Jupiter Project: A Final Word

As depicted in Jupiter Project,
life in space could be fun.

Walk into any bookstore, and you are confounded by an infinite number of books.  Even segregated into helpful categories, more titles await your perusal than you could ever read in a lifetime.  All too often, educators and employers force on us a simple choice: read this assigned work, or face my displeasure.  After thus equating reading and work in our minds, some of us opt to read little more, and if we do, these tend to be books which make no demands of us, such as light entertainment or ones that explore our interests or hobbies.  Some of us aspire to do more than this, to dedicate at least a portion of our reading to books of importance: ones valued by previous generations, or that speak to current issues.  So why can’t we do all three, you ask?  Why do we find it so difficult to identify those special books that not only inform us in vital ways, that not only fill us with delight, but speak to issues pertinent to generations both previous and present?  I, for one, believe that Jupiter Project, by Dr. Gregory Benford, is one such book.

Firstly, Jupiter Project is both important and fun.  For those who want factual reading, the novel explains how we could live beyond the confines of Earth, touching on such fundamental issues as space station design, how to build shuttles and satellites, even how to extract necessities like air and water from a distant world we might wish to colonize (in this case, Jupiter’s moon Ganymede).  Like Huckleberry Finn and the Heinlein juveniles, Benford’s novel stirs the blood with rousing adventure.  His young protagonist, Matt Bowles, confronts crucial issues from past and fights against those who would bar him and those he loves from choosing their own destinies. 

Secondly, while Fantasy novels are currently in vogue, Jupiter Project offers just as much escapism for children as it does for teens and adults.  Children could imagine themselves putting on Matt’s space suit, walking out of an airlock, and floating through space.  Teens could imagine themselves piloting a shuttle like Matt, or performing satellite maintenance using an electronic device of their own design, while Jupiter rotates below them, its storm clouds spinning and clashing before their eyes.  Adults could imagine taking their families with them (like Matt’s parents) to live on the space station JABOL, or exploring the mysteries of Jupiter and its asteroid belt as JABOL’s crew members do, or building the big reactors for Ganymede’s Atmosphere Project, so that their grandchildren could live unassisted on its surface.  While previous generations thrilled to Captain Ahab’s attempts to capture and kill Moby Dick, people of all ages can revel in Matt’s death-defying effort to save JABOL from closure.

Lastly, Jupiter Project is a book everyone should read because it speaks to timeless issues, and because it challenges us to consider the direction in which we, as a society, are headed.  For previous generations, Lewis and Clark were heroes.  The great American dream was to leave behind known society and settled territories, and forge a new life in distant lands full of possibilities they could only imagine.  Today we relegate a few weeks each year to our personal explorations, and that’s if we have the funds and can get the time off work to do so.  Instead of taking on the wilderness and converting it to our desires, we repaint our rooms, remodel our homes, and re-landscape our yards.  When these efforts at transformation fail to satisfy, we consult books and experts on how to re-prioritize our lives to make them more productive.  A young president once charged us with a different dream, one that he believed we should pursue, not because it would make our individual lives easier or more pleasant, but because it would constitute a noble achievement for all humanity. 

Visionary writer Arthur C. Clarke is credited with saying that the remarkable thing was not that we made it to the moon, but that we stopped going there.  We’ve all heard variations on this self-help mantra: if we can conceive it, and we can believe it, we can achieve it.  Yet we’ve allowed the accountants and bureaucrats to tell us that our dreams of exploration and colonization beyond this world are too costly, too impractical, too hard.  In so doing, we’ve relegated those dreams to the trash cans of history.  Are we content to let them remain there?  In Jupiter Project, Dr. Gregory Benford suggests a way forward for us all, if we will only rededicate ourselves to the goals we once dared to believe that we really, truly could achieve.

Dragon Dave

Matt Bowles: Renaissance Man

Inspired by someone extraordinary.

Even the most gifted teachers struggle at times to hold their students’ interest.  One can hardly blame the students, who often fail to see the connection between the classes society forces them to take and the jobs available to them after graduation.  What if children grew up on the frontiers of space, where the dangers of everyday life were coupled with discoveries just waiting to be made?  In his novel Jupiter Project, Dr. Gregory Benford presents us with a young man who clearly sees a connection between his studies and his desired career, one who will never simply settle for less than he is capable of achieving.

In addition to taking Calculus and other courses in space station JABOL’s Education Center, Matt Bowles has an Electronics class in Mr. Jablon’s lab.  There he learns to make new circuits and simple devices.  When he designs an improved version of the Faraday Cups for JABOL’s orbital satellites, his instructor helps him build it.  Such practical “study” is coupled with work experience in Monitoring.  For several hours each day, he not only monitors all nearby satellites to make sure they are functioning normally, but looks for asteroids, rocks, or anything else orbiting Jupiter that could put a hole in the space station or destroy one of its satellites.  While he enjoys this work, he yearns to explore his interests further, such as by maneuvering the shuttles, skimmers, and one-man jetters that service JABOL.  What more could the station do to spur on Matt’s ambitions, you wonder?  How about requiring all teens to take a periodic vacation on Ganymede?

As the ion cruiser Sagan is parked in the Can’s hollow interior, Matt suits up, leaves through an airlock, and utilizing a safety line, space-walks to the ship.  Once he arrives on Ganymede, he is assigned a bunk in the dormitory, and then heads for the life dome, where he can take off his suit and just have fun.  When he’s not performing amazing turns and maneuvers on the small ski slope (in that moon’s 1/3 G), Matt can explore the narrow valleys and foggy marshes, tour the experimental farm, or play soccer and other games with his friends.  But Matt’s interests are too great for him to spend his entire vacation at play, and his schooling and work experience qualify him for any number of jobs.  He opts to spend the remainder of his vacation not in the dome, but working in remote areas of the moon. 

The next day, Matt suits up and goes out to where the walkers are parked.  His walker, nicknamed Perambulatin’ Puss or just Cat, stands six meters tall, on six legs.  Living and working quarters are in the bubble on top.  Matt climbs up the entrance ladder through a jumble of hydraulic valves and rocker arms, then sets the vehicle in motion.  Setting an easy pace of forty kilometers-per-hour, he heads out across the moon’s surface.  For the next five days, he will stop at remote sensors to perform maintenance and take samples.  Ganymede is constantly changing: the big fusion plants are throwing out enormous amounts of heat and gas.  This transforms the ice fields into churning ammonia rivers.  Recorders and pocket laboratories have been placed all over Ganymede to monitor the air and temperature changes occurring far away from the big reactors.  Matt’s journey allows him to experience this changing landscape first hand. 

Yearning to become someone extraordinary.

Perhaps not every child growing up on JABOL would accomplish feats worthy of the history books.  But with Jupiter just outside a window, with space just outside the front door, with a moon being terraformed just a short flight away, how many of the next generation would be content to live out their lives just getting by?  How many more might be inspired to become truly extraordinary?

Dragon Dave