DATE: Friday, July 11, 1997                 TAG: 9707110034

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B9   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion 

SOURCE: Keith Monroe 

                                            LENGTH:   82 lines

RED PLANET ROVER POINTS TO AN UNMANNED FUTURE FOR NASA

The giddy scientists at NASA this week were a far cry from the mission-control freaks of my youth. Then, the style was terse. It was bad form to show emotion even in the direst life-or-death cases. Emotion was Walter Cronkite's job.

Partly, I think, it's the difference between jingoism and gee whiz. I grew up with the space program and remember standing in suburban front yards at twilight trying to glimpse the early satellites go by - Echo and Telstar. The mood was an odd mixture of wonder and worry, of cool and Cold War.

Sputnik made science suddenly more important than baseball, and anybody with an ounce of aptitude was liable to be drafted into extra innings of physics and math. After all, we were in a fight for our lives, and it might just end up cosmonauts vs. astronauts. With crew-cut engineers in white shirts, narrow ties and pocket protectors the deciding factor.

By the time men actually walked on the moon, the space race had turned into a rout, of course. And the military air had relaxed noticeably. Alan Shepherd was hitting sand wedge shots on the lunar surface. It was hard to decide which was worse. The grim-faced Cold War demeanor that often drained the enterprise of joy. Or the latter- day clowning that tended to trivialize the space program.

By the time the shuttle was flying, it was no longer clear what we were doing up there besides spending colossal sums of money. The end of the Cold War made the space program look largely superfluous. And teaming up with the old enemy to fly missions in a Zero-G mobile home like Mir appears to be taking risks for no reward, more or less out of habit. Rather like the flying Wallendas. Or maybe the motto of Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff lives on: No Buck Rogers, no bucks.

By the time NASA Administrator Dan Goldin visited the editorial board more than a year ago, the agency was scrambling to justify its continued existence in an era of reduced threats and belt-tightening. Goldin said then that the solution was getting back to science, doing more with less, combining useful Earth-focused missions with voyages into our near neighborhood on the cheap. He is more than vindicated by Mars Pathfinder.

I admit I found the early shots of Pathfinder mission control annoying. Here was a roomful of West Coast propeller heads giving one another high fives and gushing about how stoked they were that their toys had actually worked.

As a taxpayer, two thoughts ran through my mind: (1) For $200 million they'd better work and (2) Are we really spending all that money so that post-doctoral fellows in igneous rock can have the thrill of a lifetime? It would be a lot cheaper to buy them a pass to Disneyworld and their very own load of gravel.

But the scientists calmed down, and so have I. They've turned out to be an impressive bunch. Loose, bright, amiable, articulate and inventive. Here are people passionate about their work, thrilled to be learning more about Mars and getting a chance to perfect the gizmos they've invented. Not in order to beat an enemy, win a race or even enrich themselves, but because learning and tinkering are what they do.

It's easy to pooh-pooh the fruits of the space program (Teflon?), but we live in a technical age. Challenges that push the envelope also push the technology. Computers got a jump start from NASA, and using human wetware to solve technical problems is the essential post-modern talent. Here, for a dollar per citizen, we got a chance to watch the process in real time.

How do you crash a space probe without wrecking it? Air bags. How do you explore a planet without really being there? A six-wheeled, solar-powered rover guided by stereoscopic cameras. What can you make of swirls in sand and piles of rock? A record of ancient floods of biblical proportions. How do you re-establish communications with a Mars vehicle that falls silent? Same way as on Earth - blame your modem and reboot.

Men and women working in teams to solve vexing technical problems are also about as useful role models as you could have beaming into America's classrooms. Out of dozens of TV channels, the one carrying Pathfinder may have been the only one this week where somebody was thinking instead of shooting, where the knowledge wasn't carnal.

I figure I got my dollar's worth. My only qualm is the enthusiasm now being expressed for putting a man on Mars someday soon. It's the old taste for excess reasserting itself just when ``small is beautiful'' has triumphed.

If you ask me, unmanned exploration has proved itself unequivocally. And arguments for humans in space ought to get correspondingly harder. After all, Mars turns out to be a place where the weather report is: Today's high, 10 degrees. Today's low, minus 174. It's a place where the entire surface of the planet is rusting. It is no place for humans. It is a perfect place for the gizmos humans are so skilled at contriving. As long as NASA sticks to small, clever and cheap, long may it contrive.

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