Tara Gray

February 26, 2002  

Amundsen to Armstrong,

Sailing Ships to Space Ships:

The Literature of Exploration

And the Lack Thereof

            NASA has long analogized space travel to extended polar expeditions.  Travel to the poles bears a striking resemblance to outer space, including extreme environmental conditions and periods of isolation, just to name a few similarities.  However, there are some notable differences, aside from the lack of gravity and an atmosphere that merit discussion on a literary level.  Unlike the exploration of the poles, which produced a great deal of literature, space exploration has not, why?  Can the lack of great space literature be attributed to the time period?  Here I will attempt to answer these questions by comparing the two types of exploration as well as the explorers themselves.

            In 1961 when Alan B. Shepard became the first American man in space he was launched on a Redstone rocket into a parabolic arc, also known as a “suborbital lob.”  Shepard and his tiny Mercury capsule, dubbed Freedom 7, in honor of his country and his fellow Mercury 7 astronauts, were in space for only a brief time, approximately 15 and a half minutes from launch to splashdown.  Gus Grissom’s subsequent flight in his Liberty Bell 7 capsule was essentially the same flight, merely a few seconds longer.  John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962 was only up for a little over 3 hours.  This was a huge increase in time, over 12 times as long as the two Americans that preceded him.  Even still, this relatively short amount of time was barely enough to complete the required flight activities, let alone have a chance to sightsee.  Today, shuttle missions last over 2 weeks, International Space Station missions last 3 months and until recently, missions to the now-defunct Russian Mir space station lasted 6 to 9 months.  Even with longer time spent on orbit, space explorers still find themselves with very little time to sightsee and reflect on their experiences and the images passing before them.

            Time in space is expensive and in very short supply, therefore the NASA Flight Activities Office packs the flight plan.  Virtually every waking hour on orbit is spent engaged in some sort of experiment, test, repair work or spacecraft maintenance.  In some instances, such as John Glenn’s return to space in 1998 onboard the shuttle Discovery, astronauts wore devices to record data while sleeping.  Time spent looking outside is usually somehow work-related.  NASA gives astronauts particular photographic assignments, they must make astronomical sightings (i.e., navigational star fixes) and they look outside to get visual references for rendezvous and docking. 

Because of this lack of time and the ever present, always packed flight plan, it is extremely rare to find a journal written by an orbiting astronaut.  The closest I have found are the Apollo Lunar Surface Journals (available on the NASA History website) although they are actually transcripts of radio communication between the astronauts and the astronauts and the ground rather than true journals.  That is not to say that there has been nothing written by the astronauts.  On the contrary, there have been a number of astronaut biographies published for the general public.  Some astronauts such as Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin, both of Apollo 11 fame, have written several books relating their experiences with space exploration.  There are not, however, what one might consider to be “great space literature.”  These are records of their experiences as astronauts, taken from a scientist/engineer’s mind.  They are, for the most part, filled with technical details and tend to lend themselves more towards the use of moderate language and understated descriptions of events and images in their accounts.  Most readers outside the space community find their writing to be dry, overly technical and understated almost to the point of boring.

Polar explorers, on the other hand, had a completely different experience.  Time takes on a whole new meaning when spent on the ends of the Earth.  Men preparing for polar expeditions packed supplies for extended lengths of time.  For instance, Norwegian Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen in 1893 packed supplies to last him and his crew six years (Ice, 2-3).  Similarly, in 1985, solo (would-be) Antarctic explorer Warren Pearson was prepared for a one year stay despite his plan to only spend a winter (Ice, 130).  Lt. George W. DeLong spent two winters on the Jeannette frozen in place during an 1879-1881 quest for the North Pole (Ice, 158).  Story after story of polar exploration the authors emphasize the extended nature of each expedition.  Because the trips were so long in time and in distance traveled, the men found themselves with a great deal of unfilled time on their hands.  In Nancy Mitford’s description of the ill-fated Scott Expedition to the South Pole, she informs the reader that most of the men were in bed by 10pm, “…sometimes with a candle and a book” (Ice, 46).  She goes on to recount how Scott had time to give lectures, “at least three a week,” how the men were entertained with slides of Japan supplied by a member of the expedition by the name of Ponting as well as with music provided by a gramophone and pianola (Ibid.)  One can only assume that Scott and his men knew they would have an abundance of spare time and brought these items along for this purpose.  In addition to time for lectures and slide shows, the men had time for deep reflection and introspection.  Richard Byrd spent the better part of an Antarctic winter alone in an underground weather station.  During this time, Byrd wrote in a journal that eventually became the book Alone, an excerpt of which is found in Ice: Stories of Survival from Polar Exploration.  Aside from merely describing his environment and the mundane events that transpired from day to day, he took the time to elaborate on his own mental and physical condition and to reflect on his own reactions to his circumstances.

In Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s account of the Scott Expedition, aptly entitled The Worst Journey in the World, he relates an unlikely event to take place on a typical exploration—a Christmas party.  The party was complete with gifts, a tree and decorations, dancing and food (Ice, 61).  Only polar exploration could offer a situation in which something such as this could occur. 

By reading these stories, one is likely to get the impression that these stories were not written by a reserved scientist or engineer.  The vast majority of the excerpts in Ice are written in narrative form and the writers tend to extensively use hyperbole to express the extreme situations in which they found themselves.  One of the most obvious examples of this technique is found the title of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s book, The Worst Journey in the World.  Other examples include DeLong, who describes people as not just unconscious but “quite unconscious” (Ice, 164) and Byrd, who refers to his mistakes, no matter the size, “ghastly mistakes” (Ice, 142).  Tales of polar exploration are generally less technically detailed; they include recollections of personal reflection and are a great deal more introspective than many types of exploration literature that are available.  Because the authors portray the extremes of the experiences and the environment to the fullest and utilize the literary device hyperbole, the depictions of the explorations are more colorful and exciting.  Readers from the general public find these chronicles of exploration far easier to become engrossed in than those written by scientists and engineers.

The lack of great space literature cannot solely be attributed to the type of explorers sent and the shortage of time for reflection on orbit.  One must also take into account and evaluate the period during which the exploration takes place.  The exploration of the poles took place during the highly nationalistic period between the late 1800s and the early 1900s.  Britons and Norwegians alike waited anxiously for reports from Antarctica from 1911 to 1912 as Norwegian Roald Amundsen and Briton Robert Scott vied for the honor of becoming the first to the South Pole.  People from both countries derived a great deal of nationalistic pride from this competition.  Out of this hunger for information about Scott and Amundsen, particularly about Scott who never returned from Antarctica, much was published in the years following the discovery of the South Pole.  As a result, there is a veritable glut of information available on polar and to be more specific, Antarctic exploration.

In comparison, the exploration of space is taking place in a time dubbed, “the information age.”  People all over the world have access to real-time data from the astronauts via the Internet and 24-hour news services such as CNN, MSNBC and the Fox News Channel.  Because information is so readily available at a moment’s notice, members of the general public are far less likely to pick up a book about a mission they read a blurb about on the web months or even years after the mission took place.  Additionally, nationalism has slowly faded away and egocentrism and globalism have taken its place.  We live in a society far less motivated by what is best for the country and more so by what is best for one's self.  The days of President Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country” speech of 1961.  The space industry is constantly finding itself in a position of answering the question, “How does this benefit me?” a question virtually unheard of in the days of the Scott Expedition. 

Conversely, the sense that we no longer live in our own countries but in a “global village” has done a great deal to eliminate nationalism.  With the advent of the “information age,” people are far more likely to know about and care about events taking place halfway around the world than those taking place right around the corner.  One of the reasons the sense of nationalism was at an all time high at the turn of the century was due to how difficult it was to get news from other countries.  Today, however, distance is irrelevant, information from all over the world flows freely.

The demand for literature of exploration, be it polar or stellar, depends upon strong public spirit, which is more often than not, based out of nationalistic pride.  Without these, authors and explorers find very little motivation to produce literary or historical pieces about their experiences.  Sadly, if this trend continues, future generations will have nothing to study about the age of space exploration.