Claude Fournier, “From Venus to Persephone,” in Distant Frontiers (Paris: Presse Jules Verne, 2005)
… The observation of the transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769 was a project seventy years in the making. In 1691, and again in 1716, the great astronomer Edmond Halley published papers suggesting that observation of the transits would allow exact calculation of the distance from the sun to the earth, and naming the locations where it might best be observed. As the events approached, astronomers from throughout Europe, sponsored by their own countries and others, prepared to travel to those places.
What followed has sometimes been characterized as the first international scientific collaboration. 120 observers from nine nations, sponsored by their own countries and others, traveled as far as Siberia, Madagascar and the Cape of Good Hope to observe the 1761 transit. Many of them shared preparations and results, and in one case, the spirit of cooperation transcended even the Seven Years’ War: the Royal Navy granted French astronomer Alexandre Guy Pingré safe passage to Madagascar, although the French navy failed to extend the same courtesy to surveyors Charles Mason and Alexander Dixon.
Preparations for the 1769 transit were even more extensive, and also marked by a spirit of early internationalism: Catherine the Great invited a Czech astronomer to observe the event from St. Petersburg, and Swedish naturalist Daniel Solander joined Captain Cook in his expedition to Tahiti. This time, France did allow the British expedition safe conduct, instructing its captains that Cook’s
Endeavour was “out on enterprises of service to all mankind.”
Much the same circumstances would repeat themselves two centuries later, when Michael Bárek of the Prague Observatory proposed the Planetary Grand Tour. Like the transit, it was an opportunity of immense scientific value that would be open for a limited time and, if missed, wouldn’t come again for more than a century. And an expedition to the outer planets was as great a journey by twentieth-century standards as a trip to Madagascar or Tahiti was in the eighteenth, if not more so. Many countries were eager to get close views of the outer solar system, but amid the recession and economic dislocation of the 1970s, few single states could justify the cost.
Thus, where the transits of Venus reflected the emerging internationalism of eighteenth-century science, the voyage to Jupiter and beyond was a mirror of the more mature internationalist politics of the modern era. In 1971, representatives of 35 science ministries met under Consistory auspices to coordinate missions, minimize duplication of effort, and arrange cooperation. These meetings would ultimately involve 80 countries and regions, and by the time the rockets launched, 62 of them along with several university networks and private companies would contribute instruments and experiments.
The five Grand Tour missions would give humanity its first close-up photos of the outer planets and Persephone, identify almost a hundred moons, and lead to the first discovery of large objects beyond Neptune’s orbit. Many of the pictures that came back from the Grand Tour probes’ cameras are still iconic, including the Commonwealth “family portrait” of the solar system and the distant image of Earth taken by the American probe. Their political symbolism, at times, was almost as spectacular: the pan-European mission was trumpeted as a sign that Europe had finally put aside its differences, the joint effort of China, Russia and Japan was likewise hailed as a sign of peace between the late belligerents in the Great Asian War, and Indian politicians pointed to the East African and Southeast Asian components in the
Brhaspatayaan probe as proof of technical leadership among the developing nations. And as the Indian and Chinese space programs cemented their status as rising great powers, smaller countries contributed instruments to show that they were modern and upwardly mobile.
In most cases the political symbolism was overdone, as was the fashion of the day. But at a time when internationalism was being questioned in many parts of the world, the pictures of the outer planets that filled newspapers and television screens reminded people of the potential it had. In the words of the French admiralty more than two hundred years before, the Grand Tour was an enterprise of service to all mankind, and it showed such enterprises’ value in a way nearly everyone could appreciate…
Yahya Khamis Hamad, “The Mayor of the Moon and the Politics of Space,” Essays in Memory of Ulrich Katema, Humanity Magazine (October 2014).
… In the 1960s, the idea that space might have politics belonged in the realm of planetary romance. Satellites were presumed to be under the control of the nations that launched them, and transitory human missions remained under their sponsors’ law. Space had no citizens, and objects in orbit were treated as extensions of the countries that put them there.
