ESSAY; Adventure or Inquiry? Two Visions of Cosmic Destiny
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: February 3, 2004
''The best marriage of human spaceflight and science.'' That is how Dr. John M. Grunsfeld, astronomer, astronaut and chief scientist of NASA, described the Hubble Space Telescope when he announced last month that the agency was canceling maintenance missions to the telescope, which has dazzled the world with crisp visions of the cosmos.
Like every marriage, this one has had its ups and downs, and it seems to be ending like ''The War of the Roses.'' NASA officials moved as swiftly as assassins after President Bush ordered them to redirect resources toward the Moon and Mars. Without service calls from shuttle astronauts, the telescope is likely to die in orbit around 2007, making science the first casualty of the new era. Not an auspicious beginning.
NASA officials said it was a matter of safety, citing a recommendation of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board to send the shuttle only to the space station, unless tools are developed to inspect and repair fragile thermal tiles in flight.
The chairman of the accident board, Adm. Harold W. Gehman Jr., is now reviewing the decision, which outraged astronomers and others. ''Bush's 'New Vision' is a sharp stick in the eye,'' said The New Yorker.
The shuttle and the space telescope were a marriage of convenience, the visions driving them composing a sort of yin-yang heartbeat inside NASA.
In the 1970's, astronomers, who had long dreamed of a telescope above the blurry atmosphere, had no choice but to build a telescope that could be launched and maintained from the coming space shuttle.
Proponents of the shuttle then argued that their winged spaceship would be a great boon to science, a claim that came true in 1993 when spacewalking astronauts corrected a flaw in Hubble's optics. Subsequent service calls by the shuttle have continued to hone and improve the telescope's capabilities.
As I pondered the imminent demise of this heavenly relationship, I was drawn to a pair of images, each emblematic in its own way of the era and of an attitude toward space and humanity's place in it.
One was taken from the shuttle Challenger 20 years ago this month. It shows Capt. Bruce C. McCandless floating alone in space above a blue Earth, like a human satellite or a lonely star child. He was testing a nitrogen-propelled backpack designed to allow astronauts to buzz around freely in space.
The other, taken by the Hubble in 1995 and nicknamed the Pillars of Creation, shows huge columns of primordial gas being boiled away to reveal nests of hot new stars being born in the Eagle nebula some 6,500 light-years from here. It is a vision of Genesis as a continuing project.
Together these pictures represent the poles of the space program, the dialectic that has driven debate about it since the rockets began to blast forth from Cape Canaveral half a century ago. One is the drama of human exploration: footprints and golf balls on the Moon, spacewalks, zero-gravity shenanigans, space sickness, claustrophobic dramas in a tin can as humans learn like fish crawling out of the sea to adapt to a new environment. This is the inspirational adventure that serves as the loss leader, loosening Congressional purses for other space activities.
The other is science, the endless inquiry into the brute divine processes through which we originated, performed by talented robots embodying all the ingenuity and persistence of their human designers and minders back on Earth, able to go where no human could tread, through radiation belts and galactic silence, to see what human vision could not even imagine until the holy pixels came beaming down from orbit.
In one of them, space has become an arena where humans pursue their destiny. And the elements of the universe take their meaning from their relation to people: Mars is a theater, a science-fiction one; the Moon is a way station, or an observatory. We own the universe, we mine it, settle it, play in it, build great floating edifices between the stars.
In the other, humankind is not present at all, except as some possibility eons in the future, a consequence of primordial processes virtually biblical in dimension. The universe owns us; we emerge inevitably or by luck from the chipping of DNA by cosmic rays, chemical currents in space, the bubbling of volcanic mud.
Captain McCandless's test flight came at an almost giddy moment in the history of the shuttle program. The Challenger and Columbia disasters were in the future. More and more people were flying in space and flying in a style to which they were not accustomed.
Astronauts loved the shuttle, and if you have ever spent time in a museum examining the cramped capsules that took humans to the Moon, it's not hard to see why. They had toilets and showers and and hot food and the dignity of actually flying back to Earth, not being dropped like a sack of potatoes.
In the picture, Captain McCandless is above the Earth, sunlit in his white suit, tiny and fragile but triumphant all the same. Flying was fun.
Since then, most of the thrills in space have come from robots like the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe that is mapping the remnants of the Big Bang, the rovers on Mars and of course Hubble, our clear-eyed sentry on creation.
President Bush has vowed to change that course. ''Human beings are headed into the cosmos,'' he said last month, spinning visions of Moon bases and Mars explorers.
At one extreme, the Bushian vision of space is the universe as a thing to be exploited, as property. But another branch on this tree leads to the concept of stewardship, to a role of gods, as Stewart Brand put it in the Whole Earth Catalog long long ago, in charge of Spaceship Earth. In many ways this is no less arrogant than the idea of subdividing Mars before we have ever been there.
Surely it is folly to pretend that humans are in charge of their own evolution, let alone the rest of the universe. The asteroid or the killer virus could show up tomorrow. If we venture into the universe under the pretense of being owners, we are likely to get a rude awakening.
Science, of course, is not without its own sense of arrogance. We can figure out the answer; our minds are up to the challenge of understanding existence. Although why that should be so is the ultimate humbling mystery. ''The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible,'' Einstein once said.
The tension between owning the universe and being owned by it is familiar to anyone who ever bought an old house. Whether it is our destiny to be Nietzschean overlords of this house of stars or temporary inhabitants is a mystery. Cosmologists admit they are baffled by the role of life in the cosmos. The universe and its laws, they have concluded, seem to be mysteriously intertwined. Life as We Know It seems to depend on a miraculous and improbable juggling of the numerical values of a few atomic constants.
Is life a lucky fluke? Are there zillions of different universes to choose from? What is life, anyway?
Having raised this issue, I have to say that I have no answer. Are we the lords of creation, or pond scum?
Not knowing is part of the fun, and I submit that it is our fate not to know. Such ambiguity is the source of richness of drama, art, life, perhaps even science. We are doomed -- or privileged -- to find our meaning in questions, facing as clear-eyed as the Hubble the prospect that answers will probably never be forthcoming.
In his book ''The Life of the Cosmos,'' Dr. Lee Smolin, the physicist, lamented the lack of a final unified theory. ''When a child asks, What is the world?'' he wrote, ''we literally have nothing to tell her.''
Get used to it.
Photos: Two images symbolize a nation's attitude toward space and human flights: Capt. Bruce C. McCandless, above, tested a nitrogen-propelled backpack. Below, the Hubble Telescope detected the Pillars of Creation. (Photographs by Associated Press/NASA)