Excerpt: 'The Dream of Spaceflight: Essays on the Near Edge of Infinity'

By Wyn Wachhorst
Basic Books
Nonfiction/Essays
225 pages

In the tradition of Loren Eiseley, Arthur Koestler and Lewis Thomas, Wyn Wachhorst is a great rarity: an author of truly lyrical essays on science and technology. In his hands, the drive to explore space becomes a mirror on humanity's profoundest aspirations and noblest urges. "The Dream of Spaceflight" is a luminous meditation on the meaning of space exploration.

1. Kepler's Children: The Dream of Spaceflight

Pulled by the hand, the six-year-old boy ran beside his mother, scurrying through narrow cobblestone streets. Peddlers pushed their iron-wheeled carts, players and musicians passed in procession, and lepers shook their rattles as night fell on the Swabian village of Weil. At the edge of town, the boy and his mother moved across a new-mown field and up a small hill in the last purple aura of dusk. The sounds of the village gave way to a silent canopy of stars, an ocean of light spanning the world from edge to edge, dwarfing the stern little steeple and its flock of houses, huddled in the twilight of an age.

The boy and his mother stood on the crest of the hill in the drone of the night wind. They had come to behold a streak of cosmic fire hanging motionless in the heavens, slashing across a full third of the sky. It was a moment burned into the boy's memory. Though his mother had heard that the comet foretold a new age, she would never know that there at her side stood the earthly counterpart to that cosmic aberration, who would pass through the world like the wind in the grass, sending a shudder through the whole medieval order, sowing the seed of the modern age. For the Great Comet of 1577 had fired the soul of Johannes Kepler.

He was a spindly, mange-eaten boy with a bloated face -- sickly, pasty, chronically covered with scabs, boils, violent rashes, and putrid sores, plagued with worms, piles, myopia, and multiple vision. A precocious adolescent, neurotic, self-loathing, arrogant, and vociferous, he was an introspective loner, belligerently defensive, and prone to wild fits of anger. He was frequently beaten up for being an intolerable egghead, welcoming, perhaps, the periods of hard field labor that kept him from school. Raised by an extended family that Arthur Koestler describes as "mostly degenerates and psychopaths," the boy saw little of his vicious father, a mercenary adventurer who barely escaped the gallows, and who finally wandered away forever. Nor was he a special concern of his mother, a quarrelsome eccentric who was nearly burned as a witch.

Out of this "childhood in hell," as Koestler put it, came "the most reckless and erratic spiritual adventurer of the scientific revolution." His lifelong quest for larger meaning, for celestial harmony in an age of upheaval, sought a new image of God to transcend the misfortunes of a persecuted exile, swept about in the storms of seventeenth-century Europe. A strange and tormented genius whom Kant called "the most acute thinker ever born," Johannes Kepler stood astride the intellectual divide between medieval and modern.

The Poetic Structure of the World

Like the seafarers of their time, seventeenth-century scientists left well-worn paths to seek their own East in the west, for the new empiricism was often incidental to their search for a harmony and symmetry that would reveal the mind of God in nature. Kepler's laws of planetary motion -- the first "natural laws" in the modern sense -- not only rescued the Copernican system from philosophic obscurity but were also prerequisite to the law of gravity, upon which Newton built the modern universe. Yet the founding of modern science was a byproduct of Kepler's larger purpose, which was to seek no less than the poetic structure of the world, the grand geometric symmetry of all creation. His famous empirical laws were to him mere tools in a lifelong obsession to prove his mistaken notion that the vertices of the five symmetrical solids (pyramid, cube, etc.), inscribed or nested one within the other, defined the orbital spheres of the six known planets, and that their relative motions matched the mathematics of musical harmony -- the music of the spheres.

