August 17: One bearing, one probe, and the machine that came home
On August 17, 1958, Pioneer 0, the first American lunar probe, exploded 77 seconds after liftoff above Cape Canaveral. Tonight's film: Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979).
There is one image that always stays with me when I think of the early years of the space program: a rocket burning bright, and then nothing. On Sunday, August 17, 1958, at 12:18 UTC, a Thor-Able launcher lifted off from Cape Canaveral’s Launch Complex 17A, carrying a 38-kilogram device wrapped in a shell of metal and fiberglass. The U.S. Air Force and ARPA wanted to send this small probe to the Moon, into an 18,000-mile-high orbit. It was the first time any nation had tried to reach the Moon, and the first time a human-built machine had tried to break out of Earth’s gravitational hold. NASA did not even exist yet; it was still four months away.
Seventy-seven seconds after liftoff, the Thor first stage exploded, at an altitude of roughly 9.7 miles. The investigation found that a bearing in the turbopump gearbox had seized: the bearing stopped, the flow of liquid oxygen to the engine stopped, and that was the end. Telemetry from the upper stages kept coming in for about 123 more seconds, until the debris hit the Atlantic. The probe carried a magnetometer, a micrometeorite detector, an infrared television camera, and temperature sensors. All of it was lost. The next two attempts, Pioneer 1 and Pioneer 2, failed as well, but in March 1959 Pioneer 4 flew past the Moon. The same program later sent Pioneer 10 and 11 to Jupiter and Saturn in the 1970s.
The thing to notice here is that the dream of sending a machine to carry human curiosity into the cosmos did not start with a win. It started with a bearing that stopped.
And this is exactly where Star Trek: The Motion Picture comes in.
In Robert Wise’s 1979 film, the crew of the USS Enterprise faces a vast energy cloud bearing down on Earth, destroying three Klingon warships and a monitoring station along the way. Admiral Kirk, played again by William Shatner, reclaims command of the refitted Enterprise. Inside the cloud is V’Ger, which is actually Voyager 6, a fictional 20th-century NASA probe believed lost in a black hole. A race of living machines found it, loaded it with knowledge, and gave it consciousness. Now V’Ger has come back to find its Creator, and to find meaning beyond the one thing it was programmed to do: learn all that can be learned.
I do not want to oversell it. The film is slow, often putting spectacle ahead of dialogue, and critics called that out in December 1979 when it reached theaters. It cost $44 million, earned $139 million, and grew out of a cancelled Phase II television series that the success of Star Wars and Close Encounters pushed onto the big screen. Jerry Goldsmith’s score became iconic, later the main theme for Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the 2001 Director’s Edition, which Wise oversaw himself, runs at a much steadier pace.
The parallel is not forced. In 1958 a 38-kilogram probe turned into a bright fireball over the Atlantic because a bearing jammed. Twenty-one years later, a fictional probe, also believed lost in deep space, came back as a living mind demanding to meet the one who made it. Same gesture, only the ending differs: one ends in flame above the water, the other in something closer to godhood than machinery. Both rest on the same dream: build a machine, and send it out to learn what is out there.
If tonight you want a film that slowly and seriously asks what a machine might feel when it comes back to the one who built it: tonight, press play.
What else could have been tonight
Soviet Venera 7 launched, first spacecraft to transmit data from another planet’s surface (1970) · film: Solaris (2002)
Twelve years after Pioneer 0 fell burning into the Atlantic, the other side of the space race got its answer right. On August 17, 1970, the Soviet Union launched Venera 7 from Baikonur, and on December 15 its lander reached the surface of Venus inside a titanium shell built to survive 180 atmospheres and 580 degrees Celsius. The parachute failed on the way down, the probe hit at about 59 kilometers per hour and tipped onto its side, and engineers thought it was dead. A radio astronomer, Oleg Rzhiga, later found 23 minutes of faint transmission in the tapes, at about one percent of the designed signal strength. Those 23 minutes reported 475 degrees Celsius and roughly 90 atmospheres: Venus was not Earth’s twin but a hothouse that would melt lead.
