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Many U.S. scientists believe that there is too much emphasis on getting a man into space at the earliest possible moment. The huge expenditures now being poured into Mercury and Saturn could, they argue, be better used for the near future on instrumented vehicles. Says Iowa's Van Allen: "It is still much more effective to build instruments to make scientific observations than it is to support and maintain a man comfortably and helpfully in a spacecraft."
But even the dissidents agree that the day is not too far off when man will have a valid function in space. As instrumented spacecraft get more and more sophisticated, it becomes more and more difficult to transmit, record, digest and interpret their food of raw data. The best solution at present is to put small computers in the spacecraft. One kind, called a "Tele-bit," translates the data from the instruments into figures that are sufficiently simple to send over the transmitter and can go directly into a big ground computer. But when spacecraft begin to work at such distances as Mars, even this sort of wizardry becomes cumbersome. Frorn as far away as Mars, it requires a giant transmitter to send back one yes or no answer per second to a question. Explains Van Allen: "Instead of sending a yes answer in a second, you may have to stretch it out over a minute if the distance and noise level are great enough. It's almost like talking in a noisy room. If you want to make yourself heard, you're much better off trying to speak slowly than rapidly."
Thus, if an instrument-packed spacecraft were to land softly on Mars to observe Martian weather, soil, vegetation and earth tremors, the information that it would gather might be bottlenecked forever by its slow-acting transmitter. Then, says Van Allen, will be the time "when it will be more efficient to send up a man or a party of men to make observations, digest them and transmit back what is roughly equivalent to a monograph on the subject." Only half facetiously. Van Allen has one more idea about the advan tages of men over instruments in space: "There are many more subtle things that a man could report, such as 'Gee whiz, I have a terrible headache' or 'I have just vomited all over the cabin.' "
Since the first rockets poked into space, humans have come to realize what a small place they live in. The earth's atmosphere is an insignificant film, thinner in proportion than the skin of an apple, but it is opaque to most kinds of information-bearing radiation, so most of the realities of the universe remain mysteries to man. Space science gives humans a chance to come out from under the atmosphere to see what the universe is really like.
And where will this inquiry lead? Space scientists consider the question rather ridiculous. No one, they say, could have foreseen what would happen when 16th century astronomers looked out at the solar system and decided that the sun does not revolve around the earth. But out of that bold assault on old and in correct ideas grew the modern science that has enabled man to outgrow his planet. In the past three years, man's knowledge of his universe has increased more than in the centuries between Galileo and Sputnik I. What tomorrow may hold overwhelms the imagination.