Everything's looking up for a change

The Miami Herald ^ | 1/17/04 | ANA VECIANA-SUAREZ

[harpu]

There's plenty happening right in this world -- Iraqi bombings, Afghan troubles, Mexican summits, Iowa caucuses -- but far from here, up in the sky, mystery beckons. A piece of us has landed on Mars and is sending back mesmerizing postcards. Imagine that: wish you were here messages from the Red Planet.

Despite little time and too much work, I find myself gazing up, up, up, away from my desk, away from my computer monitor, elated by curiosity. Since NASA's Spirit rover touched down on a brick-red crater, the evening news has been filled with the details of its attempted comings and goings. Newscasters have dubbed the 4-foot robotic wizard our newest action hero, and groupies like me can't get enough of it.

The NASA website has received so many hits that the agency believes this will be the biggest online event ever for the U.S. government. In Google's ranking of search queries that increased the most these past weeks, NASA has topped the charts, even beating out pop tart Britney's brief interlude into marriage.

Mars has long loomed large in our culture. I, for one, grew up reading the legendary Ray Bradbury, he of The Martian Chronicles, and watching My Favorite Martian on an old black and white TV set whose rabbit ears did little to improve the picture. Back then kids wanted to grow up to be astronauts and presidents, wear space suits and govern the world. Now . . . now . . .

Hollywood, too, has had an ongoing love/fear affair with our sister planet. Think The War of the Worlds and Total Recall, as well as the more interplanetary fare of Lost in Space and Star Trek. Space was, yes, that last great frontier. But it has always been something much more, too.

For those of us who remember that summer of 1969, when Neil Armstrong took man's first steps on the moon, when turbulence on Earth seemed to fuel hope in the heavens, space exploration was all about possibility and promise. Vietnam raged, race riots exploded and assassinations shocked, but out there somewhere Eden awaited, never farther than our own imagination.

Today, our interest in Spirit -- how aptly named, no? -- is simply an extension of those youthful aspirations. Today, instead of fretting over yellow and orange codes, it's nice to worry about Martians for a change. Spirit, and its companion rover Opportunity, couldn't have come at a better time, particularly as the first anniversary of the Columbia accident fast approaches.

No wonder President Bush has used this opportunity to propose a space exploration program considered the most ambitious since President Kennedy's. And that was more than 40 years ago. The Bush plan calls for, among other things, a base on the moon and, eventually, a man on Mars.

As plan details emerged, however, critics worried that spending hundreds of billions of dollars chasing lunar rocks and Martian minerals was wrongheaded. Scarce resources, they argued, could be used in better ways right here on our planet. I must say, the cynic in me, the pragmatic bean-counter I've become as an adult, agrees.

Where are we going to come up with all this money? What about ballooning deficits? The recent tax cuts? The bijillions we're already spending in a war against terrorism that has yet to land bin Laden?

But the young, hopeful person, the one who gazed at the stars and stayed up all night on that long ago July, thinks about how every great culture before us explored beyond its boundaries. How history has taught us that great discoveries have come at great financial and human costs. How vision takes time to prove its purpose.

And I look up, up, up into the heavens and, for the briefest of moments, marvel at what we can't see, at everything we don't know.