Driven by a cosmic vision, a grandiose fugue woven of science, poetry, philosophy, theology, and Pythagorean mysticism, Kepler's transcendent goal -- to map the mind of God -- was more medieval than modern. Yet in this quest for his summa of the Renaissance, the perfection of which eluded him all his life, Kepler had seen that empirical observation was key. He founded celestial mechanics, moving astronomy from theology to physics. Ironically, he compared his voyage of discovery to that of Columbus, little knowing that he himself had discovered his America believing it was India. It was neither Copernicus nor Galileo but Johannes Kepler who launched the scientific revolution.

Failing to match the paths of the planets to the vertices of his symetrical solids, Kepler came finally to question the orbits themselves. By a stroke of luck, the astronomer Tycho Brahe, whose observations were the most accurate to date, was so protective of his data that he would give Kepler only his figures for Mars. Only the orbit of Mars, having the largest eccentricity, could have forced Kepler to abandon the dream of symmetry. Attempting to derive the orbit from Brahe's data, he was unwilling to accept a discrepancy of even a few minutes of arc. He labored six years on the problem, covering nine hundred folio pages in small handwriting, at one point repeating seventy times a process involving thousands of calculations. Looking first for an egg-shaped orbit, he settled sadly on the lowly ellipse. Thus the planet Mars, so prominent in subsequent dreams of spaceflight, led Kepler to the first natural law: planets move in elliptical orbits. This in turn led him to two additional discoveries: that a planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times, and that the squares of the periods of revolution of any two planets are as the cubes of their mean distances from the sun -- the revelation that led Newton to the law of gravity. Though Kepler salvaged his vision of harmony with his notion of musical intervals, he had opened the universe to infinity. No longer in the supernatural province of God, the planets now belonged to man. Yet the three laws had no apparent relationship before the invention of calculus and analytic geometry; thus, one of Newton's greater achievements was to spot the laws in Kepler's writings, hidden away, as Koestler notes, "like forget-me-nots in a tropical flower bed." With those laws Newton laid the foundation of the pyramid that would put man on the moon.

Seeking the Past in the Future

"Let us create vessels and sails adjusted to the heavenly ether," Kepler wrote to Galileo, "and there will be plenty of people unafraid of the empty wastes. In the meantime, we shall prepare for the brave sky-travelers maps of the celestial bodies." The reduction of the planets from ethereal orbs to rocky worlds like our own resulted from both Kepler's work and the advent of the telescope (which was neither invented nor understood by Galileo; it was Kepler who deciphered its principles and founded the science of optics). The planets had become real places in the sky.

Thus Kepler's "Somnium" (1634), published four years after his death, became the first cosmic voyage in modern science fiction, providing a model for later works. Though the moonflight itself was a dream, Kepler took great pains to envision the lunar surface and its inhabitants. Disguised as fiction, it was in fact a heretical scientific hypothesis, the first seriously to suggest extraterrestrial life. Kepler poured his soul into Somnium. In it, observes Koestler, were "all the dragons which had beset his life -- from the witch Fiolxhilda and her vanished husband, down to the poor reptilian creatures in perpetual flight, shedding their diseased skin." And the same tension of old and new that had defined his life colored this last work. For if the hero was whisked to the moon by spirits, he was also first to see Earth afloat in the lunar sky, where the continent of Africa resembled a head, and Europe a girl bending down to kiss it.

In projecting a lunar reality based on the best science of the day, Somnium was ahead of its time. Though the literary history of voyages beyond the Earth dates from second-century Greece, tales before the nineteenth century were the tongue-in-cheek gimmicks of sermon and satire. Travelers were swept to the moon by angels and witches, by ships borne on whirlwinds or waterspouts, and in chariots drawn by flame-red horses. One voyager wore the wings of a vulture; others sailed an angular framework suspended from a team of swans, donned bottles of dew that rose with the dawn, or ascended the heavens in an iron car by lobbing lodestones continuously upward. Shrewdest of all, perhaps, were those who simply arrived on the moon unexplained. But even these tales were virtually nonexistent until the fabulous voyage flowered in Elizabethan literature.

