To Mars and Back Again: Planetfest '21 - Behind the Scenes of Space TV

"I'm a doctor, not a nightlight."

Robert Picardo, Voyager audition

Day Two of Planetfest '21 starts later, and I only attended two of the sessions being offered, although they turned out to be two of the most interesting talks from the two-day event.

A Conversation: Behind the Scenes of Space TV is exactly what the title says it is: a wide-ranging and entertaining conversation between longtime Planetary Society supporter and member Robert Picardo, who played the Doctor* on Star Trek: Voyager for seven seasons, and Hugo-award winning writer, director and producer Brannon Braga, who began his career as an intern on Star Trek: The Next Generation and eventually became one of the show's co-producers. He continued producing and writing for Star Trek: Voyager and Enterprise, and co-wrote the scripts for Star Trek: Generations and Star Trek: First Contact.

The chat begins with the degree to which Star Trek has found its inspiration in science. Braga's goal as a writer was to avoid a formulaic approach to writing for Star Trek, leading him into an ongoing search for high concept science fiction ideas and themes for the scripts.

He cites the Tuvix episode from Voyager, in which the characters of Tuvok the Vulcan science officer and Neelix the Talaxian are fused in a transporter accident, and how it "started as a ludicrous concept and became something quite profound, and quite controversial."

Braga views Voyager as almost being an anthology show with an ongoing cast of characters: "Each story had its own rhythm - some stories were told backward, some were told in circles." He prefers this approach, and likes the idea of "one story well told" - for example, the journey of the Doctor's character throughout the seven seasons of Voyager.**

An audience member raises the question of Star Trek's future being "an unrealistic utopian dream", but both Picardo and Braga disagree with this characterization.

Braga acknowledges that the show never looks at how its vision of the future was achieved, but doesn't consider Star Trek to be utopian. "But it does depict a future without war, crime or starvation or any of the other earthbound issues that we deal with. I hope that we can vanquish those problems and get to a future where diversity is a strength, not a divisive issue."

Picardo agrees, describing Star Trek as "a positive future", which Braga echoes by calling it, "Optimistic! It’s a future that we can achieve!", and points out that there was an essential optimism to the program across all the versions of the franchise.

That hopeful view of the future may have played a part in the degree to which Star Trek has inspired people to become scientists - as with the Star Trek convention attendee who thanked Braga for her childhood, and then explained how she had been inspired by Star Trek to become a biologist, particularly by Voyager - "that was her Star Trek".

Picardo adds that, "I've had the same experience. A number of people who have gone into medicine over the years have told me that they were inspired by my character."  

Picardo was invited to join the Planetary Society in the late 90s after attending an event celebrating Ray Bradbury's 70th birthday, at which a number of actors did readings from Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. Picardo was asked to become an advisor, and was asked to spearhead some of their educational challenges for young people. He became involved in the innovative Red Rover project, where schools exchanged rovers that they had constructed out of Lego™, which would then explore the other school's version of Mars and vice versa.

He also helped to promote NASA's 1999 Mars Millennium program, a challenge for students to create a 2030 Martian village for one hundred inhabitants, and managed to convince Rick Berman, Voyager's Executive Producer,  to allow him to do a PSA from the Voyager set. Years later, he received a thank-you letter through the Planetary Society from a PhD. at JPL who had originally become interested in space exploration because of that announcement and her subsequent work on the project, finally ending up working on the Curiousity mission. "And that makes me as proud of my relationship with Star Trek as anything else."

An audience member follows with a question as whether either of the speakers had been fans of space and science fiction before their involvement with Star Trek. 

Braga was already a science fiction reader more than a Star Trek person before he started working on Star Trek, and has been a huge science fiction reader his entire life. "I love science fiction!" 

Picardo characterizes himself as having read "quite a bit" of science fiction as a young man, but wasn't a Star Trek fan originally.  He was first asked about being a Star Trek fan before his work on Voyager at a Star Trek convention, and after a "deer in the headlights" moment, decided that "If I lie now, I'll have to lie forever."

Braga interjects, "Star Trek fans were nerds. We were the horror people, they thought we were nerds. Dungeons & Dragons players thought we were both nerds, they were the REAL nerds.

"But the thing is, once you work on Star Trek, you become a fan for life. It's in your DNA forever. It really changes you."

