Michael Benson: I’ve been deeply interested in space exploration since two key events in my early childhood. The first was being taken by my mother to see Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s amazing film 2001: A Space Odyssey when it came out in 1968. I was six years old. I’ll always remember trailing her down Broadway after the film – a three hour film feels much longer to a six year old; it feels like an actual space voyage – demanding to know what it meant. To her credit, she simply answered that she didn’t know. Kubrick’s masterpiece was my first exposure to ambiguity, really – the ambiguity in all great art. What does it really mean? Well, what does the universe really “mean”? The second key event, chronologically, was watching the moon launches and landings live on television from our home in Bethesda, Maryland. More impressive than the landings, which were initially broadcast from the moon in grainy black and white, was the real-time launch of those huge obelisks. The Apollos were by far the most impressive rocket ever built. There’s something Egyptian about them, in the sense that they represent one of the high points – well, literally – of all human civilization. I didn’t make that comparison at the time, but I think I intuited the long-term importance of those days. And, you know, even though the Cold War was the motor, this wasn’t the US being imperialistic, not really, it was the US investing a big part of its resources to go to places the species had never been before. There’s something very inspiring about that. I mean, yes, it was the American flag that was planted, and these were Air Force and Navy pilots, but there was no attempt to lay claim to the Moon. It was a voyage “for all mankind.” I mean, that wasn’t just PR.

The first event not only made me interested in space, it got me interested in art, and specifically film; probably one reason why I later became a filmmaker was that first screening of 2001, which I have since seen countless times. And it is certainly why this book exists. The second event, the Moon landings, helped plant the conviction that the destiny of the human race is to continue expanding off this blue-white seed, into space, now that we have thoroughly explored the land areas of this planet, to colonize the solar system and eventually to make voyages to the stars. And through the rest of the cold war years – a period during which I lived in the USSR, among other places; my father was an American diplomat – it seemed clear to me that the way to avoid a US-Soviet nuclear war was for those two countries to channel all those primitive built-in competitive and territorial instincts into space, into the peaceful exploration of space. I still think this would be a natural way to move away from war, to convert our highest talents from weapons production to the construction of spacecraft. That way all those industries, lucrative contracts, political webs and local pork and so forth, wouldn’t have to be as seriously disrupted as full-stop disarmament would – what a pipe dream – but instead something could at least be achieved with all that money. After all, there isn’t that big a difference technically between a Seawolf nuclear submarine and, for example, a spacecraft capable of going to Mars. It’s just that the former is designed to kill tens of millions of people in a nuclear fire-storm, and the latter could open up a whole new chapter of human development. The question of which to build would seem to be a no-brainer, but unfortunately that’s exactly what we have in Washington. Needless to say, we haven’t exactly enjoyed political leadership in the US capable of seeing things in visionary terms. This has been a big disappointment.

I was very lucky to go visit Arthur Clarke in December of 2001 so I could ask him personally about what his views were on the lack of progress when it comes to crewed spaceflight. In retrospect a lot of the ideas I just mentioned were planted there by Arthur’s tireless non-fiction work of the 50’s and 60’s. He was the leading propagandist of the Space Age – even if that work was overshadowed by his science fiction. When I visited him I wasn’t yet working on my book, though I had been amassing space probe pictures for years – as does he, by the way; we traded pictures of Jupiter’s moon Europa! As Sir Arthur points out in his generous introduction to my book, the achievements of the robot space probes goes a long way towards undercutting any disappointment about the lack of human exploration of the Solar System. But for me the most important result of going to visit him – well, after the honor of spending days talking with him and making a new friend, of course – was bringing a poster of 2001 for him to sign and date in the year 2001. Now that’s something!

TH: If you were to mention one argument of your book, what would it be?