The sudden popularity of the cosmic voyage in the 1630s found fertile ground in an ambivalence toward accelerating change, a yearning to escape the present by seeking a simpler past in a purified future. Like twentieth-century America, early seventeenth-century England straddled old and new, oscillating between extremes of hope and pessimism, experiencing what literary historians have called a failure of nerve, a metaphysical shudder. Amid political and economic turmoil, the medieval world-picture was surfacing into critical consciousness. Like present-day materialism, it was losing the power to provide axiomatic order and meaning. But if a melancholy sense of mutability and decay reinforced the Christian notion that history must unwind to its end, the new visions of Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, and Descartes, with their expansive belief in man's ability to improve on nature, promised escape from history. The New World became the idyllic setting for utopian tales, and Kepler's notion of a world in the moon prompted fables of escape to simpler but superior peoples on exemplary planets.

The vast resources of the New World so liberated human potential that the imaginative mind felt a new relation with the universe -- a new sense of control over destiny. But the consequent rise of the self-reflexive individual, severed from institutional contexts of identity, brought the loss of innocence that has made the reconquest of Eden the organizing image of the last half-millennium. If the Copernican expulsion from the literal center symbolizes this loss of larger meaning, then the leitmotif of the longing to return -- from Kepler in the seventeenth century to von Braun in the twentieth -- has been the dream of spaceflight.

In contrast to the horizontal expansion of modern materialism, which has confused Paradise with power itself, this longing for meaning has been a vertical vision, seeking the whole over the part, the why over the how, meaningful ends over endless means -- akin to the medieval penchant for spirit over matter, which put final meaning at the highest point in the heavens, embodied in the cathedral's soaring vaults. From early explorers, scientists, and novelists to pulp writers and rocket pioneers, the forerunners of spaceflight have been keepers of this lost vertical vision. Imbued with curiosity and wonder, they have carried the quest for meaning across the modern desert, seeking the East in the west, the past in the future, the center at the edge.

Rites of Passage

Certainly curiosity has been prerequisite to our success as a species. But what drove a man like Magellan, who sought the mythic el paso, the passage to the Orient, only to find himself on the far side of a globe many times larger than imagined, hurled about in howling winds amid mountains of water, or becalmed in a stillness that roasted the flesh, putrified meat, and fouled water casks with green scum? He and his men ate worm-filled biscuits turned to powder and the ox hides off the masts, unable to get their fill of that delicacy the rat. And what drove the Spanish adventurer who trekked across the Isthmus of Panama in 1513 with 190 men in heavy armor, scaling steep mountains, forging defiles and dark troughs of swampy rain forest, beset by snakes, predators, and poison arrows? A nineteenth-century expedition following the same route lost every man; even today no road traverses it. But the hardy redhead Spaniard reached the westernmost mountain with sixty-seven men. Climbing the last peak alone with his dog, Vasco Nuņez de Balboa stood silent on the bare summit. Beyond the virgin forest glistened the vast blue of the Pacific stretching away with the other half of the world.

The price of exploration has been high. On the far side of the Earth, Magellan's body, mutilated by native knives and spears, lay on a barren beach. Balboa, a victim of political intrigue, was beheaded in a public square, his head displayed on a stake, and his body thrown to the vultures. What motivates those who venture over the edge, who trek over barren plains, through tangled jungle, or across the Arctic waste; who ride on fire over the rocks of the moon, only to yearn for the relentless red desert of Mars? Surely it is more than gold and glory. What the biographies of most explorers reveal, in fact, is a sometimes selfless obsession with reaching the pristine edges of reality. At the heart of exploration, it seems, is the attempt to complete the grand internal model of reality, to broaden the context of meaning, to find the center by completing the edge.

In a sense, the age of exploration, geographic and scientific, is the whole of modern history, a five-century quest for self-definition. Just as the adolescent's desire to remain dependent in a maternal Eden conflicts with a growing sense of autonomy, the modern age, suspended between an authoritarian past and an existential future, has been man's rite of passage. The adolescence of humanity began with the age of exploration.

