Antarctic explorer Navy Rear Admiral Richard Byrd and transatlantic pilot Amelia Earhart made thousands for their journeys by selling postmarked souvenir envelopes and stamps that commemorated their travels. They were helped along by “Stamp-Collector-in-Chief” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a devoted philatelist, who made supporting American exploration as easy as buying a stamp.

Stamp collecting began almost as soon as stamps began being printed in the 1840s. Great Britain first came up with the concept of stamps to solve a postal problem: Mail recipients generally paid postage upon delivery, but their correspondents were skirting the system by writing messages on the outside of mailed envelopes—“Arrived in London”—so that the recipients could then decline to pay the postage. Stamps flipped the script by forcing the sender to pre-pay for transporting a letter. In turn, the stamp-based system ushered in a revolution. Not only were postal authorities guaranteed payment, but the cost of sending letters fell.

With costs reduced, the number of letters circulating through the mail skyrocketed. Other nations began to adopt Britain’s postal model, too, printing stamps with unique images that represented their nation or empire. With the emergence of beautiful and innovative postage designs, increasing numbers of people naturally started collecting them. Enthusiasts purchased stamps, placed them into albums, and traded them with friends.

Thousands of stamp collectors emerged in the U.S., for instance, where early stamps featured portraits of the first president, George Washington, and the first postmaster general, Benjamin Franklin. The phenomenon of stamp collecting coincided and was bolstered by an emerging network of male-only collecting clubs in the late 1880s that were similar to fraternal orders and dinner clubs. Stamp enthusiasts who did not or could not belong to the collecting clubs could still take part by reading a growing number of stamp-collecting publications. There was no shortage in stamps to marvel over; between 1864 and 1906, collectors printed and circulated more than 900 stamp papers, as they were referred to at the time, in the U.S. alone.

By the 1930s, stamp collecting was so popular that radio stations across the U.S. dedicated broadcasts to newly issued stamps and provided tips for caring for collections. Teachers gave grade school students stamps from around the globe to teach geography. Articles appeared in magazines, such as Ladies’ Home Journal, and large daily newspapers, such as the Washington Post, extolling the virtues of stamp collecting (or, on the flip side, framed it more negatively, as a “mania”). Meanwhile, cultural institutions—libraries, museums and the like—hosted stamp exhibitions. Even businesses got in on the trend, using stamps to attract customers. Starting in the 1880s, the tobacco company W. Duke and Sons, which already handed out baseball cards in cigarette boxes to attract customers and increase sales, began giving away international postage stamps. The company even printed its own stamp album, which was designed to hold the entire set of stamps distributed in its packages.

Postal agencies took notice and stoked the hobby further. In 1892, Postmaster General John Wanamaker, founder of Wanamaker’s Department Store in Philadelphia, oversaw the issuing of the first commemorative stamp series, a collection of 16 intricately designed stamps depicting the life of Christopher Columbus to promote the World’s Columbian Exposition. Stamp sales increased by millions of dollars. Between 1893 and 1919, alone, the post office printed 47 more sets of commemorative stamps, most of which celebrated World’s Fairs held in the U.S. From 1920 to 1940, the post office more than tripled its output, printing 150 more, available for a limited time and designed to be collected. Because federal rules restricted American stamps from carrying the image of a living person, most of these designs looked backward to celebrate contemporary events.

It’s hard to say who came up with the idea of tapping into the stamp-collecting craze to raise money for expeditions, but Amelia Earhart was almost certainly one of the first to do so. The famed aviatrix made her name in the early days of flight in the 1920s as one of America’s first pilots, and by 1932 had become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Earhart’s trips were expensive, and despite her fame, she was always short on funding.

Earhart’s husband and publicist, George Palmer Putnam, had encouraged her to write an autobiography and go on speaking tours to promote her career, and he also appears to have come up with the idea of helping her make money from the stamp-collecting craze. In 1932, Earhart carried 50 letters she had postmarked and signed on her first solo transatlantic flight. Putnam sold these letters to collectors who sought materials from notable figures. The scheme was successful, and Earhart began carrying mail on all of her international flights.

Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd followed her lead. Byrd was a naval scientist who explored the North and South Poles, and he, too, had to raise money for his expeditions. Preparing for a second voyage to Antarctica in 1933, he got the CBS radio network to feature a weekly broadcast from the “Little America” military base in Antarctica, sponsored by General Foods, which also published and sold the “Authorized Map” of the expedition. Like Earhart, Byrd benefitted from a fundraising opportunity directed at philatelists. Unlike Earhart, Byrd got government help making it happen, from none other than President Roosevelt.

