Pathfinder? Hardly

Between them, they outlined the future of space exploration. Clarke, as always, is a little ahead of his time. It will be decades before ma...

Between them, they outlined the future of space exploration. Clarke, as always, is a little ahead of his time. It will be decades before man begins to move out to the planets. He will have to wait until it is cheaper to live on Mars than to live on Earth and, despite the going price per square foot on Nariman Point in Mumbai, that day is still in the middle distance.

The unusual enterprise displayed by the JPL employees points to yet another hard reality. Space programmes are no longer driven by defence imperatives. The success of Apollo 11 was a matter of national pride. Pathfinder8217;s is a triumph in which the whole world shares. Over the last decade or thereabouts, people have come to see space as a common resource, not an arena for international competition. They have realised that there is nothing to compete over. There is enough space to go around.

But until that space is exploited, exploration will remain prohibitively expensive. So, along with the defence imperatives, the disinterested quest for knowledge will also, unfortunately, take a back seat. So will the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Today, JPL8217;s employees are selling a bit of merchandise on their own. A couple of years on, merchandising could be as integral to space exploration as to a Ninja Turtle movie, and if any aliens want to buy a nice toy rover, so much the better. Last of all, the most telling statement is that of the rover team: quot;Thanks for the lift.quot; The age of Goddard, when delivery vehicle technology overshadowed everything else, is drawing to a close. Then, it was sufficient to reach for the stars because they were there. Now, is it necessary to address a very pedestrian question: what do you do when you get there?

On this Mars mission, the star of the show is Sojourner, the unassuming little rover. The first independent planetary vehicle, it extends man8217;s abilities in space many-fold. Sojourner is to planetary exploration what the Space Shuttle was to satellite maintenance and space station technology: it renders the impossibly difficult unbelievably easy. The earlier Mars probe8217;s range was limited by its optics. Sojourner can travel half a kilometre from the lander, and take a look from up close. More significantly, it is the first independent machine to be sent into space. Mars is 10 light minutes from earth. If Sojourner happens upon the unexpected there, its distress signal will reach earth after 10 minutes, and the command sent out from Pasadena will reach it after 20 minutes.

Sojourner is on its own. The future of space exploration will depend on intelligent agents like Sojourner, working independent of supervision as drone probes, maintenance units and general dogsbodies. It is they who will narrow the gap between the costs of living in space and living on earth, and make Clarke8217;s dream possible, paving the way to the stars. Man is yet to work out what he will do when he gets there but doubtless, in Clarke8217;s own words, he will think of something.