MB: That’s an interesting question. It would have to be that these pictures can be understood not just as science, in other words as the result of scientific curiosity, but also as art. As landscape photography, even as abstract art, in places. I believe that the images sent to Earth by the probes represent an entire previously unacknowledged chapter in the history of photography. And there are several reasons why it hasn’t necessarily been understood as such previously – as art. One is that this is a NASA thing, a space program thing, run by an anonymous collective of egg-head scientists in white coats with pocket-protectors and, you know, spectacles. Or so goes the cliché. How could that be art? – it’s science. A second reason is that nobody has really gone through that immense archive of material before to look for the real gems in there, the gold in the dross. I mean, NASA’s PR machine always released a handful of shots to the press, some of them quite astonishing, but in general they were just the tip of the iceberg, and they vanished into collective memory with that week’s Time magazine. They also tended to be garishly over-colored, as though someone had concluded that the shortest way to public approval was via pumped up technocolors. So they sometimes looked quite fake. The actual colors of the planets are beautiful enough without needing to exaggerate them – something I hope I conveyed with this book. In any case, the internet has now allowed anybody with a reasonably fast connection to explore the entire database of these missions. In effect, you can proceed down the entire “image trajectory.” If you want to view each mission as a chain of portholes punched into space-time, well, you can go and look through each one. And I found shots of Jupiter and Saturn that I’m convinced rank up there with some of the greatest photographic images ever recorded; they’re certainly among the most stunning views of nature ever taken. Or so I believe; if I didn’t I wouldn’t have made this book. And a third reason, of course, why these pictures haven’t really been understood as art is the authorship question. Who is responsible for these pictures? Well, there isn’t one address, really; there are three. First, there’s that anonymous mob of engineers and scientists who built, launched, and then ran these things – though they’re actually not so anonymous; they have big careers and are readily identifiable. Second, the probes themselves, which may be ordered to investigate this or that set of target coordinates, but which inevitably always introduce their own ‘thinking’ (and autonomous pointing and shooting) into the equation. And finally the curator/image processor, the person who chose which pictures become representative of the first two, and then worked on them, in my case using digital image processing techniques, to make them reveal their best qualities. So it’s a big collective, a bionic collective linking humans and machines.

TH: Since, with this book anyway, you represent the curator and image processor, one third of that authorship triad, as you say, does that mean you are ascribing a percentage of the authorship of these pictures to yourself?

MB: Another interesting question, and I’ll answer it by telling a story. In the last year astronomers have been pooling the immense amounts of data that are continuously pouring down from our space sensors, and also our Earth-based telescopes, and creating what they are calling a “National Virtual Observatory.” Since there is so staggeringly much data, terabytes and terabytes of it, it’s impossible for astronomers to digest all of it, or even glance at all of it, let alone always assemble the various views of the same quadrants of space, for example, to search for similarities in the data, or differences – either of which can lead to new discoveries. So the solution is to create a kind of virtual universe that can be accessed by scientists at any time. This way at least it’s all sitting there, so to speak, in one set of hard-drives, ready for study. So we’re talking about an “outside-in” universe here, a universe of data, of pre-recorded observations. And the activity of going through this material isn’t really observation any more, because the actual observations have already been made. Instead they call it “data mining.” Which is an interesting metaphor, as it seems to call for digging in to the Earth – the opposite of looking up at the stars and planets. Which is fair enough, since when you dig far enough into the Earth, you get to the other side, and see space again…

Anyway, although the National Virtual Observatory has only been up and running for a year, this spring astronomers already used it to discover three brown dwarfs in deep space – the brown dwarf being not a Tolkien character but a smouldering spherical object somewhere between  a star and a planet in size and consistency. So in their first real use of the National Virtual Observatory, they already made some significant discoveries. And there will be many more, no doubt.

But my larger point is, I’m sure that those discoveries will be credited to the scientists who conducted the data-mining – as they should be. Even if technically Hubble, or any one of a number of other telescopes, conducted the observations, Hubble doesn’t really have a “mind” capable of registering such a discovery yet. There’s no sentient supercomputer on the level of HAL-9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, unfortunately. So “authorship” of those brown dwarf discoveries will no doubt go to the scientists who conducted the data mining.

The reason I mention all this is that my book contains a number of images that I’m very proud of, and when I examine the source of that pride I realize that I feel like I’ve “discovered” – though certainly not “taken” – those images. Because I was doing something very similar to the astronomers; I was “data mining” through hundreds of thousands of layered images, and looking at them with my own set of criteria in mind. Even if two generations of planetary scientists have riffled through, for example, all of the two Voyagers’ Jupiter and Saturn images, or all the four Vikings’ Mars images, they were generally looking for pieces of evidence to prove or disprove a supposition or theory – they approached the pictures as scientific data, in other words. Whereas I was kind of “re-purposing” the material and looking for stunning images of nature, pictures that could inspire a sense of awe, and with luck even be capable of holding their own as “art,” whatever that really is. And I think – I know – I discovered some, and I even “authored” some multiple image mosaics, creating new composite images. And that’s one reason for my pride in them.

Having said that, though, I wouldn’t think of trying to take away from the achievements  of the engineers who built these fantastic camera platforms, or the trajectory specialists who got them to where they were going, or the planetary scientists who directed them to investigate various hemispheres or latitudes of a given moon or planet – or of course the probes themselves, which are semi-autonomous and exhibit the bare beginnings of sentience. But I do feel a certain pride in having “unearthed” (well, another interesting metaphor) some of the pictures in my book.