This three-cent stamp, created to fund Byrd’s expedition, was inspired by President Roosevelt’s initial sketch. Courtesy of the National Postal Museum.

As a child, Roosevelt learned philately from his mother. In adulthood, he returned to the hobby while traveling the world as assistant secretary of the Navy from 1913 to 1920, and found comfort in his collection after his polio diagnosis in 1921. Newspapers reported that Roosevelt sorted stamps in the White House during his famous first 100 days in office to help him relax while he waited for Congress to vote on legislation.

FDR used his position to encourage stamp collecting and influence stamp production. He submitted ideas for stamps that promoted federal programs, like the national parks, and New Deal initiatives, such as the National Recovery Act.

When Byrd visited Roosevelt in the White House in 1933 seeking financial assistance for his Antarctic expedition, Roosevelt had a brainstorm. Rather than offer government funds, he asked Byrd to send him a letter postmarked from “Little America”—and suggested that other collectors might want a unique souvenir cover canceled at Little America, too, or might be interested in supporting Byrd’s expedition by purchasing a limited-issue stamp. Roosevelt himself sketched out a quick design that was later adapted by artists at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing: a map of the globe with dotted lines pointing out Byrd’s major expeditions to the North and South Poles. Collectors could buy a three-cent stamp, or pay 53 cents for a stamped envelope at Gimbel’s Department Store or through the U.S. Post Office Department’s own stamp store, the Philatelic Agency.

The initiative was a success. Ultimately, more than 150,000 envelopes were sent down to the “most southerly post office” at Little America, where each piece of mail was canceled with a special seal. Because of the distance carried, the postal service imposed a 50-cent transportation fee, which helped finance the expedition’s expenses, raising approximately $75,000.

While Earhart never got to benefit from the presidential friendship and support that Byrd enjoyed, as her fame grew, so did her connections with American philatelists. She took to carrying hundreds of letters with her on each of her flights, which her husband sold on her behalf. She was also a collector herself and exhibited international stamps, postmarks and signed envelopes at an international philatelic exhibition in 1936.

Prior to Earhart’s 1937 attempt to circumnavigate the globe, stamp collectors and fans purchased more than 5,000 souvenir envelopes at Gimbel’s, for $5 each. Earhart carried this extra cargo with her, intending to postmark the envelopes at a few stops along her global adventure.

It would be her last. After flying 22,000 miles Earhart, her navigator Fred Noonan, and her plane disappeared in the South Pacific, carrying $25,000 worth of philatelic cargo. Roosevelt allocated federal resources to a large-scale search to find them, led by Navy and Coast Guard ships.

The plane and pilots, and the thousands of stamped envelopes they carried, were never recovered.

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It was a perilous time. Only eight weeks before, a British cargo vessel had been torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat off Cape Farewell just to the south. As newly minted members of the Greenland Patrol of the Atlantic Fleet, the Bowdoin and the Comanche were responsible for preventing German forces from establishing a base on Greenland and for providing vital support for the Allies.

As the Morrissey’s passengers disembarked, town residents gathered onshore. Commander Donald Macmillan of the Bowdoin hurried forward to greet the person in charge. Defying all expectations, the leader was no grizzled Navy man. Instead, a stately, well-coiffed California woman of a certain age clambered out of the rowboat and strode toward him.

Louise Arner Boyd was the world’s leading female Arctic explorer and geographer. By that time, she had organized, financed, and led six maritime expeditions to East Greenland, Franz Josef Land, Jan Mayen Land, and Spitsbergen. She had been showered with honors by five countries, and her scientific accomplishments and daring exploits had earned her newspaper headlines and global renown. A month earlier, many journalists had covered the departure of the 1941 Louise A. Boyd Expedition to Greenland from Washington D.C. But after the Morrissey weighed anchor, more than a few local residents wondered what this outspoken, unusual woman was doing in the company of high-ranking officers engaged in war matters.

The answer to that question was a secret. Boyd, operating under the guise of her work as an explorer, was conducting a covert mission for the American government, searching for possible military landing sites and investigating the improvement of radio communications in this region. Even the captain and crew of her own ship were unaware of the expedition’s true goals.

