Free Cosmic Connection by Carl Sagan Page A

the Viking mission to land on Mars in 1976 is about half that of the cost overruns in the so-called Safeguard antiballistic missile system for fiscal year 1970. The cost of a Grand Tour exploration of all the planets in the outer Solar System (canceled for lack of funds) is comparable to the 1970 cost overruns on the Minuteman III system; the cost of a very large optical telescope in space, capable of definitive studies of the origins of the universe, is comparable to the 1970 cost overruns on the Minuteman II missile; and a major program of Earth resources satellites, involving several years of close inspection of the surface and weather of our planet, would cost approximately the fiscal year 1970 cost overruns on the P-3C aircraft. A decade-long program of systematic investigation of the entire Solar System would cost as much as the accounting mistakes on a single “defense” weapons system in a single year. The scientific space program is small change compared to the errors in the Department of Defense budget.
    Another viewpoint worth considering is space exploration as entertainment. A Viking Mars-lander could be completely funded through the sale, to every American, of a single issue of a magazine, containing pictures taken on the surface of Mars by Viking. Photographs of the Earth, the Moon, the planets, and spiral and irregular galaxies are an appropriate and even characteristic art form of our age. Such novel and oddly moving photographs as the Lunar Orbiter image of the interior of the crater Copernicus and the Mariner 9 photography of the Martian volcanoes, windstreaks, moons, and polar icecaps speak both to a sense of wonder and to a sense of art. An unmanned roving vehicle on Mars could probably be supported by subscription television. A phonograph record of the output of a microphone on Mars, where there seems to be a great deal of acoustic energy, might have wide sales.
    I do not wish here to broach the debate on manned vs. unmanned planetary exploration, except to stress again that there may be very good nonscientific reasons for sending men into space. There exist intermediate cases between manned and unmanned exploration, which we may very well see in the forthcoming decades. For example, there may be telepuppets, devices landed on another planet but fully controlled by an individual human being in orbit, all of whose senses are in a feedback loop with the device. It is also possible that planets with very hostile environments by terrestrial standards, or planets where there is a great danger of contamination by terrestrial micro-organisms, will be explored by men inside machines like enormous prosthetic devices, amplifying the sense perceptions and muscular abilities of the human operator.
    Even apart from these hypothetical developments, it is already quite clear that the development of sophisticated devices for unmanned planetary exploration is organizing the same technology required for the production of useful robots on the Earth. An unmanned vehicle that lands on Mars by the early 1980s will very likely have the ability to sense its environment much more thoroughly than humans are able to, to rove over the landscape, to make both preprogrammed decisions and decisions based on information newly acquired. First cousins to such a robot, some mass-produced, would be extremely useful devices here on Earth. I am thinking in part of operations in inaccessible environments such as the abyssal floor of the ocean basins, but I am also thinking of industrial robots to free workers from repetitive and uninteresting tasks, and domestic robots to liberate the housekeeper from a life of drudgery.
    The experience of space exploration gives no unique philosophy; to some extent, each group tends to see its own philosophical view reflected, and not always by the soundest logic: Nikita Khrushchev stressed that in the space flight of Yuri Gagarin no angels or other supernatural beings were detected; and, in almost perfect