BookSpin Excerpt:

Excerpt from:

The Vinyl Frontier: The Story of the Voyager Golden Record
by Jonathan Scott
Bloomsbury Sigma
Hardcover

©Jonathan Scott, 2019   I would like to thank Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.  for facilitating this excerpt publication, with special thanks to Emily Willette.

CHAPTER ONE 

The Naked Pioneers 

‘Ad astra per aspera’ – ‘Through difficulties to the stars’ 

Carl Sagan 

Two space probes called Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were sent to the outer planets in the late 1970s to beam back lots of lovely images and data of the gas giants and their moons. Primary mission complete, and with no way of being controlled, the probes were doomed to drift forever in the unimaginable void of interstellar space.

With this gloomy-sounding outcome in mind, NASA decided to do something very optimistic. They would send with them a message, on the very slim chance that they would one day be recovered by some little green chap. The message took the form of a metal record. A record designed to convey something about our origins, our civilisation, our art, through sounds, images and music. CliffsNotes to Earthlings.

To tell the story of this record, its creators and the people who chose that moment to fall in love, we need to begin by backing up a little. You see, Voyager Golden Record is a sequel. It’s the more ambitious, bigger-budget sequel to Pioneer Plaque. Five years before Voyager, the Pioneer probes became the first man-made objects destined to reach interstellar space, to cast off the gravitational cloak of our solar system and head out into it forever. While this was known to everyone involved in the mission, it took an outsider looking in – a writer for Christian Science Monitor – to draw attention to the magnitude of this fact. Pioneer 10 and 11 were to be humankind’s first emissaries to the stars. Here was a first-time opportunity to send a message, a greeting to any intelligent beings who might chance upon them.

Armed with enthusiasm and a deadline of just three weeks, a three-strong team, comprising an artist, an astronomer and an astrophysicist, thrashed out a design for a modest metal plaque, complete with star map and naked human figures. However, one of the strangest aspects of the Pioneer plaques – the first of which was hurled towards Jupiter in March 1972 – was the absence of vulva.

The last-minute sanitising of the female figure, for fear of offending a domestic audience, captures an essence of the environment in which the Pioneer plaques were forged. These are not only messages to some imagined future alien interaction, they are also time capsules, snapshots of when they left Earth. The removal of the vulva is a lens through which we can view America nearly 50 years ago. Despite the swinging sixties, despite mass movements, protests, social reforms and upheavals, despite convention-busting cinema coming out of the American New Wave, America in 1972 remained a conservative environment. NASA was in the glare of the public gaze, at the mercy of popular opinion. It was funded by American tax dollars, and everyone knew it. And to tell the story of the missing vulva, we need to back up just a little bit further.

In 1964 a graduate student working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory2 noticed something
important. His name was Gary Flandro. He had finished school in 1957, just before Sputnik, perfectly timing his arrival at JPL with the start of the space race. The first of the Pioneer missions took place the following year, when a probe designed to achieve moon orbit, failed some 73.6 seconds after launch. A steady stream continued to punch holes in the atmosphere. Some were lost at launch, others failed to reach their desired orbit, others did very well. A personal favourite is Pioneer 5 from March 1960 – a spherical probe sent to measure magnetic forces in the space between the orbits of Earth and Venus – that looks very similar to the intimidating black ball that approaches Princess Leia in Star Wars: A New Hope.

Flandro had been investigating the knotty problem of how an object might be sent further, towards the outer planets. The general consensus at the time was that this was virtually impossible without something called gravity assist. Jupiter held the keys to the outer planets. Without Jupiter’s gravity, any object sent in that direction would eventually fall back to Earth’s orbit. But with Jupiter there, an object could fly past, pick up an enormous boost of energy, and then be hurled out towards Saturn. Then, in theory, it could do the same thing at Saturn, and head off further towards Uranus, Neptune and so on.

While working on trajectories, Flandro realised something mind-blowing: that by the late 1970s all the outer planets would be on the same side of the Sun. This alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune could enable a single craft to visit all four outer planets by using gravity assists in what would be dubbed the ‘Grand Tour’. This wasn’t quite a single one-time option – there were various possible iterations and trajectories – but such an advantageous planetary arrangement would not occur again for another 175 years. Flandro had uncovered a chance to explore a number of planets in one go, at a fraction of the cost. Suddenly NASA had been given the mother of all deadlines.

*** 

To plan for a planetary Grand Tour, NASA needed Pioneers 10 and 11 to dip their toes in the waters of the outer solar system, to see if such an endeavour was even possible. The idea to include a message with the Pioneers came relatively late in the day. Eric Burgess, an English freelancer, had been writing about space missions since 1957. He’s the one who held up his hand in class and pointed out to the world that NASA was about to throw something further than anything had ever been thrown. And during conversations with writers Richard Hoagland and Don Bane the idea for attaching some kind of physical message to the craft was forged. Burgess was unsure about pitching direct to NASA, so instead he approached Carl Sagan, whose eyes lit up.

Sagan was already a well-known astronomer, with a growing public profile, but he was not yet the household name he would become. He was a coal-face scientist, with acknowledged achievements, enthusiasms and specialisations under his belt. He would study the greenhouse effect on Venus, seasonal dust patterns on Mars, the environment of Saturn’s moon Titan. He would play a medal-winning role in NASA’s Mariner 9 mission, and contribute to the Viking, Voyager and Galileo missions.