This view began to change in the decade that followed. As countries beyond the great powers put up their own communications, weather and navigation satellites – Kazembe in 1978, Brazil in 1979, a Niger Valley consortium in 1981 – reservation of orbits and responsibility for space debris became points of contention. This concern increased sharply when Hungary launched its first satellite in 1980, followed closely by its first test of a rocket-launched fission bomb. The unspoken agreement against orbital weaponry had been breached, and the world confronted the possibility that Hungary or another country might exploit the absence of a legal prohibition by launching orbital weapons platforms.
The 1970s also saw the growth of space stations. The first experimental unit, the
Sternenlicht, was launched as early as 1969, with several others following over the next three years. The experience of these early missions, and the technological and operational advances they engendered, paved the way for modular stations. The most prominent of the early ones was the
Humanity, launched in 1977 with four great powers contributing modules and several others adding components. The
Humanity contained rudimentary assembly and repair facilities and was designed as a prototype shipyard, looking ahead to future times when large spacecraft or habitats might be built entirely in space.
The existence of an international station raised the question of what law applied to the interactions between its staff. In the 1970s, the people in space were still overwhelmingly professional astronauts with military or scientific background, so discipline was generally good and interpersonal conflicts minor. But in 1978, a dispute between the station crew and ground control over what the former saw as harsh work schedules, which led to a one-day work stoppage and involved the science ministries of three countries, highlighted the possibility of more serious labor actions in the future and convinced many that a legal framework had to be in place to handle them.
The Hungarian test was the catalyst that brought all these factors together and, in 1981, the first international conference on the law of space met in Prague. There was nearly universal agreement that space-based weapons should be banned, that a registry of objects in orbit should be instituted, and that an authority should be created to make and enforce space law. The main dispute was over whether near-Earth space should be administered on the watershed-authority model – that is, jointly by the spacefaring nations – or whether it should instead be designated as a Legatum Humanitatis, administered by and on behalf of all humanity.
After some debate, the latter model won out. Nations without spacecraft still had an interest in the administration of space – they made use of communications and weather satellites, and were potentially at risk from falling space debris – and they were unwilling to support an arrangement in which the spacefaring nations would administer Earth orbit as a private club. A group of nations led by the United States also argued for a governing structure that would minimize barriers to entry, allow room for private spacecraft (although any such were still well in the future) and provide for a degree of citizen participation.
The treaty that emerged from the Consistory in 1982 would thus create the Orbital Trusteeship, with jurisdiction over all space beginning 100 kilometers above the Earth’s surface and extending to 50,000 kilometers. Its governing board would contain one representative from each entity that had sponsored a spacecraft, with non-spacefaring entities represented in six regional groupings and a final ten members elected for ten-year terms. Its committees would have authority to enact criminal, civil and labor codes and an organic law governing objects in Earth orbit, and to administer those laws and investigate their breach. Its rulings would be subject to enforcement by the Court of Arbitration, whose peacekeeping arsenal by this time included a small number of missiles capable of bringing down weapons platforms launched into space in defiance of the ban.
The administration of space beyond 50,000 kilometers was left for another day. As yet, no human had left Earth orbit, nor was there any competition over use of the Moon and planets, and no one could know what kind of bases and colonies might be established there in the future. It was assumed that details of government would be worked out in the distant future when they became necessary, but as it turned out, those details would become relevant sooner than thought…
… The long-awaited first landing on the Moon took place on August 11, 1984, when an international crew of seven touched down in the Mare Vaporum. Their habitat consisted of three prefabricated huts capable of supporting 15-day missions, as well as a small fleet of manned and unmanned rovers. Even as the first missions took place, a consortium of 20 nations was building a larger modular habitat which, when finally assembled in space, would be able to support continuous occupation. This installation was brought to the Moon in stages and completed in early 1988, with the first crew of 15 arriving shortly after for a six-month rotation. But even this was a transient station, not a colony, and its administration was at once quasi-academic and quasi-military – a state of affairs that no one thought of changing until Ulrich Katema arrived.
