Pathfinder and The Angry Red Planet

Perhaps the most unpopular president of all time was none other than George Bush. No, not W. He

Read my lips!

sucked too, but I mean the other one. George followed in the wake of one of the most absolutely, hands-down, no-bullshit unbelievably popular presidents in the history of the United States, Ronald Reagan. Georgie-boy was Vice-President during the Reagan administration, which meant he was pretty much invisible for most of the 80s. But still, he was “Dutch” Reagan’s second banana, so that was enough to get him elected into the top spot since most voters took a flyer on the notion that he’d keep the good times rolling.

Unfortunately everything sort of collapsed -- particularly the economy -- because, when it came right down to it, Reagan was a big business puppet and kind of a lovable buffoon. Poor old George, being almost completely deficit of a personality, couldn’t play the beloved cowboy card like his predecessor, so he pretty much got blamed for everything that had gone wrong. ’Course he wasn’t all bad. He did coin the phrase, “Read my lips!“ and he refused -- on television -- to eat broccoli. That’s something, anyway.

In a desperate attempt to bolster his sagging image, George tried something that John F. Kennedy had pulled off with panache decades before. Standing on the steps of the Simthsonian’s National Air and Space Museum on the 20th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, Bush tried to play the space card by making a half-ass commitment to return to the moon and then continue on to Mars.

For those of you without a lot of memories about Kennedy, here’s the 411: In the early 1960s, Russia, having risen from the ashes of World War II as a nuclear power and now calling herself the United Soviet Socialist Republic or USSR, was the most deadly rival of the United States. They were communists -- the bad guys -- and we were capitalists -- the good guys -- and basically we competed over everything from atom bombs to space exploration. Unfortunately, when it came to space exploration, they were better than we were so we got our asses kicked regularly. While they successfully launched the first satellite, Sputnik, our rockets were blowing up on the launch pads. While we were messing around with monkeys in space suits, they put the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space and let him orbit the earth for awhile. Yep. Their space program was literally spinning circles around ours.

By 1961, Kennedy had had enough, and he committed the United States to the task of landing a man on the moon and bringing him back to earth by the end of the decade. The technology didn’t exist to do it, so NASA made it up as they went along. And they achieved miracles, everything from multiple moon landings to Voyager to Viking. And it made Kennedy even more of a legend than he already was.

But none of this was free. What was achieved was legend, but it was only because Kennedy wrote NASA a blank check. Unfortunately without a national rival like the USSR to compete with and in the face of a terrible recession, Bush couldn’t do that. So in his dramatic vision of the creation or a new space station, returning to the moon and landing on Mars, was little more than a request for an estimate. When the price tag came back at a whopping $500 billion dollars, Bush backed off. Even though this is a trivial cost compared to the the $4 to $6 trillion George’s son, W, and Barrack Obama have spent blowing up camels in Afghanistan, it was considered way too much for something as trivial as space exploration, so manned programs beyond earth orbit died in poverty.

Sojourner, the first wanderer of Mars

Fortunately, it wasn’t all black. NASA glommed onto the concept of going to Mars, did an end run around the whole political fiasco, and got one really cool project approved. It was called Pathfinder. This was an ambitious little mission to send a robot probe to the surface of Mars. Unlike its decades-earlier predecessor, Viking, Pathfinder wouldn’t just land and sit there. The total package consisted of a weather station and a rover. This was a nifty little robot about the size of a skateboard with six little metal wheels that allowed it to wander around and look at stuff. After landing, the base station was named The Carl Saga Memorial Station. But the rover, the first wanderer of Mars, already had a name it had gotten as the result of a nationwide name-the-rover contest. JPL that asked students across the country to write essays explaining why the little robot should bear the name of their favorite historic heroine. The winning name was Sojourner, named for Sojourner Truth, a former slave who escaped to freedom and turned into an effective abolitionist and women’s rights activist.

And she -- or at least her namesake -- was about to escape to the surface of Mars. But there were a few tiny little glitches to be dealt with first.

As soon as George Bush made his rousing speech on the stairs of the Smithsonian, NASA had, of course, jumped on his promise like white on rice. The fly in the ointment was Money. To put it bluntly, there wasn’t any. So Pathfinder’s entire mission budget was actually less than had been spent designing the parachutes for the 1976 Viking probes. Pathfinder, therefore, wouldn’t have the luxury of sitting in orbit above the planet while someone found a decent landing site. Instead it would fly on a direct course from Earth to a predetermined destination. The Russians had tried that approach with ten different missions and all but one failed. Even the one that succeeded only managed to transmit for 20 or 30 seconds before it gave up the ghost. And there was another little nagging problem to be added on to all rest.

Nobody knew exactly how to land.

