THE World Summit on Sustainable Development seemed to supply everyone with more or less what they wanted – except for the poor, of course, who were scarcely there at all. The corporate world and the governments that serve them were able to promise more programmes, such as providing clean drinking water for the billion or so people who lack it, or smallish but fine-sounding efforts at saving forests.
These don’t cost too much and help chip away some of the greed-coloured stain that has built up of late on the corporate image. George Bush did not attend, so professional greens and anti-globalists had to satisfy themselves with heckling Secretary of State Colin Powell. Any American official would have sufficed – they were simply props in the theatrical production.
The lines had been memorised and the plot was laid out well in advance: the US had backed out of the Kyoto treaty and would have to pay the price in public humiliation, while the rich, and most especially the US, would set their jaws and defend the status quo. Meanwhile, national leaders and ministers from Togo to Tunisia got to take the stage before a world audience somewhat more attentive than the one they normally get at the UN, and held forth on how important it is for someone – especially someone else – to end starvation, disease and poverty.
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If this seems a cynical take on the affair, it is. The world learned 10 years ago at the Rio Earth Summit that huge international meetings where politicians are given long reins at the podium and demonstrators free reign in the streets don’t solve big, complicated problems. Certainly not if the problems concern the great divide between rich and poor, or the tragic destruction of the environment. Those problems get solved village by village, house to house. Grand promises and declarations are easy. Digging a well or teaching a child to read are not.
REMEMBER Pathfinder? NASA certainly does. It was the little bitty spacecraft that cost less that $200 million – next to nothing in space-mission terms – and not only defied the odds by using a new airbag technology to land safely on the surface of Mars five years ago but also sent back a wealth of stunning pictures. Even if the pictures were more valuable for public relations than science, Pathfinder still managed to inch forward our understanding of our neighbouring planet.
How NASA would love another mission like Pathfinder. Two of the last three Mars missions have ended in total failure, and NASA’s newest spacecraft, Contour, broke apart after an apparent malfunction with a booster rocket.
The good news is that there is a new Pathfinder-like mission being put together at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. In fact, two spacecraft are being built, and both will be launched when the next window for a Mars mission opens next May. The bad news is that the new mission has been operating on an extremely tight schedule, and project managers worry that deadlines may not be met. And since the new mission costs four times what Pathfinder cost, failure would be expensive as well as embarrassing.
With public apathy about the International Space Station at an all-time high, another pair of high-profile failures is something the space agency does not want to think about too closely. On the other hand, a spectacular success would likely renew public enthusiasm for space exploration. Oh for another Pathfinder.