Katema, a leading geologist at the University of Kazembe, spent his early career in the copper mines, working as a miner during his studies and graduating to a professional capacity afterward. In 1968, at the age of thirty, he was badly injured in a tunnel collapse, becoming an S2 paraplegic. Like some others with spinal cord injuries at that level, he learned to walk by wearing braces and using his hips to move his legs, but mobility was slow and painful. For someone who had been an athlete in secondary school, the transition was a difficult one, leading to long-term depression and the loss of his marriage.
As a palliative, Katema threw himself into his work, shifting from an industrial to an academic career and concentrating on planetary geology. In 1988, with several papers on lunar rock samples under his belt, he learned of an upcoming mission to conduct a geological survey of the area around the Vaporum base and determine whether any resources needed for the station’s upkeep could be mined locally. Acting through the university and the Kazembe government, he volunteered to join the party.
His application was initially met with great skepticism: there were no advanced medical facilities on the Moon, and if his disability got him into trouble, the station might not be able to rescue him. But aside from his paraplegia, he was in good health, with none of the incontinence or respiratory problems that affected those with higher-level spinal cord injuries. He pointed out that personnel at the Vaporum base never went out alone, and that the space suits used for lunar activity would provide a natural brace. He was also very persistent, and his skills were needed, so in early 1989, he landed on the Moon.
He would never leave. On the lunar surface, Katema weighed a little more than twelve kilograms rather than seventy-five. He was able to walk without pain and do so much more naturally than he could on Earth, and after he installed ceiling bars in his room and in the hallways of the habitat, his arms were strong enough to carry him hand-over-hand. At the end of his six-month rotation, he refused to go home, and stayed at the Vaporum base until his death in March 2014. He was the Moon’s first settler.
There would be others. Alessandra Licalsi, who married Katema in 1990, was the first, but she wasn’t the only one for whom the harsh landscape of the Moon became home. By 2000, the Vaporum base had a permanent party of ten. The habitat had also seen its first birth, when a physicist’s pregnancy (due to birth control failure) wasn’t noticed until it was too late to bring her home. The baby, Virginia Dare Carroll, was returned to Earth at the first opportunity, but she still symbolized the way that the base was slowly turning into a settlement.
And in the meantime, Katema’s unmatched experience meant that both permanent party and transients looked to him for advice, and the base adopted him as its unofficial mayor. The installation of a permanent habitat and the growing efforts at sustainability meant, for the first time, that many of its workers
weren't professional astronauts, coming instead from skilled industrial and even agricultural backgrounds. Katema's work in the mining industry as a young man meant that he understood the skilled tradesmen better than most of the scientists and administrators did, and he was often consulted on policies and called on to mediate disputes. Many of the sustainability projects that the Vaporum base undertook during the 1990s and 2000s - particularly mining for iron and silica and "juicing" rocks for hydrogen fuel and water - also bore his stamp.
It was in this role that Katema raised the issue of the Moon’s political status; true to the Bazembe planetary romances he had grown up with, his eyes were cast on a far future in which the solar system was dotted with colonies and nations. He argued that the Moon as a whole should be administered as a Legatum, but that its settlements should have a degree of self-government that expanded with population, culminating in autonomy and international presence much as the American frontier grew into organized territories and then states. His persistence told again, and in 2006, the Court of Arbitration adopted a protocol much like the one he proposed. He would spend the last eight years of his life as the citizen representative on the Legatum governing board, taking part by video conference in debates on the future of space; in 2009 he would serve as the board’s chairman, the
official mayor of the Moon.
The day when the first lunar nation arises is still far in the future, if it comes at all: it will be a long time before any off-Earth settlement is self-sustaining, and even that will depend on an investment we may not see as worth making. But as we finish our preparations to take the next step outward, the model Katema created will follow us elsewhere in the solar system…