Picardo agrees, and mentions watching Lost in Space and having a crush on Angela Cartwright: "Star Trek, I guess the women seemed too old for me at 14.  But I missed all of Star Trek the first time around. I remember ridiculing friends of mine from Yale who'd sit down and watch Star Trek reruns in the afternoon - they got the last laugh on me."

After being cast in Voyager, Picardo was sent a package of ten Next Generation episodes to watch . "I was stunned by the quality of the storytelling, the variety in the stories, and I got really jazzed to start the job, and I felt very lucky to get it.

"The longer you work on it from the inside and you meet the people that love it, that it's influenced their lives, either as great entertainment and high ethical standards, or, it's inspired them to pursue careers in science and technology and engineering, and that's very gratifying."

Braga adds that "Science fiction and science have a symbiotic relationship," mentioning Leo Szilard, who conceived the idea of nuclear chain reaction and the concept of the atomic bomb based on an idea from The World Set Free, a novel by H. G. Wells.

Braga's most famous Star Trek episodes came from his interest in quantum physics, ideas that were new in the 90s and seemed radical at the time, that he used in episodes.  Picardo observes that, "the people that love Star Trek, and are very sciency people themselves, are very complimentary that Star Trek is based in real science and extends it to an incredible degree."

He then cites a comment by Neil deGrasse Tyson, who, when asked if he preferred the science in Star Trek or the science in Star Wars, replied, "Star Wars - what science?"

Braga explains that the shows always had a science consultant, but admits that he would always try to "tell the story first and then fit the science in, could this be plausible? But we were very studious about making sure the science was good."

The session ends with a series of audience questions.  Braga answers a question about science fiction authors by saying that he's "a huge fan of H. G. Wells, who invented time travel stories, invisibility stories, alien invasion stories, the guy invented every science fiction genre.***

"And his books are amazing, and beautifully written." 

Another attendee asks how Voyager has affected their relationship with other people.  Picardo talks about the blessing and the curse of his children being associated with such a distinctive last name, and  about introducing his Star Trek character to his children, and having to explain what acting was and why Voyager couldn't come and pick him up to go to work.  (Interestingly, both of his children have ended up in post production, one in VFX after being mentored by Voyager episode director John Bruno.)

Braga ends the session with a simple statement: "In thinking about it for the question, it just hit me that my three best friends are people I met because of my work on Star Trek."

- Sid

* Not the British one with the blue time travel box, the other Doctor, the emergency hologram one. Ironically, Picardo originally planned a medical career in real life, and attended classes at Yale - acting was just a sideline.

** You could easily make a case that there's no journey for the characters in the original Star Trek, but I think that those characters were never intended to have a journey - their strength comes from their archetypal nature. 

*** I love H. G. Wells as well, but I have to disagree with one thing - to the best of my knowledge, Wells never wrote about robots or androids.

 

To Mars and Back Again: Planetfest '21 - Mars Mind Meld

"The rovers are our proxies - their shadows on Mars are our shadows."

Bethany Ehlmann
Planetary Society president;
Professor of Planetary Science
and Associate Director, Keck Institute
for Space Studies, Caltech

Since its inception in 1980, the Planetary Society has staged ten Planetfests to commemorate significant milestones in space exploration, starting with the Voyager 2 flyby of Saturn in 1981, and then of Neptune in 1989, where Chuck Berry performed Johnny B. Goode in recognition of the song's inclusion on the gold record album attached to both of the Voyager probes.* Subsequent Planetfests have recognized events such as the unsuccessful Mars Polar landing in 1999, the Spirit rover's safe touchdown on Mars in 2004, and Curiousity's in 2012.

The most recent Planetfest, in honour of NASA's Perseverance Mars probe, took place this last weekend via Zoom. (I was a little surprised by the timing, in that if they'd waited another week, we could have been celebrating the probe's arrival on the red planet, but the organizers may well have decided that an unsuccessful landing would have put a damper on the event.)

The two-day celebration of Martian exploration featured an eclectic array of speakers, including an impressive selection of planetary scientists, engineers and NASA representatives; well-known science fiction authors Kim Stanley Robinson and Andy Weir; and Star Trek: Voyager actor and space exploration advocate Robert Picardo in conversation with producer, director and writer Brannon Braga, best known for his work on three television series and two movies in the Star Trek franchise.

