http://planetary.org/solarsailblog/index_05.html

Jun 22, 2005 | 19:12 PDT | Jun 23 02:12 UTC

Scattering to the winds

With failure of Cosmos 1 virtually certain, the team members that have been staffing Project Operations Pasadena have elected to return to their homes. Thanks to the Internet, if our spacecraft miraculously reappears, each of us will still be able to keep watch over the mission from our individual remote locations. Greg returns to Berkeley, Jim and Brent to Utah, and Paul to his usual life at the Jet Propulsion Lab, just up the valley from Pasadena. Lou will be returning from Moscow in a couple of days. I took off for home a couple of hours ago in order to begin to catch up on sleep.

The team may be scattering, but it's not over. The search for the spacecraft continues. The search continues in the present, as several observatories have offered to try to look for a signal from the spacecraft. (If you, too, have a spare observatory, feel free to search at a frequency of 401.5275 Hz, but I am afraid that I can't offer any advice on where to point your antenna.) The search also continues into the past, as Strategic Command is working through its "unknown objects bucket" (as Jim called it this morning) to find where the spacecraft and its launch vehicle ended up.

At the Society, we're already talking about what to do next. A few hours ago, Bill Nye -- the Science Guy, and also the Vice-President of The Planetary Society -- asked all of the staff to gather together in the living room of the 100-year-old house in which we work. He opened and poured champagne for all of us, and we raised several toasts. We toasted Cosmos 1, first of all; it was an audacious dream, that we arrogantly compared to the flight of the Wright Brothers. We toasted Lou Friedman in absentia, for whom it must have been a pretty rough week. We toasted the staff and volunteers of the Society, for all the work it's taken to bring Cosmos 1 to the world. We toasted Ann Druyan, the chief sponsor of Cosmos 1, for making it possible, and for being the mission's spiritual leader. We toasted our members, for their devotion to our cause and their support. Finally, we toasted: Cosmos 2? Many of our members are telling us they're ready to try again. We can't say whether or not we'll try again with this mission until we find out what really happened. But we'll certainly stay in the business, and try more audacious things, like the Solar Sail, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Mars airplanes, or Venus balloons we've advocated in the past.

In the meantime, we'll go back to our ordinary everyday work. My ordinary everyday work has me talking to scientists and engineers around the world about their work on active space missions, like Cassini-Huygens; answering space questions on our weekly radio show; running contests like the Deep Impact Great Comet Crater Contest; and generally sticking my nose into whatever's going on in space exploration and relaying whatever I learn to any member of the public who has the patience to read what I write. I have a cool job.

Jun 22, 2005 | 13:22 PDT | 20:22 UTC

Reaction, the day after

So it's looking more and more certain that our space mission may be a failure. As with many failed missions before us, it was the launch that got us. This is frustrating, of course, because if we did fail, we failed before we ever got to try the new technology we were attempting to pioneer. Where would that leave The Planetary Society, its employees, volunteers, friends, and members?

For one thing, we've just had an object lesson in how hard space exploration can be. That's the nature of the business. For me, in my extremely short tenure as a space science geek (which began when I entered Brown University as a grad student in 1998), I've been blessed; I've never been closely associated with a failed mission. I've seen success after success. But that's not really representative. Failures happen in space exploration; if you can't accept that you have to stay away from it. Furthermore, as Bruce Murray told us this morning, if you are not taking risks as you explore space, you are not doing the right thing. By its very nature, pushing frontiers generates risk.

What that leaves us with is the fact that we still built the world's first solar sail spacecraft, and we attempted to launch it. That in itself is an achievement, though of course we wanted to achieve more. And when I say "we" here I'm not talking just about the Cosmos 1 project team. I'm talking about everybody who made this mission attempt possible. That includes our sponsors and the thousands of Planetary Society members who gave what they could to support us.

All day long yesterday the email from our members kept pouring in. Not only were the messages uniformly positive, wishing us luck, but in fact they became more and more positive as the day went on. (I am trying to respond to your messages, but it may take me and the other people here at the Society a while to catch up with all the mail.) I'm proud and happy to have been able to help make our members and well-wishers a part of this space exploration experience.

You know what that means? Maybe our spacecraft failed, but even so, the mission didn't, as far as I'm concerned. I feel like we really did something here. All day yesterday I was riding on an adrenaline high. When I went to bed last night I thought I was going to be in a pretty low place when I got up this morning. But I actually still feel pretty good, because of the incredible amount of support that we have received. Even the members of the media who were here, watching and waiting for news, are still rooting for us, still expressing hope that our spacecraft is still out there. The Planetary Society's mission is, in part, to inspire the public, and it seems we may have done that through the dramatic developments of yesterday's launch. I'm proud of that. I hope we get a chance to do it again.