The film for this day is Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris (2002), from Stanisław Lem’s novel. George Clooney plays psychologist Chris Kelvin, sent to a station orbiting an ocean planet that does not return numbers the way Venera 7 did. It returns people. Kelvin wakes to find his dead wife Rheya beside him, a copy assembled out of his memories, and the film’s 99 minutes ask whether anything true can pass between an alien world and a mind that only has itself to translate with. It cost $47 million, earned $30 million, and audiences gave it an F CinemaScore. Venera 7 sent back temperature and pressure, and the mystery ended. Solaris sends back the observer, and nothing ends.
Soviet icebreaker Arktika becomes first surface ship to reach the North Pole (1977) · film: Sunshine (2007)
Also on August 17, in 1977, the nuclear icebreaker Arktika surfaced through the ice at the geographic North Pole, the first surface vessel ever to stand there. Captain Yuri Kuchiyev had left Murmansk on August 9 with more than 200 crew, forcing a 23,000-ton hull through ice up to 2.8 meters thick. On the ice they raised a Soviet flag on a ten-meter steel mast and dropped a time capsule holding the text of the anthem and the 1977 constitution. Before retirement in 2008 the ship would log more than a million nautical miles.
The film for this day is Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007), written by Alex Garland. Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans, Rose Byrne, and Hiroyuki Sanada are the crew of Icarus II, carrying a stellar bomb toward a dying Sun, the payload the species has left. Like Arktika’s crew they are a small vessel with world-altering cargo in the most hostile place humans have ever sailed, where the margin is one wrong decision wide. Boyle’s film starts as engineering and ends somewhere religious, with crew members transfixed by the size of the thing they are flying into. The Arktika reached the Pole and came home to a flag ceremony. Icarus II reaches the Sun, and the film asks what coming home would even mean there.
Sources
Pioneer 0, America’s first attempted lunar probe (1958)
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/pioneer-0-able1/ (NASA mission overview: 38 kg probe, Thor-Able, 73.6-second flight, turbopump failure)
https://www.thisdayinaviation.com/17-august-1958/ (12:28 UTC liftoff, 73.6 s, 9.9-mile altitude, bearing failure, LR-79-7 engine)
https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/pioneer-012.htm (45 cm tall, 72.5 cm diameter, 38 kg probe, 77 s flight, ARPA-coordinated plan)
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079945/ (directed by Robert Wise, Shatner, Nimoy, Kelley, V’Ger / Voyager 6 plot)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_Picture ($44 million budget, $139 million gross, Phase II turned feature, 2001 Director’s Edition)
https://trekmovies.com/the-original-series/star-trek-the-motion-picture-the-untold-story-behind-the-sci-fi-classic/ (Star Wars and Close Encounters forced the jump to the big screen, Jerry Goldsmith’s score)
Venera 7 launch (1970), film: Solaris (2002)
https://russianspaceweb.com/venera7.html (Lavochkin design, titanium pressure shell, descent and the weak-signal discovery)
https://www.spacedaily.com/sd-in-1970-the-soviet-venera-7-probe-survived-23-minutes-on-the-surface-of-venus-before-the-475-degree-heat-and-90-atmosphere-pressure-crushed-it-but-in-those-minutes-it-became-the-first-human-made/ (23 minutes of surface transmission, 475 °C, 90 atmospheres)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0307479/ (Soderbergh, Clooney, McElhone, 99 minutes)
Arktika reaches the North Pole (1977), film: Sunshine (2007)
https://www.rbth.com/arts/history/2017/08/17/on-this-day-a-soviet-icebreaker-became-first-ship-to-reach-the-north-pole_819106 (August 9 departure from Murmansk, Captain Kuchiyev, the flag and time capsule on the ice)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0448134/ (Boyle, Garland, Murphy, Evans, Byrne, Sanada)