Boyd’s extensive technical knowledge of Greenland and her work as a U.S. military consultant would make her an invaluable asset to the Allied war effort. But, for all her accomplishments and service to her country, she has largely been forgotten, and not just because historians preferred to consider the larger-than-life dramas of her male colleagues. Her focus on contributing to scientific journals rather than pandering to the sensationalistic whims of the reading public cost her some acclaim. And she had no direct descendants to carry on her legacy.

Her 1941 mission along the western coast of Greenland and eastern Arctic Canada was Boyd’s seventh and final expedition. As on her previous voyages, she pushed the boundaries of geographic knowledge and undertook hazardous journeys to dangerous places. Boyd also brought in promising young scientists to participate in vital polar research. Exploration of the Arctic seascape—with its vast expanses of bobbing ice, the rhythmic sway of the wooden ship as it traversed the surging waves, the soothing solitude of the north—resonated deeply with Boyd and defined who she was and what she did.

“Far north, hidden behind grim barriers of pack ice, are lands that hold one spell-bound,” she wrote in 1935’s The Fiord Region of East Greenland. “Gigantic imaginary gates, with hinges set in the horizon, seem to guard these lands. Slowly the gates swing open, and one enters another world where men are insignificant amid the awesome immensity of lonely mountains, fiords and glaciers.”

But her life had not always been like this. Born in 1887 to a California gold miner who struck it rich and a patrician mother from Rochester, Louise Arner Boyd was raised in a genteel mansion in San Rafael, California. As a child, she was enthralled by real-life tales of polar exploration, but grew up expecting to marry and have children. Like her mother, Boyd became a socialite and philanthropist active in community work.

But her life took unexpected turns. Her brothers died young; her parents did not survive into old age. By the time she was in her early thirties, she had lost her entire family and inherited a fortune. Unmarried and without children, she followed a dream to travel north.

Her first tourist cruise to the Arctic Ocean was so moving that she returned a few years later. This second voyage was also only a pleasure trip, but she chose Franz Josef Land as her destination—then as now, one of the most remote and unforgiving locations on Earth. Following her return to California, Boyd knew that her future was linked to the north. But it took a stroke of destiny to transform her into an explorer.

Boyd planned her first full expedition and arrived during the summer of 1928 in the far northern Norwegian city of Tromsø, prepared to set sail. She was shocked by the news that the iconic explorer Roald Amundsen—conqueror of the South Pole and the first person to successfully traverse the Northwest Passage—had vanished while on a flight to rescue another explorer. A desperate mission involving ships and airplanes from six European countries was launched to locate Amundsen and his French crew.

Boyd lost no time in putting the ship she had hired, as well as the provisions and services of its crew, at the disposal of the government in its rescue efforts. But there was a catch—Boyd demanded to go along. The Norwegian government eagerly accepted her offer, and she ended up an integral part of the Amundsen rescue expedition. Only the most experienced and high-ranking explorers, aviators, and generals had been chosen for this dangerous undertaking, and no allowances were made for a woman. Despite her lack of expertise and the skepticism of male expedition participants, Boyd assumed her responsibilities with vigor.

Louise Arner Boyd holding a piece of equipment on an expedition. Courtesy of Joanna Kafarowski.

Tragically, Amundsen was never found, but by the end of that fateful summer, Boyd had won awards from the Norwegian and French governments for her courage and stamina. And she had discovered her purpose in life as an Arctic explorer.

From this point forward, she began living a double life. While at home in the United States, she was a gracious hostess, a generous benefactor and a beloved member of California high society. While sailing on the high seas, she assumed a different, heroic identity.

How did one become an explorer? She had no formal education to draw on. She had left school in her teens, had limited outdoor expertise, and no family members remained to advise her. Instead, she implemented her charm and networking skills to identify individuals who could help her. She developed an unerring ability to choose exactly the right scientist for the job. Her expedition participants included geologist and famed mountaineer Noel Odell, who was the only survivor of the tragic British Mount Everest Expedition of 1924. She was also a remarkably fast learner who sought out experts in her fields of interest—including photographer Ansel Adams and California Academy of Sciences botanist Alice Eastwood—to teach her what she needed to know.

During the 1930s and ’40s, Boyd’s skills and abilities as an explorer grew. Unlike her male colleagues, she had no interest in conquering territories or being the “first.” Rather, as a self-taught geographer who was awarded the Cullum Geographical Medal in 1938 (only the second woman to earn it), Boyd focused on contributing to science.

