Anthonares

Last night, PBS aired a two-part series on NOVA about the search for the Northwest Passage and two of the most famous Arctic explorers, John Franklin and Roald Amundsen. As I watched I realized something that helped to put much of the discussion about Martian exploration into perspective: Arctic and Antarctic explorers would spend up to several years at a time on any given expedition.

These weren’t years spent in the relative shirt-sleeves comfort of a pressurized, climate-controlled Mars base either. They were fitful, short summers bracketed by horrifically cold and dangerous winters. Supplies were often quite limited, and scurvy and tuberculosis were constant threats. There were no radios (though the final Shackleton expeditions did carry radios for part of the journey), and absolutely no communications with home. Support teams were non existent, resupply missions were impossible, rescue was unlikely, and the psychological conditions of the journey were simply brutal. In the words of Shackleton in an advertisement in the Times of London in 1901 (historically disputed, btw):

Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages. Bitter cold. Long months of complete darkness. Constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.

Why, then, did these men choose to go? I’m not talking about Franklin, Amundsen, Scott, or Shackleton. I mean the men whose names have not come down to us, the hundreds or even thousands of men upon whose backs the poles of this earth were explored. I think the answer to this question is the reason why space exploration is inevitable. These men were along in part for the money, and in part for the fame, but mostly because the urge to explore is embedded so deep in all of us that the dark specter of death was no deterrent. Let me make my point all the more clear.

Some Notable Expeditions

There are literally dozens of fantastic Arctic and Antarctic explorations whose collected tales could occupy a literary historian for a lifetime. See, for instance, Wikipedia’s list of Arctic explorers, or the bios of John Ross, Ernest Shackleton, Edward Wilson, Robert Falcon Scott, Roald Amundsen, and John Franklin. Here is a short list of some of my favorite tales of polar exploration. What is remarkable about these expeditions is that even those that ended in horrible catastrophic failure remain inspiring stories about the perseverance and strength of mankind.

1829-1832: An expedition of the British Admiralty in search of the Northwest Passage led by John Ross was stranded for four years when their steamship become stuck in the ice. They spent their time exploring and mapping the area with the local Inuit peoples. They finally escaped by abandoning their ship and walking to another ship abandoned by a different expedition years before. The ice broke up and they were eventually rescued.

1845-1851?: John Franklin led his final expedition in search of the Northwest Passage equipped with the finest technology the age had to offer. Their ships were iron-lined and reinforced, they had canned food (a recent invention), many years worth of lemon juice (to fend off scurvy), and all manner of Victorian-era comforts. His two ships, the HMS Erebus and Terror, and their 128 crew became ensnared in ice in 1846 and never broke free due to unseasonably cold summers. Unfortunately the crew suffered physical and psychological disease brought on by lead poising from the solder on the cans, along with scurvy resulting from the gradual breakdown of vitamin C in the lemon juice. Unable to travel except by sea, part the crew struggled mightily to walk to freedom. By then scurvy was causing their muscles to literally bleed, making each step an exercise in agony. There is good evidence that some of the men resorted to cannibalism. Inuits spotted a group of four men as late as 1851 six years after setting out. Unfortunately, none of the 18 rescue missions sent to find the Franklin expedition found these men alive, but did find that Franklin himself had perished in 1848.

1903-1906: The Northwest Passage is found, sort of. Roald Amundsen led a relatively tiny ship with a crew of six, following in the path John Franklin had perished on half a century before. Amundsen took a vital turn that Franklin could not have followed due to the deeper drafts of his ships, and this probably meant the difference for Amundsen and his crew. They spent two winters learning from the local Inuits, adopting their dress and means of survival. In 1905 they finished the Northwest Passage, though they would spend another whole winter in the Arctic wilderness. Nevertheless, Amundsen traveled 500 miles, each way, to Nome Alaska to send a telegraph about his success during that final winter.

1910-1912: The Terra Nova expedition, led by Scott and accompanied by four other men, finally reached the South pole on January 17, 1912. This was exactly 35 days after Roald Amundsen accomplished the same feat with a crew of 8. Scott had followed a route pioneered by Shackleton years earlier, while Amundsen found an entirely new route to the Pole. It seems that Amundsen’s skills gained on his successful Northwest Passage journey several years earlier may have helped him and his entire crew return safely. Scott’s crew did not. All five men perished in some of the coldest conditions ever observed in Antarctica. The Google Earth forums have this placemark detailing both missions (it doesn’t seem to work splendidly on the Mac version of Google Earth, but it worked great on the PC one)

1914-1916: Shackleton’s Endurance trans-Antarctic journey is perhaps the most famous of all polar expeditions. Their ship, the Endurance, became trapped in pack ice and was crushed. The crew watched as their ship slowly sank over the next month. From their they traveled over the Weddell Sea pack on sledges and reached Elephant Island. There, most of the crew stayed while Shackleton and a select few traveled on a rebuilt boat, the James Caird on one of the most heroic missions of rescue ever written. Shackleton wrote his tale in the novel South, thankfully available for free over at Project Gutenberg. A Google Earth forum user created a wonderful documentary placemark from the photos and details in this book. It is a fantastic example of the power of GE. As soon as I get a chance to read South I will definitely have this placemark close at hand.

Lessons for Space Exploration

There are undoubtedly dozens of important lessons to be drawn from the age of Polar Exploration to apply to the coming age of Space Exploration. A primary lesson is that utilizing in-situ resources, or “living off the land,” seems to have guaranteed the success of Amundsen where so many others failed. Robert Zubrin applied this concept to Martian exploration by realizing that manufacturing rocket fuel from the Martian atmosphere would not only make a manned mission cheaper, but more likely to succeed.

Second, but perhaps more important, is that humans are more than capable of surviving and staying sane on several year long missions in ridiculous conditions and despite incredible hardship. These folks endured things that would make even the strong people quail in fear. Yet they survived. These stories and exploits provide us with a high mark against which all other human endeavours appear down right easy.

Third, and what I consider to be most important, is that the risk averse society that we live in today is a perverse historical accident. During the Age of Polar Exploration, men (and women) risked their lives in the name of exploration and their nations rewarded them for it. Failures, even high profile ones, simply energized those remaining and provided lessons for everyone to learn from. There are thousands of would-be explorers ready to give their lives for their dreams; is it up to remainder of our comfort-mad society to make their choices for them?

Arguing that the cost of space exploration demands that risk be examined differently is something I find specious as well. After all, money spent on the space program is not truly wasteful spending any more than is defense spending. The equipment that is launched, and the ground support needed for operations, provides high-paying high-skill jobs to workers. In fact, I’m sure the economics of spending money on space exploration are a good-deal better than defense spending considering the enormous economic potential of opening space.

Gone are the days of the British Admiralty and their farsighted mission of exploration in the name of increased economic and naval power. Whether or not government space programs are capable of producing true explorers is an open question as well. If the voices of leather-chair newspaper editors continues to dominate the public discussion of space exploration, then government-financed explorers may never leave the pad. So perhaps like many of the Hudson Bay Company’s explorers during the 17th-19th centuries, tomorrow’s space explorers will be planting flags in the name of their sponsors, rather than of their sovereign nations.