But people here know that all their marvels -- JPL's deep-space control center is monitoring 35 space ventures -- are performed against a backdrop of deepening public indifference. And cosmology's human capital is declining as young scientists choose other career paths.
The public's diminishing capacity for astonishment is astonishing. Perhaps second only to Einstein's question (Did God have a choice in the creation of the world?) is this one: How did matter, which is what we are, become conscious, then curious? Not all clues can be found on Earth.
Curiosity is why a Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977 is now 8.5 billion miles away. It is, in the scheme of things, just next door: traveling now at 1 million miles per day, it would have to continue for 40,000 more years just to be closer to another star than to our sun. Still, here in our wee solar system -- our little smudge on the skies of uncountable billions of galaxies -- Voyager's and JPL's other undertakings must be measured against Einstein's axiom: "All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike -- and yet it is the most precious thing we have."
All space programs search for . . . us. For, that is, understanding of how we came to be. Does that mean space exploration amounts to species narcissism? Yes, and that is an excellent thing. It is noble to strive to go beyond the Book of Genesis and other poetry, to scientific evidence about our origins, and perhaps destiny.
The Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-79), an early authority on Saturn's rings, had, as cosmologists should, a poetic bent:
At quite uncertain times and places,
The atoms left their heavenly path,
And by fortuitous embraces,
Engendered all that being hath.
The phrase "fortuitous embraces," although lovely, is not explanatory. Knowledge, tickled from the heavens, is the business of a small band of possible explainers -- the people of JPL and NASA, government at its best.