The Opportunity Rover proved NASA’s great ambitions

Has the collective human imagination ever been so significantly triggered as it was that moment on 20th July 1969, when the commander of Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong, first stepped foot on the Moon? Arguably the moment still stands at the very peak of human achievement, and it’s hard to conceive of another moment in the future that might come even close to dislodging it.

Yet if there was a contest for second place, a candidate should be the story that ended last week when NASA announced that the second of its Mars Exploration Rovers, Opportunity, is now considered dead. The rover hasn’t responded to commands since it was caught in a Martian dust storm some eight months ago. Yet for fifteen years, we had lived with the knowledge that humanity had a footprint on a very distant planet. The achievement was small in scale but profound in what it augured.

Precisely because their success has been relatively low key, the story of Opportunity and its sister rover, Spirit, is in many ways more significant than the achievement of Armstrong landing in the Lunar Module, Eagle, alongside Buzz Aldrin, fifty years ago. The Apollo space programme ran from 1960 to 1972 and, on Earth at least, the legacy of the missions can be counted by the untold number of young lives steered towards engineering and the sciences. Yet in terms of a long-term investment in Moon exploration, it’s hard to make a case for its overall success. There were just five more manned missions to the Moon and only twelve men would walk on the lunar surface before the program ended with the Apollo 17 mission.

If the Apollo program seemed to open space up to human exploration, in truth, it pretty much closed it down for decades. Apollo was the culmination of a political decision that was itself largely motivated by Cold War anxieties. When President John F. Kennedy promised the American people in 1961 that by the end of the decade they would land “a man on the Moon and [return] him safely to the Earth”, he was responding to the achievement of the Soviets, whose cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, had just become the first man to orbit the Earth. And that was the very problem with the American space program from the outset: it required a degree of feverish paranoia to fund what was, at the time, an overreach for the available technology. It was never a logical long-term approach to space exploration; motivated, as it was, entirely by the ends and never the means towards those ends.

Once the ambition of the Apollo program was fulfilled, NASA would be directed by Nixon’s more pragmatic rationale that the space program should be “part of a continuing process […] and not as a series of separate leaps, each requiring a massive concentration of energy”. It might have been a more logical approach to space but it also meant that NASA was folded into the general government expenditure, constantly undercut as it vied for budgets and suffered from waning political interest. It is said that Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were the presidents least supportive of NASA but perhaps that’s understandable given that the manifestation of Nixon’s dream of “low-cost, multi-purpose space missions” became the Shuttle program which was itself hugely expensive, over-engineered, and occasionally dangerous, as was proved by the Challenger disaster in 1986 and Columbia in 2003.

NASA would learn – or was forced to learn – hard lessons from the Shuttle era. They were required to find a different methodology and critical to that was the early Mars rovers which succeeded in ways that few could have imagined when they landed in January 2004.

The Rovers – Spirit, Opportunity, as well as the Sojourner Rover before them and the Curiosity Rover that came later — were an expression of where we were (and are) in terms of our technology, much closer in spirit to the independent home brew community than they were to that bloated corporate entity that built the Shuttle. With the rovers’ lower costs came lower expectations. They were designed to work for around 90 sol (a solar day on Mars) yet Spirit lasted 2208 sol (2269 Earth days) and Opportunity 5352, which is 5498 days on Earth or just over fifteen years. The reason for their longevity is often attributed to the unexpected way that Martian winds would occasionally blow away the accumulated dust from their solar panels but that’s to overlook the real virtue of the program. The Rover programs were a fiercely pragmatic application of technologies that are readily available, making a virtue of the need to keep costs low ($800 million for the two rovers compared with the $196 billion for the 30-year Shuttle program).

The rovers were also, in a sense, a harbinger of what would emerge in the world of private space companies. Companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic, have benefited from the huge wealth of their founders but also the pioneering attitude of a new generation of technologists. NASA too has benefitted from private investment in space exploration and, just today, SpaceX has protested the award of a NASA contract to a rival, United Launch Alliance, meaning, ultimately, that costs are driven down.

That victory of practical engineering over bloat and bureaucracy is, ultimately, the legacy of Opportunity and Spirit, and a reminder of how and why NASA is currently enjoying some of its most notable successes. Just this week, the successor to Spirit and Opportunity started to move again. The Curiosity Rover is moving away from Vera Rubin Ridge, its home for the past year, and is continued to provide raw data that will takes years to analyse.

There will, of course, be demands for humans to take part in the exploration of Mars. Alongside the rush for science is the rush for glory. Elon Musk continues to push his dream of landing humans on the red planet in the next six years and perhaps that’s how it should be. Landing humans on Mars might not be viable or even sensible and having owned the most glorious moment of human exploration, it’s clear that NASA no longer needs to lead that race. As the rover program proved and continues to demonstrate in the search for life on Mars, NASA’s ambitions are arguably now far greater.