl was in Pasadena at the time, taking part in mission operations of the Viking spacecraft on Mars (the second Viking lander had only touched down at Utopia Planitia three months before12 ). Writing in Murmurs of Earth, Sagan describes how this was his first inkling of another ‘pleasant and hopeful’ plan to send a Pioneer-like message with the Voyagers. Yet I think we can assume that it must have already at least entered Carl’s mind that there might be something in the offing.

  Nevertheless, time was already short. Launch was months not years away. Voyager 2 was setting off first,13 in August 1977, and it was already December 1976. It wasn’t like Carl could finish it off on a piece of paper o
n the morning of launch, then gallop down the runway at Cape Canaveral, waving it in his hand.

  Perhaps because of this lack of time and money, his initial thoughts were very low-key. He pondered simply reproducing the Pioneer plaques as they were. He considered a simple ‘modest extension’ of the Pioneers – virtually identical plaques, this time with bonus extras and hidden Easter eggs for any alien collectors out there. In Murmurs he gives the example of something in the field of molecular biology – perhaps they could encode some message or image into a Voyager plaque that communicated something of the structure of proteins or nucleic acids. But, as Frank Drake describes it, they soon realised this would be a cop-out.

  Towards the end of December Carl instigated the great Voyager brainstorm, tapping up friends, colleagues and academic consultants. First on the list, of course, was his Cornell buddy Frank Drake. Then together Frank and Carl quizzed others in the SETI/CETI14 posse, and members of the Order of the Dolphin – people used to thinking about interstellar communication. These included Philip Morrison, professor of physics at MIT, Canadian astrophysicist and Harvard prof A.G.W. Cameron, British chemist Leslie Orgel, Hewlett-Packard founder and inventor Bernard Oliver, British philosopher Steven Toulmin, and a great trio of science-fiction writers in Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein. This roll call of talent wasn’t amassed through some NASA-sponsored call to arms printed in the Washington Post. No, this was all under the radar. This was Carl and Frank putting their feelers out to people they knew or had worked with. And despite the glaring lack of female input, there’s much to be admired in the list.