She left extensive photographic documentation of Greenland currently used by glaciologists to track climate change in Greenlandic glaciers. She pioneered the use of cutting-edge technology, including the first deep-water recording echo-sounder and photogrammetrical equipment to conduct exploratory surveys in inaccessible places. She discovered a glacier in Greenland, a new underwater bank in the Norwegian Sea, and many new botanical species. More than 70 years later, data generated during her expeditions is still cited by contemporary scientists in the fields of geology, geomorphology, oceanography, and botany.

After the perilous 1941 mission to Greenland was a resounding success, the National Bureau of Standards commended Boyd for resolving critical radio transmission problems they had grappled with in the Arctic for decades. A certificate of appreciation from the Department of the Army extolled her “exemplary service as being highly beneficial to the cause of victory.”

For all this good work, she was not universally respected by her expedition participants. Despite her seemingly gregarious nature, Boyd battled shyness and struggled at times to assert herself. Initially, most academics were happy enough with her credentials and her generous offer to join the team, but once the expedition was underway, some of them ridiculed her behind her back and undermined her position as leader. University of Chicago geologist Harlen Bretz and Duke University plant ecologist H.J. Oosting wrote scathingly about her.

By the time the war was over, Louise Arner Boyd was nearly sixty years old; the 1941 trip was her last true expedition. In 1955, she would realize a dream by becoming one of the first women to be flown over the North Pole. And her polar work continued—through her active participation as an American Geographical Society Councilor, and a member of the Society of Woman Geographers and the American Polar Society—until her death in 1972.

Today the name Louise Arner Boyd is only a dim memory. But it is one worth reviving.

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Last week, my wife and I walked 102 tough miles in eight days in the lush, rain-soaked Scottish Highlands. There’s nothing quite like an eight-hour hike in the pouring rain to get you thinking about why you travel and where you do it. Maybe it was the blisters, the knee brace, and the roll of tape wrapped around my left knee, but some bleak mornings I just wanted to say to hell with Scotland. It rained six out of the eight days. And even when it was “dry,” the perennial gray skies seeped into my body, mind, and spirit. While I was supposed to be communing with the open wilderness, I felt hemmed in and constrained by the heavens. By the end of day five, I felt downright miserable. But then I received a late night text from a good friend back home in Los Angeles that helped me realize not only why I was there, but what it is I love most about traveling.

Although I’m scheduled to fly upwards of 100,000 miles this year, I don’t call myself a traveler. I get tongue-tied whenever I’m asked the inevitable “business or pleasure?” question. I mean, what am I supposed to say? Both? Neither? Must I choose? Is life itself “business” or “pleasure”?

In his odd little essay, “Walking,” Henry David Thoreau explains the origins of the term sauntering. The word is derived “from idle people who roved around the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under the pretense of going à la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land. Sensing their duplicity, children would then exclaim, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a saunterer, a Holy-Lander.

That is how I view the term “traveler” and the many people these days who blithely say they “love to travel”—mere saunterers. And particularly after last week’s rain-soaked musings, I’ve come to think that travel should be more purposeful than that.

I’m partial to places that may seem godforsaken, places where residents have to grapple with human deprivation, isolation, and darkness. I’m deeply curious as to how people manage to survive the slings and arrows of life. Sure, I can enjoy Paris as much as the next guy. There is no denying its beauty. But the City of Lights also sometimes seems like an Impressionist still life that calls me to ponder life’s perfections and delicacies rather than its struggles.

One of my most rewarding trips ever was the three weeks in 1997 I spent traveling around Romania. I wanted to know how Romanians were managing to move beyond the material and spiritual deprivations of the Communist era.

A man I met on a train took me into the sewers of Bucharest to introduce me to a group of children who lived there, and a saintly nun from Arizona took me on her regular visit to an orphanage for children with congenital deformities. In a landscape of so much hopelessness, the legacy of an oppressive dictator, and a morally corrupt ideology, these were the things that struck me most: the power of love and a people’s sheer ferocity in the face of complete tragedy.

And that is what the best travel is to me, the opportunity to strip life to its essentials, not in order to go beyond the culture in which I live, but to remind myself of what culture is for in the first place: to help us survive life’s travails and keep us going. And it certainly helps to put my own bourgeois “travails” in perspective.

A dozen years ago, during the Second Intifada, the Israeli Foreign Ministry invited me to their country and asked me what I wanted to learn. I told them that I wouldn’t speak to politicians or soldiers and that my only interest was how the average Israeli citizen survived the daily stress of terror. I interviewed artists, playwrights, social workers, and psychologists. On that trip, I learned the power of denial and adrenaline.