This might raise a question mark over your head. You’re probably asking yourself, “hadn’t they already set LEMs on the moon and two -- count ’em -- two Viking Probes the size of Volkswaggens on the surface of Mars, or did I miss something?“

Well of course they had. But more than 20 years had passed since then. Most of the scientists involved in those landings were retired or dead, including Carl Sagan, who had personally supervised Viking and the landings. There weren’t a lot of records kept, most of the technologies were ancient and the companies that built the hardware were long gone. So, with no money and their backs firmly against the wall, JPL scientists and engineers had to invent a whole new way of landing a spacecraft on the surface of a distant world.

What they came up with was beyond novel.

They placed Sojourner on a ramp atop the base station, closed its four legs around it like flower pedals

A novel way to land.

and wrapped the whole thing in a cocoon of inflatable balls. Once the Pathfinder entered the Martian atmosphere, a parachute opened, slowing it down. All the balls inflate. Then the parachute is released and the whole thing bounces on the surface like a gigantic beach ball until it comes to a rolling halt. The balls deflate and the base stations pedals open, flipping the station into an upright position.

When you think about it, the whole idea is so incredibly preposterous that its amazing it ever got proposed let alone approved. What’s more amazing still is that it worked. Still, as novel and unusual an approach as this was, it was hardly what anyone who grew up on drive-in theater science fiction would expect. In all of those great old movies like The Angry Red Planet, rocket ships didn’t separate by stages during launch. They stayed in one piece. And when they got to where they were going, nothing was left in orbit, there were no capsules, parachutes or bouncing balls. The ship simply came down vertically and set down on legs, standing straight up just like the TWA (which later became the MacDonald/Douglas) I flew to Mars in when I was a kid. You may have flown on it too. It the rocketship that stood in front of the spaceport beside Space Mountain at Disneyland. Now that I think about it, we never did actually land on Mars during that ride. We just orbited the planet until a meteor storm caused us to take another space-jump through hyperspace. My older brother tried to convince me that we weren’t actually in the rocket standing outside, though. He said the cabin we flew in was much too wide to actually be the inside it.

Outside and inside the rocket

I still think he’s wrong though. I mean, the TARDIS is a lot bigger inside, isn’t it?

Anyway, when Pathfinder was on the surface of Mars, and the ramp extended to the ground, Sojourner drove down the side of the Carl Saga Memorial Station to the surface. It was never intended to go back up and park. The rover was meant to wander around looking at stuff until it simply quit working. In The Angry Red Planet, a ramp extended from the MR1 -- that’s the name of the rocketship, I think it stands for Mars Rocket One -- to the surface for very much the same reason.

Sojourner would have probably caught the attention and fancy of a lot more people had she sent back pictures of the weird stuff the crew of the MR1 saw when they went down their own ramp.

But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. For those of you that don’t know, The Angry Red Planet was a great “B” drive-in science fiction flick that came out in 1960, a year before Kennedy gave the Soviets the finger and promised us the moon. It was produced by a guy named Sid Pink (no shit) who also co-wrote it along with the director, Ib Melchior based on his own story about man‘s first trip to Mars.

Unlike Pathfinder, whose crew consisted of a single robot rover, the MR1 had a crew of four humans. There was the pilot, who resembles and tries unsuccessfully to act like Humprey Bogart, the grizzled, pipe-smoking rocket scientist (played by Les Tremaine, who also played the General in George Pal’s 1953 version of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds among lots of other cheesy sci fi roles), the somewhat bumbling communications and electronics expert (who looks a little and acts a lot like Curley from the Three Stooges), and a plant and animal biologist that just happens to be a hot redhead in one of those 60s style bras that makes her boobs stick out like rocket ships.

Down the Carl Saga Station ramp

Down the MR1 ramp

When Sojourner rolled down the ramp and hit the Martian surface, she was smack dab in the center of a rock garden. This greatly contrasts with the jungle the crew of the MR1 find just outside their ship. As they go into the jungle to explore, the Bogartesque Colonel warns the redhead (the annoying running gag is that her name is Iris, but he calls her “Irish” because of her red hair) to not wander off. She, of course does, but only after telling him that she can take care of herself. Then she runs straight into a man-eating plant complete with waving tendrils that grabs hold of her and drags her into it’s huge, lettuce-covered maw of a mouth. Despite her earlier bravado, she screams bloody murder for the Colonel, who shows up with Sam, the comic relief communications guy who hits the plant with a beam from an odd freeze-ray rifle right after the Colonel chops its tendrils off with a machete.

Barnicle Bill get a hole

Plant gets the freeze ray

Not exactly a very friendly greeting from Earth. But its no less violent than the welcome Sojourner gives to Barnacle Bill, the first Martian rock she encounters. Sojourner doesn’t have a freeze ray or a machete, but she does have a drill in her nose. She rolls right up and drills a hole in it. Being stoned, it doesn’t actually care. Neither does anyone else, except for the scientists.

