Space oddities

Ten years ago I stumbled out of the Plaza cinema, high on a ‘Space Odyssey’. In one rush of celluloid Kubrick (with the intrepid Mr. Clarke at his side) put flesh and blood on the ghost of science fiction, and gave it a complete and wholly real physiology. They detailed what exactly Nasa was at, and put the whole God question into a certain perspective.
Nasa in the last two weeks has begun to catch up with Messrs. Kubrick and Clarke. On August 5th, the space shuttle “Orbiter Enterprise” had its first free flight, after riding piggyback on a 747 explosive bolts separated the Orbiter from the Boeing at 22,000 ft.
The “Enterprise” flew for five minutes before landing at Dryden Research Centre. “Enterprise” is the prototype of an orbiting craft which will be launched from a pad in the conventional way, go into orbit and fly back to Earth to land like a normal aircraft. Its first job when in operation in the 1980s will be to construct orbiting space stations and then shuttle earthlings to and from these stations.
On August 21st, Nasa launched “Voyager 2”, the first of two multi-investigational probes which will voyage out to the giant planets on the far side of Mars. “Voyager 1” (to be launched September 1) will reach Jupiter in March 1979, after investigating the Earth, Moon and Mars.
It will investigate Jupiter (the fifth planet from the Sun and larger than the rest of the planets in the Solar System combined) and its 13 moons for four months. Then using the huge gravitational forces around Jupiter will “slingshot” around the planet and on to Saturn. One year later “Voyager” will reach Saturn Space, 930 million miles from the Sun, and begin investigating that planet, its rings and satellites, including the biggest moon in the Solar System – Titan.
At this stage the spacecraft will have travelled 1 1/2 billion miles.
All going well at Saturn “Voyager” will be set on course to Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun, to arrive there in 1986. Smaller than Jupiter and Saturn but still much larger than our planet, Uranus is a strange gaseous world spinning through space with its poles along the plane of its orbit, i.e. at right angles to the Earth’s poles. In the last year rings similar to the rings of Saturn have been discovered around Uranus. Saturn’s rings rotate along that planet’s equatorial plane, whereas Uranus’ rings rotate along its polar plane. The “Voyager” will be powered by nuclear energy and will be guided by an on-board computer. The information will be transmitted back to Earth on radio waves.
Three years after leaving Uranus Space “Voyager” will exist from the Solar System at a speed of 38,000mph. It will be 40,000 years before “Voyager” reaches any other worlds, where any technological civilisation will, hopefully, detect and capture or calling card.
It is now accepted by most people in space exploration that there are intelligent and probably technological civilisations outside our Solar System.
So, when “Voyager” leaves our system its secondary function begins. At the instigation of that well-known cosmologist Carl Sagan (the man responsible for the gold-plated message on Pioneer 10 and 11 – the first man-made objects to go into interstellar space) one 12 inch copper LP (16 rpm) have been placed on each “Voyager” with operation instructions, a cartridge and stylus. The idea being that any beings advanced enough to capture “Voyager” will be able to decipher the recorded sounds.
Each LP is of two hours duration and contains recorded electronic images of mathematical, scientific and visual information. Included in the 115 earth pictures are: snowflakes, a house in Africa, dolphins, the Taj Mahal and The Golden Gate Bridge photographed by Amsel Adams.
The sound section contains greetings from earth people in 60 languages, including Sumerian Urdu, Gaelic, Sotho and English as well as laughter, rain, waves, whales, jet engine, kiss, baby cry. The music selection includes: a pygmy girl’s initiation song, Bach’s ‘Brandenburg No.2’, ‘Melancholy Blues’ by Louis Armstrong, ‘Dark Was The Night’ by Blind Willie Johnson and ‘Johnny B. Goode’ by Chuck Berry.
Peanuts Carter has the following message:
This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilisation.
We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into or future, when our civilisation is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some – perhaps many – may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilisations. If one such civilisation intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:
“This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilisations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.”
Jimmy Carter
President of the United States of America

Whether one is pro or anti-American, pro or anti-Capitalist technology, the sending of this message out into the cosmos is a buzz and says something very hopeful about life on the planet. Whether we like it or not the Yanks have sent Earth’s calling card to the Universe and all our names are on it.
I keep thinking of that line from an old Zimmerman song – “And before the sky there are no fences facing”.