My favorite cities in Europe are Berlin and Dresden, where, like in Bucharest, one is obliged to grapple with the evils of the not so distant past. A decade or so ago, I spent Christmas Eve alone in a hotel room in a snow-bound and empty Dresden as a way to redefine the holiday away from the trappings of family and tradition and towards more fundamental concepts. Like peace and goodwill.

Alain de Botton recently wrote, in a Financial Times column, about the medieval Catholic tradition of pilgrims taking long journeys to touch the body part of a long-dead saint to help cure whatever ailed them. The Church had a guide to pilgrimages that matched destinations with ailments. At one point, de Botton points out, there were 46 sanctuaries in France alone that welcomed women who were having trouble breast-feeding. Similarly, those who suffered from a painful molar could travel to the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Rome, where they could touch the arm bones of Saint Apollonia, the patron saint of dentistry. Though moderns don’t generally believe in the power of relics to cure them, de Botton encourages today’s travelers to “hang on to the idea that certain parts of the world possess a power to address complaints of our psyches and bring about some sort of change in a way that wouldn’t be possible if we just remained in our bedrooms.”

De Botton’s exhortation explains why I’m drawn to godforsaken places. The ongoing complaints of my psyche only make sense, and can be put into proper perspective, far, far away from my bedroom.

Indeed, sometimes it helps to go to the most remote inhabited island on earth, as I did several years ago when I took a six-week trip to Tristan da Cunha. I hopped on a plane to Cape Town and then hitched a ride on a research vessel for six days before I reached the British-ruled volcanic speck of an island in the South Atlantic. Though my ostensible goal there was to learn about the effects of inbreeding on asthma, what I was forced to study firsthand, in an isolated village of fewer than 300 blood-related souls, were the ways humans try to control each other to protect themselves from one another and from the outside world. There I learned the power of kinship and of harboring a collective disdain for “the others.” Well, before the six weeks were up, the disdain was mutual and I was ready to go home.

Which brings me back to my bleakest days in Scotland. Although the culmination of a life-renewing weight loss effort, the 100-mile walk was no small undertaking for me, a chronic asthmatic whose lungs generally don’t respond well to humidity, or to nature, for that matter. But then came that text message from my friend on the night of day five. “What an achievement,” she wrote. “It’s like you’re walking into a new life. Going through a Scottish birth canal. Only through misery do you find purpose and clarity.” And there it was, I was suffering both physically and mentally because I was being reborn into a healthier and physically more disciplined life. The idea of death is implicit in that of rebirth.

With each step and heavy breath through the Scottish Highlands, I was actively discarding the years of disappointment, anger, and sadness that led to my putting on so much weight. Walking through Scotland, it turns out, was a way for me to actively grapple with my own darkness. I assure you that the trek was neither business nor pleasure. I can say, however, that it was exactly what I love about traveling.

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I was in high school when the two Voyagers swung by Jupiter and Saturn. Along with the rest of the world, I gazed in awe as the spacecraft revealed glorious images of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, violent volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io, Saturn’s stunningly thin and fragile rings, and the thick orange haze shrouding Saturn’s moon Titan. These weren’t the first images of these giant planets, but the ones before Voyager—from spacecraft that were designed to demonstrate that NASA could navigate in deep space and send scientific data back—were very poor. With Voyager, we suddenly had striking images that made even an amateur like me feel as if I were there, riding shotgun on these robots.

Voyager is the reason I got into planetary science, a career that has enabled me to participate in other robotic space missions and to serve as the current president of The Planetary Society, which educates the public about space and advocates for our continued exploration of it. It is a uniquely important mission in humankind’s history of exploration—as a colleague once put it, “You only explore the solar system for the first time once.”
The two Voyager spacecraft, meanwhile, are still hurtling ever farther out into outer space, a testament to the ingenuity of the people who built them. When I heard that Voyager 1—the faster of the two spacecraft—had become the first human-made object to travel into interstellar space (the space between stars) a few years ago, I thought it was time to revisit this mission and see what made it so extraordinary.

Luck, of course, is part of Voyager’s special recipe. The sun’s family of planets travel in their orbits like the hands of a giant cosmic clock. Once every 176 years, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune align in a spiral that provides the opportunity to send a single spacecraft past all four giant planets, using the gravity of one to slingshot on to the next. Of course, that occasional “Grand Tour” alignment had to be discovered—and celestial navigators from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab noticed it in the 1960s and were able to exploit it in 1977 for Voyager 2. The last time such an alignment occurred, back in the early 1800s, the frontier of exploration was defined by European wooden sailing ships.
It was lucky, too, that the direction of this alignment sent the Voyagers on the shortest path to interstellar space. After about 35 years in transit, Voyager 1 still had enough power left to run instruments that could detect the changes in its environment. Getting to interstellar space the long way could have taken decades longer, with no guarantee it could still run its science instruments.

