Manatees in Space

The symbiosis between nature and technology has brought us in sight of distant worlds. What next?

By Jeremiah Creedon

The Kennedy Space Center in Florida is bounded to the north by a real Jurassic Park, a tidal swamp teeming with rare and exotic species. Since the earliest days of the Space Age, the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuges has served a very practical purpose: Anyone up to mischief must brave it to reach the rockets beside the sea. Described in brochures as a place where “nature affirms her spirit and lives in harmony with human technology,” it is in fact the site of a vast protection racket. Its inhabitants, among them many alligators and snakes as well as the endangered manatee, earn their separate peace in return for the moat in time they form around the ships.

Out beyond this primordial Eden sits pad 39B, one of the launch sites for the space shuttle, which I had a chance to visit on a press tour. From a mile or so away, the shuttle seems an amazing work of public art, a monument to the will of a daring and arrogant age. A bit closer and you can see the hints of earthly life in its shape, a morphing of bird and reptile with a dolphin’s bottle snout. Beyond that, closer yet, there’s nothing but the massive reality of the machine. Strapped to its twin boosters and orange external tank, caged in a tangle of pipes and gantries, the orbiter Atlantis resembles less a living thing than a refinery.

No way that can fly, I remember thinking, which partly explains why it takes several hundred million dollars to prove me wrong. That’s what it costs to defy gravity long enough to hurtle something that looks as airworthy as the Taj Mahal into orbit.

In another sense, that’s what we pay to think of ourselves as a people with a destiny amid the stars. The shuttle’s real function has always been as much in this realm, as myth, as it has been a tool of science. As many experts note, there’s not much we do on the shuttle that couldn’t be done with cheaper, unmanned rockets. But that may not be the point. It seems we’d rather spend the extra money to believe we’ll soon join the Star Trek crew, venturing beyond this planet to strange new worlds.

Space exploration has been back in the news lately. After years of indifference, supporters say, the public has reawakened to the challenge of reaching distant realms. They trace the new enthusiasm to the success of the recent Pathfinder mission to Mars, where once again there’s hope of finding life – the ultimate draw. Another factor may be our curiosity about the fate of the aging Russian space station Mir as it orbits daily between slapstick and disaster.

Whatever the reason, many would like to see the space program regain its status as high technology’s premier event. If there is to be another golden age of human endeavor, the logic goes, we have to strive outward. Space is where we’ll finally realize the potential of the human spirit. That’s why, some insist, we need the new International Space Station: a joint project with Russia and other countries to meld us all into a single spacefaring race.

Critics have been saying for years that a big new space station has no real scientific purpose, and yet somehow the concept survives. The aerospace industry would like to see the station built of, course, but that may not be the whole story. There’s also the American romance with a certain vision of what our future in space should be. A stripped-down model like Mir would never do. We want our own Enterprise, a magnificent blend of shopping mall, health club and college dorm. It may cost the country $60 billion or more, but we’ve got to have a starship if we’re ever to reach the stars.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, not far from pad 39B, a manatee does languid somersaults in the amniotic brine.

Maybe our future does lie in space. Ever since Leonardo da Vinci sketched his ornithopters and dreamt of giving conquest a vertical dimension, some of the best minds in the West have been convinced of it. And yet even among those who see humanity eventually reaching interstellar space, there’s doubt about how much closer we’ll get in the near term. Profound hurdles – technological, psychological, economic – stand in the way. Though exploration will continue, perhaps in the form of ever smaller probes, the starship is apt to remain a fantasy.

All evidence suggests that the real frontier in the next century will involve biology and genetics. Even now the bioengineers are reducing life to its simplest parts, then reassembling them to suit our purposes. One early insight is that we share the vast majority of our genes with other creatures. Genes are, it seems, free agents. Their allegiance is less to any one species than to life in general. We’re just the vessels that bear them through time. And unlike us, they’re not so picky about the ride.

A shuttle launch is an amazing thing to see. The huge ship inches upward on a pillar of liquid fire, slowly at first, too slowly. Then the noise reaches you from across the swamp, in bubbles of thunder that burst and shudder against your chest. By now the ship is hurtling upward, its path arching like an arrow’s; and then it vanishes, bound for an orbit about 250 miles up. All that risk and expense has taken the crew no farther away than Orlando is from Tallahassee.

Seconds before liftoff, vast torrents of water are sent gushing across the pad to quell the destructive roar. The rocket’s fire atomizes this water, creating an acidic cloud that slowly settles on all those “protected” species in the surrounding estuaries and swamps. As their self-appointed stewards, we may find that troubling, but life in general may not. What is the manatee in the bigger scheme of things? What are we?

The miles of shoreline south of the shuttle complex are dotted with other launch pads used earlier in the Space Age. Most are now abandoned. I’ve stood on one in ruins, its concrete apron spotted with weeds and stained by rust from the base of the tower corroding in the ocean air. From there you can glimpse a different, almost unspeakable future: the day when our springboard to the heavens might be another Stonehenge, its symbolic meaning lost on the dolphins and seabirds, if not our simpler descendants.

We dare at this moment to think of ourselves as the authors of life, given our new understanding of the language in which life is written. But the real creative force may still lie beyond our comprehension. In the larger script, we may be just the laborers who build the ark; we may even be left behind when it finally sails. For all our myths and dreams, the portal to the stars may in fact prove too small for our giant heads. Perhaps our role is only to seed the cosmos with life in its tiniest forms – even as we sadly realize that we’ve been tricked. Nature, so long exploited, had been toying with us all along, waiting in its infinite patience for the last laugh.

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