So it is fitting that the impetus for Kepler's grand internal model of the solar system was both a priori and inductive, ideal and real, regressive and progressive, a tension resembling that of adolescence. For not only was the seventeenth century a torn and restless era of nascent individualism, but the architects of the modern age seem themselves to have lived in that limbo between childhood and maturity. Copernicus found refuge from lonely isolation in secret and incessant elaboration of his system; Galileo was a self-centered egomaniac; and Newton, also a rational mystic, was a sickly recluse, alienated from his parents, obsessed with his work, and a lifelong celibate. Kepler himself, as Koestler observes, seemed polarized to a point verging on insanity. He was a "dark, wiry figure, charged with nervous energy," his Mephistophelian profile "belied by the melancholia of the soft, shortsighted eyes." He was both naīve and profound, fanatically patient and violently irritable, burdening his sweeping fantasies with pedantic obsessions over fraction-of-a-decimal deviations. Set against twenty years of dreary, heartbreaking computations, the true significance of which he never perceived, his labors were suggestive, says Koestler, of the "explosive yet painstakingly elaborate paintings by schizophrenics." In that tension lay the spark of the scientific revolution and the dream of reaching the stars.

A Wind Between Worlds

Perhaps there was a brief moment, on some bare summit of imagination, when Kepler himself glimpsed the true scope of the cosmos, stretching away before him like Balboa's Pacific. But Kepler, too, had paid the price of beaching his boat on the shore of a new world. For attempting to stand above the political and religious forces of the Thirty Years War, he was excommunicated and exiled, forced to migrate from city to city with his family, his household goods piled in a wagon. He was chronically ill and ever in fear of penury and starvation, trekking from court to court in his baggy, food-stained suit, pleading for his fees. Seldom understood, he was desperately lonely amid the ignorance and provinciality of his time. His first wife, a nagging, simple-minded, sulking woman who viewed with contempt his position of stargazer, died of typhus at thirty-seven. In the end, Kepler lost six of his twelve children. His mother, accused of witchcraft and chained in prison for fourteen months, died shortly after he secured her release. Through all this, fluctuating between ecstatic discovery and frequent depression, Kepler wrote his "Harmony of the World," convinced that the world that so mistreated him was nonetheless beautiful. One day in the fall of 1631 he set out on a skinny nag in search of funds with which to feed his children. Three days out, he died in a fever at the age of fifty-eight. As befit an outcast who wandered the edge, the tides of war erased his grave and all trace of his bones.

Like the Great Comet itself, the fugitive odyssey of Johannes Kepler drifted on that great divide between Aristotle and Newton, animism and mechanism, spirit and matter, a wind between worlds. For decades after his death, until Newton unearthed his significance, scholars saw only the wild-minded apriorist whose speculations had included an Earth soul and radiations from the planets that shaped human lives. The ironic postscript was that the planets, which his labors had so demystified, stood in the exact same positions at the moment of his death as they had on the day of his birth.

Embodying the vertical mind of the medieval while setting the modern mind in motion, the two sides of this wholly original man foretold the tension of our collective adolescence -- the overt drive to recapture Eden with the rational mind and the covert need to restore the old mysteries, to humble man once more before Nature. Epitomizing this polarity, the prophets of spaceflight -- from the astronomers who mapped imaginary Martian canals to the writers who peopled them with exotic beings to the rocket pioneers themselves -- were realists in search of the ideal, reflecting the expansive spirit of the age while preserving the transcendent vision. A classic Heinlein story comes to mind in which the community aboard a starship, intended to reach its destination after countless generations, has forgotten the origin and purpose of the journey. A similar loss of meaning has befallen spaceship Earth, where dreams of enlarging the grand internal model, of moving toward some final cosmic perspective, yield to the cancerous individualism that devours the social organism.

Copyright © 2000 by Basic Books.

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