This varied group of speakers, united by their shared passion and commitment to both the present and the future of space exploration, covered a wide range of fascinating, informative and insightful topics over the two days of the event.

After an introduction by Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye, Planetary Society president Bethany Ehlmann delivers the keynote speech for the weekend - Mars Mind Meld: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Mars. Her presentation provides a broad overview of Martian exploration, and looks at the questions that probes such as Perseverance will help to answer.

For Ehlmann, the most important question is: what happened to Mars that eliminated water and possibly life? Although there are only a few weeks of the Martian year when the environment allows liquid water to exist, Mars is covered with evidence of water - as Ehlmann points out, "the plumbing of Mars is exposed" - there is visible erosion of the surface by water, clay substrates, formations like those found around geothermal springs on Earth, and so on, all pointing to a time in the past when Mars may well have been more habitable than it is now. 

Provided all goes well on the 18th, Perseverance's extended mission on the surface of Mars will take it up the Midway delta that feeds into the Jezero Crater landing site**, allowing it to explore successive layers of Martian history as it proceeds up out of crater and moves a billion years further back in time.

In addition, the probe is not only an explorer, but a cacher, with the ability to store drilled samples from the various exposed strata for eventual return to Earth. It's hoped that these samples, each about the size of a piece of chalk, will allow scientists on Earth to answer questions about Martian climate, Martian change, and Martian life.  They're playing the long game on the process:  the current strategy for sample return involves a three year wait.

The eventual exploration of Mars by humans will immeasurably accelerate the process of scientific investigation, but until then, the robotic rovers act as proxies in our place - as Ehlmann eloquently puts it, "their shadows are our shadows".

- Sid

* It also included a needle, cartridge, and symbolic instructions on how to play the record - which, at this point in time, a lot of people on Earth would also need.

** I was charmed to see that she had a Post-It™ tab on the Martian globe in her office to indicate the Perseverance landing site.

 

The Lake of the Sun, the Bay of the Dawn.

Rather than true channels in a form familiar to us, we must imagine depressions in the soil that are not very deep, extended in a straight direction for thousands of miles, over a width of 100, 200 kilometers and maybe more. I have already pointed out that, in the absence of rain on Mars, these channels are probably the main mechanism by which the water (and with it organic life) can spread on the dry surface of the planet.

Giovanni Schiaparelli, Life on Mars

The Google home page kindly informed me this morning that today was the birth date of Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli (1835-1910). This 19th-century astronomer's name may not be known to everyone, but generations of science fiction fans owe an enormous debt to Signore Schiaparelli - or, to be more accurate, to the mistranslation of his work.

In 1877, Mars was in a particularly favourable position for observation, and Shiaparelli, at that point director of the Brera Observatory near Milan, took advantage of this opportunity to make detailed observations of the planet's surface. Using these observations and additional data from the next decade, he produced maps of Mars which remained the standard until space probes allowed for more accurate images.

But when Schiaparelli's work was translated into English, the Italian phrase "canali", intended to refer to the channels that he had observed, was translated as "canals" - creations of intelligence rather than environment. The debate regarding life on Mars that was started by this minor alteration was to continue for almost one hundred years, until Mariner 4 sent closeup pictures of Mars back to NASA in 1965.

Regardless of the position of the scientific community, the idea of vast canals spanning a desert planet resonated with the science fiction community. That was the Mars that I first read about when I started reading science fiction, a dying planet inhabited by the descendants of a fallen civilization older than our own, desperately fighting a losing battle against the ever advancing sands. This is the Mars of Planet Stories, the Mars of Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, the Mars of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, the Mars known as Barsoom to its inhabitants in Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter novels.

However, Schiaparelli is more deserving of praise than the common translation error about canals would suggest. As he made his initial observations of the Martian surface, he began to name the various geographic features that he saw, and those names have left Schiaparelli with a lasting heritage.

Just as the broad flat plains of the Moon were commonly referred to as "seas", Schiaparelli used a similar convention for Martian names, giving us The Sea of Sirens, the Bay of the Dawn, and the Lake of the Sun. Other names came from mythology, the Bible, or history. But regardless of its origins, the geography of Mars has a sort of lyrical poetry to it: Tharsis, Chryse, Ophyr, Thyle, Cydonia, Elysium - they almost seem to have been chosen as locations for adventure and fantasy.


