At the dawn of NASA’s voyage into space, one could glimpse the origin of a fascinating debate that still rages today: Is it more efficient for humans or machines to venture forth into the cosmos?
American human space exploration began with NASA’s Project Mercury, which made six manned flights from 1961 to 1963. When, on April 9, 1959, the first NASA Administrator T. Keith Glennan introduced the seven men chosen to be the first human voyagers into the uncharted oceans of space, they were to be called “astronauts,” just as the pioneers of ballooning had been called “Argonauts.”
There was no formal job description for the newly-minted astronauts unveiled at that Washington press conference because nobody working in research and development expected humans to have a role.
Even though the technology of the day was relatively primitive, astronauts were initially regarded as a “backup to automatic system modes.” Re-entry of the astronauts in the bell-shaped Mercury capsule was calculated by a computing center on the ground, with retrofire times and firing attitude transmitted to the spacecraft.
[Click here for a featured presentation on NASA’s 60th anniversary]
Their Soviet rivals also had engineers running their program and designed highly automated spacecraft. Chief Designer Sergei Korolev referred to Soviet cosmonauts as his “rabbits.” Meanwhile, in America, fellow test pilots sneered that peers who had been selected to be astronauts to ride in Mercury were little more than “Spam-in-a-can.”
The controversy reflected a divide between the first astronauts, who were military test pilots who wanted complete control over the spacecraft, and the engineers, who believed that automatic controls could protect this fragile payload — a human being — more effectively than the astronaut himself.
“Objections to the pilot range from the engineer, who semi-seriously notes that all problems of Mercury would be tremendously simplified if we didn’t have to worry about the bloody astronaut, to the military man who wonders whether a college-trained chimpanzee or the village idiot might not do as well in space as an experienced test pilot,” Astronaut Deke Slayton, one of the Mercury 7, told the Society of Experimental Pilots.
And, indeed, humans proved all too fallible. Scott Carpenter, the Mercury astronaut who was the second man to orbit the Earth, had more control over his spacecraft than his predecessor John Glenn. But Carpenter’s needlessly high expenditure of altitude control fuel resulted in re-entry taking place well off-course. After his first orbit, the capsule gave Carpenter a low fuel warning light. He promptly covered it with a piece of tape so that he would not be distracted. Infuriated, Flight Director Chris Kraft would sideline Carpenter in future missions.
Even so, while the Mercury spacecraft were designed to complete a limited preprogrammed mission automatically, manual controls were also provided from the very beginning to ensure that astronauts could finish the mission if there were a malfunction. After Project Mercury ended, and despite his bad experience with Carpenter, Kraft said it had shifted thinking from a focus on pure automation to including the astronaut. “Primary success of the mission depended on man backing up automatic equipment that could fail,” he said.
Unlike “Spam-in-a-can,” astronauts also proved to be great for public relations, as noted in the official history of Mercury in a reference to NASA’s public affairs officer and “voice of the astronauts,” John “Shorty” Powers. “People, or at least reporters, were more interested in people than machines, so they allowed ‘Shorty’ Powers to skew publicity toward machine-rating the men rather than man-rating the machines.”
Unlike the Soviet Union, which recruited relatively junior pilots to be cosmonauts and kept their identities secret, the U.S. astronauts were highly experienced, competitive test pilots who were given the full showbiz treatment. NASA’s Chief Historian Bill Barry describes how “we introduced them to the public as heroes before they had ever flown. They had a lot more skill and opportunity to influence things, and U.S. spacecraft design quickly began to include a more active role for the astronaut. I think it has less to do with debates about reliability of automated systems, and much more to do with astronaut self-identity and their ability to wield influence effectively.”
In other words, the origins of the space race with Mercury suggest that the dichotomy of humans versus machines is probably a false one. The two have always been complementary.
That does not mean the debate is over, however. At one recent discussion held in the Science Museum, London, by the Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific academy, U.K. Astronomer Royal, Lord Rees, highlighted the colossal amounts that can be spent on putting humans in space, not least the $150 billion spent on the International Space Station, when machines offer a much cheaper alternative.