Next day, Sojourner drives over and looks at another rock. The crew of MR1, on the other hand, go all the way through the jungle and find themselves on a desert plain not unlike the one Sojourner is seeing. There is a stand of eight odd-looking trees in the middle of it. So Irish uses the Colonel’s machete to lop off a fist size thorn only to learn that it wasn’t a stand of trees at all. It was, instead, the legs of one of my all-time favorite movie monsters, the infamous Bat-Rat Spider. This thing is 40-feet tall, stands on eight

The Bat-Rat Spider, one of my favorite movie monsters

spider’s legs with lobster-like claws that extend into bat wings coming from the body of a rat complete with little rat’s claws and a rat-like face with giant teeth and bat’s ears. The Bat-Rat Spider is really pissed off, so, while growling its head off, it tries to grab the rocket scientist in one of its claws. Of course, being older, the rocket scientist grimaces with pain and grabs his chest, since everyone knew that anyone over 50 back in the 1960s had a dicey heart and any excitement at all could and probably would trigger a heart attack. In fact, the two ground rules of any 1960s drive-in flick are that all women fall down while running away from monsters, and sooner or later the older guy will keel over from a heart attack when the action heats up. That being the case, it makes you wonder why they would actually send an old guy into space in the first place. Obviously they expected some excitement or they wouldn’t have equipped the space ship with hand guns, machetes and freeze-ray rifles.

Speaking of that, Sam tries to freeze the Bat-Rat Spider with his freeze ray rifle -- which he has named “Cleo” -- with little effect. So the Colonel directs Sam to hit the monster in the eyes, which immediately turn white, having been frozen solid, and the monster ambles away. That part always bothered me. I know it’s a monster, but really. Freeze its eyes? Man, that’s really cold. What’s it going to do now, spend the rest of its life running into rocks?

Perhaps we should name it Sojourner.

Well, despite the fact that he’s nearly been eaten, to say nothing of the heart attack waiting to get him, the rocket scientist doesn’t want to go back to the ship and insists they more on. So, just over a rise, they find a huge lake.

Irish says, “So, there is water on Mars,” to which the Colonel replies, “We should have brought the boat.”

Personally, I thought it was strange that with space and weight always at a premium on rocket ships that they would pack the MR1 with an inflatable boat big enough for a crew of four even though they had no idea if there was water on Mars or not. But apparently they wanted to be prepared for anything. At first they had no intention of using it. When the crew got back to the ship, the rocket scientist and the Colonel decided that Mars is too dangerous and they’d be better off leaving for home. Unfortunately, some strange force is holding the rocket down, so take off isn’t an option. Realizing they have to stay, the next day they take the boat out to see if they can find out who is keeping them a prisoner and why.

Adrift on the Martian sea

So while Sojourner is busily drilling a hole in another rock, the crew of the MR1 paddles their boat out into the lake until they spot a Martian city with buildings half-a-mile tall. Before they can land there, though, and have a look around, they are attacked by another monster, this one a giant amoeba with a spiky punk haircut and a single rotating eye. They paddle like the devil for shore and then run like hell for the rocket ships. But the amoeba follows them. Irish, of course, stumbles and falls, and Sam tries to cover her by freezing the amoeba. But this monster is like the Blob that ate all the people in the movie theater after chasing Steve McQueen. It’s like trying to kill a bowl of jello. Instead of dying, it eats Sam and his freeze rifle and then tries to eat the MR1 for dessert. While trying to save Sam from his awful fate, the Colonel gets some monster goo on his arm which immediately eats through his suit. But just when it looks like the crew’s had it, they run electricity through the hull, frying the monster. The ship takes off, but all this excitement finally triggers heart attack the rocket scientist has been putting off, poor old bastard, so by the time the MR1 is spotted by mission control and brought back to Earth, only Irish -- the inevitable “final girl” -- is left to tell the tale.

Meanwhile, while all this drama is unfolding, Sojourner wanders off to look at another rock. It would have been amusing if she’d found the boat instead.

Compared to cheesy drive-in science fiction, Pathfinder seems a little dull. Then again, compared to the angry red planet, Mars isn’t exactly the most exciting place you could want to be either. No matter how much we want there to be, there just aren’t any jungles, lakes, man-eating plants, punk-rock amoebas, mile-high cities or 40-foot monsters. It’s just a vast, cold, dry rock-strewn desert. But it wasn’t always that way, and little Sojourner, the skateboard-size first wanderer of Mars took the first steps (rolls?) toward proving it. Now Curiosity has taken up the mantel. And who knows what it will find.

But in the meantime, if you’re interested, The Angry Red Planet is currently available for viewing on Netflix and probably some other places to. So check it out. It’ll have you doing the Martian March in no time.


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