Current scientific theory has it that there may be no life at all on Mars, and science fiction authors have sadly and reluctantly moved on from tales of dying civilizations and fallen empires on our sister world. Now science fiction tends to look ahead to life on Mars as it would be lived by colonists from Earth, and, more ambitiously, to the prospect of terraforming Mars. Who knows, if technology can some day match imagination, a future generation of Mars-born humans may be able to stand on the shore of the Bay of the Dawn and see the sun glinting off the waves.

- Sid

P.S. In addition to reminding the world about Schiaparelli's birthday, Google has added a Mars option to Google Earth. (Thereby calling for a new name for the product, if you think about it.)

Have Space Suit Will Travel.

"Not too late. No, suh! I goin' to Mars, yes I am, and I beat the Chinese, too. Even if I hafta make my own spaceship, me."

- Jubal Broussard, Red Thunder

Having just finished reading Red Thunder by John Varley, a guardedly acceptable little read in the home-made spaceship genre, my mind turns to the portrayal in SF of space exploration by individuals. (I describe Red Thunder as "guardedly acceptable" because it was a very light read, and other than the sex* would be an ideal read for a bright twelve-year old. But, to be fair, it's reasonably entertaining, well written and so forth.) 

The plot of Red Thunder is strongly reminiscent of one of those Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney movies, the ones where someone says, "Hey, gang, let's put on a show!", except in this case it's "Hey, gang, let's go to Mars!" Instead of an uncle with a big barn, these plucky teens meet an alcoholic ex-astronaut whose idiot savant cousin has invented a sort of Rube Goldberg power source that will allow them to beat those nasty Chinese to Mars and to save some of the crew from a failed NASA mission. 

Similar (although perhaps more cynical) entries into the do-it-yourself spaceship category can be found in The Daleth Effect by Harry Harrison and The Mouse on the Moon, by Leonard Wibberley, both of which deal with small countries that trump the great world powers by discovering miraculous means of propulsion that they utilize in makeshift spaceships. 

As a sign of changing times, the Danish astronauts rescue stranded Russian astronauts in The Daleth Effect, written in 1970 - apparently the Chinese have replaced the Soviets as the people to beat, if Red Thunder is an accurate barometer. 

In science fiction from the 40's and 50's, the concept of the individually owned spaceship is a commonplace one, with oceangoing vessels providing the analogy. Obviously, the man on the street won't own the Queen Mary, but if he's in a high enough tax bracket, he might well have some kind of little sailboat that he can use for weekend trips. (If he's sufficiently foolhardy, he can even try to cross the Atlantic - or go to Mars - in his little ship.) 

Cargo haulers, passenger liners, luxury yachts and warships commonly ply the spaceways in the writing from this period, along with the occasional tramp freighter that will barely hold air, and even a few pirates now and then. And, to continue the analogy, private explorers seeking literal "new worlds" might obtain funding from corporations or governments, as did Columbus, but still maintain their independent status. 

The 60's introduced the world to a different paradigm: space travel is so expensive and difficult that it's impossible for anyone but a major global power. It's difficult to think of any other activity so completely elitist in its financial demands, as witnessed by the fact that the Space Race only had two competitors. (Full credit to the X Prize winners, but in the nautical analogy above, compared to NASA they're like people going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.)  

Red Thunder provides an interesting comment on this phenomenon, one which I hadn't really given a lot of thought: the approach taken by the Soviets and the Americans was the least efficient way of doing things. In the course of the story, the ex-astronaut describes the method used by the USA to reach the Moon as being like Columbus sinking all three of his ships on the way to America, making the trip back to Europe in a lifeboat, and sinking that in the Straits of Gibraltar and swimming the rest of the way back to Spain with a life preserver. 

The spendthrift approach used by the Apollo missions is explained as being a side effect of American hubris: any expense or wastage was justified in order to win the race first, rather than winning the race efficiently. That distinction now in place, we'll take a look at efficient space travel in the next posting.

- Sid

*Come to think of it, I was a bright twelve year old and I would have thought that a book with sex was a fabulous find.