He questions President Trump’s new emphasis on human exploration, since robots are making huge strides and can do most things a human can do, and without putting a life at risk. Rees can envision flights conducted by advanced robots with near-human capabilities and robot fabricators that can build vast space structures. “The gap between humans and robots is closing,” he said.
Astrophysicist Chris Lintott of the University of Oxford added that the grandest manned space missions, for instance to put a human on Mars, have been absorbing vast amounts of funding for years. Rather than chase this receding horizon of expectations about Mars colonies, why not put the money into a submarine mission to the methane seas of Titan, or one to drill under the ice of Europa, or design balloons to waft around the atmosphere of Venus?
Today’s robots can be just as inspirational as human spaceflight, according to professor Monica Grady from the Open University, who became a news sensation in the U.K. after being filmed jumping for joy when her instrument aboard a probe safely landed on a comet hurtling through space. “You can’t tell me that was not inspiring and emotional,” she said. “Robots can take our dreams and ideas with them.”
Sure, the hundreds of billions of dollars that a manned Mars mission would cost would be more efficiently spent on robots, but if Mercury, and of course Apollo, taught NASA anything at all it is that it must provide entertaining visuals and stories with compelling human characters. Grady added, like other passionate proponents, that humanity has a powerful instinct to explore and to expand its horizons and reminded us that, quoting Arthur C. Clarke, “when an organism ceases to explore, it starts to die.”
However, there is a limit to how much autonomy you can give a robot and how easy they are to control from afar. Commands sent to a Mars rover take four to 24 minutes to arrive, depending on the relative position of Mars in its orbit.
Helen Sharman, the U.K.’s first astronaut, said humans remain fast and flexible in comparison. Astronauts can make quick decisions in response to changing conditions or new discoveries, rather than waiting for time-delayed instructions from Earth. For example, after a few days on the moon’s surface, the Apollo astronauts produced a tremendous scientific legacy, not least a trove of moon rocks that are still generating papers in scientific journals.
What can be done by a robot in a Martian day could be done by a human in a matter of minutes, she added. The Apollo 17 astronauts covered more than 22 miles in three days, a distance that has taken the Mars Opportunity rover eight years to match. Indeed, she argued that they could even be less costly overall given that, based on the Mars experience, humans are 1,500 times more efficient.
When I asked the audience of the Royal Society event to vote on whether they saw the future of humanity in space, it was an overwhelming yes, with only around 10 percent seeing it as an expensive distraction from problems down here on Earth. But in the coming years, the boundaries between man and machine are likely to become increasingly blurred.
Remotely operated robots on the surface of another planet would have greater strength, endurance and precision than human explorers. One prominent test to show the possibilities of human-robotic missions to the moon, Mars and beyond came in April 2016 when British astronaut Tim Peake controlled a rover named Bridget from the International Space Station as it trundled around the “Mars Yard” of Airbus Defense and Space in Stevenage, England.
At the University of Colorado, Boulder, preparations are underway for telerobotics in NASA’s lunar orbital outpost — the Gateway — so that science can be done more easily on the lunar surface by robots. The project, if successful, could lead to similar missions to explore other planets in the solar system. Astronauts could camp out on Mars’ moons Phobos and Deimos and direct remote-controlled robots to travel long distances over the planet’s surface, set up scientific instruments, conduct deep drilling, and collect samples for analysis.
Consider an even more extreme possibility. Around the dawn of NASA some six decades ago, Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline conceived of human beings who had been enhanced to survive in extra-terrestrial environments and coined the term “cyborg” to sum up a more intimate relationship between human and machine.
When humans begin to live on Mars, or on a spacecraft, the next phase will be what Lord Rees calls a “posthuman future,” when a combination of gene editing and cyborg technology can hone humans for life in space. “Within a few centuries, we would have developed into almost a new species, which will spread beyond the Earth and eventually to the stars.” Whether that species will be organic, or machine, we’ll have to just wait and see.
Roger Highfield is a science author, a director of the Science Museum in London, and a visiting professor at the University of Oxford and University College London.
