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The nature of space exploration is necessarily profoundly different from that of Lindbergh's solitary flight. It costs billions of dollars, as against the $15,000 that Lindbergh spent. Astronauts, however highly trained, are nonetheless essentially cargo as they are flung out of gravity on a rocket's nib. The astronaut, says Sir George Greenfield, a literary agent who has specialized in accounts of explorations, "is more like a bus driver than an adventurer." The Viking spacecraft investigating Mars are made of thinking metal. The only humans aboard the Pioneer 10 spacecraft are the little sketches of a man and a woman that are meant to show extraterrestrial creatures what we look like. Still, says Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on ground other than that of earth, "we are dealing with the spirit of mankind, searching on into infinity."
There are many other frontiers. Exploration of the ocean depths may become a new counterpart of the space program. Scientists are engaged in-a fascinating search into the structure of atomic particles. "This is a new world of muons, of quarks, and we shall have to invent a new language to cope with it," says M.I.T. Physicist Victor Weisskopf. Others are exploring DNA, the stuff of life itself.
Lindbergh's feat was technologically progressive; its trajectory pointed into the future. Much of today's adventuring is essentially regressive — men employing ever more primitive modes of transportation. Thor Heyerdahl's crew sailed in the papyrus rafts called Ra I and II to show that ancient Egyptians might have discovered America. His 1947 voyage aboard the Kon Tiki was similarly primitive.
In the summer of 1975, William F. Buckley Jr. made an Atlantic crossing — chronicled in his book Airborne — aboard his 60-ft. cutter Cyrano. Says Buckley: "All adventure is now reactionary." With loran, radar, autopilot and vintage wines, Buckley was not exactly blown across the ocean on a naked raft. Even the most venturesome solitary sailors today — men like Sir Francis Chichester, who circumnavigated the globe in 1966-67 in his 53-ft. boat Gipsy Moth IV — have the advantage of sophisticated hull and sail design. Says Tristan Jones, a small, bearded Welsh sailor who has circumnavigated the globe three times, crossed the Atlantic 18 times under sail, nine times alone: "The boats I sail wouldn't have existed before now. They are fitted with the best technology of our time, from stainless steel to freeze-dried food."