But the key to Voyager’s success has really been the people. I began to meet them around 1984, when I was a freshman at Caltech in Pasadena. I was lucky enough to get a work-study job with Ed Danielson, a member of Voyager’s camera team. Back then waiting for images to load on computer screens was like watching pain drip down a wall. So processing images was great grunt work for students. When I started, we were still processing images from the Saturn encounters of 1980 and 1981.

Larry Soderblom of Voyager’s imaging team explained images of Saturn’s icy moons to the press.

When the imaging team started gearing up for Voyager 2’s encounter with Uranus, Ed asked me if I wanted to get a pass to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a few miles away from Caltech. That’s where the spacecraft had been built, where they were being operated, and where all the scientists were going to be gathering during the encounter. I had no real expertise yet, so I didn’t expect to be doing technical analysis; I was just happy to be there in the middle of the action and see how “real” scientists worked. If you needed a cup of coffee, a copy made, or a pizza delivery picked up at the main gate, I was your man.

Almost all of what scientists know about Uranus comes from that encounter in 1986. I remember seeing the puzzled looks on the scientists’ faces when they saw the crazy geology and 10-mile-high cliffs of ice on the moon Miranda. I thought, You’re the world’s experts—how can you have no idea what’s going on? Then I realized not even they had ever seen anything like this before. Many of the scientists had thought Uranus’ moons would be boring iceballs.

So there lay the challenge to figure Miranda out. And the scientists were incredibly open-minded about the hypotheses they were throwing out—Were there plates moving under the icy surface? Were there volcanoes spewing icy lava? Of course, there were egos—every scientist wants to be the first one to come up with the answer to a difficult question. But under the guiding hand of the project scientist Ed Stone, the discussions were thoughtful even when there was disagreement, and they were always enthusiastic.

With all the back and forth, it took years to work out the leading hypothesis about why Miranda looks the way it does and it was something no self-respecting scientist would have suggested before Voyager 2’s visit: Miranda was probably hit by some other moon or slow-speed space rock in just the right direction to fracture it, but not blow it apart. Miranda’s own gravity reassembled the jumbled pieces and kept them from flying off into space.

Curiosities like this were the beauty—and the frustration—of Voyager. Each of the planetary encounters was a flyby. By the time we saw that Jupiter’s moon Europa had a surface that resembled cracked sea ice on Earth, it was already in the rear view mirror. And we only got good views of the sunlit halves of the planets or moons—what features were lurking on their dark sides? It took decades to send orbiters back to Jupiter and Saturn and we still haven’t yet returned to Uranus or Neptune. And we might not do so soon enough for many original Voyager team members, who are in their 70s and 80s and still have burning questions about that planet.

The Voyagers themselves are aging, too. Though their 23-watt transmitters and 8-track tape recorders are still going strong, the two Voyagers only have enough power to send back scientific data into the late 2020s and only crude “I am here” signals maybe into the 2030s.

Still, the machines themselves—and the Golden Record on each one that contains Earth’s greatest hits—will remain intact for millions, perhaps even billions of years. I don’t personally think that any other intelligent species will find the spacecraft any time soon (and sorry, Star Trek fans, I don’t see it turning into V’ger). But I am optimistic about our own space-faring future. I believe that the Voyagers will become moving museum pieces that we may be able to visit some day on interstellar cruises. It’s possible that in the far future we won’t remember Madonna or Watergate, but we will remember the two Voyagers as among the most ingenious objects human beings ever created, and their mission as one of the most ambitious journeys that humans have ever conducted.

 
 
*An earlier version incorrectly referred to the last time a single spacecraft could visit all four giant planets as the early 18th century. It was the early 1800s.

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Away from the immaculate suburban developments down below, cattle graze and there are no rushing cars—just a gust of wind blowing through the bushes. I refer to it as “Vantage Point” because of the view. Others have called it “LA-29.”

I discovered this place when I was in junior high school six years ago. Four of my closest friends and I were exploring in the wilderness behind one of our houses in Brea after his mom told us we needed some fresh air. Once outside, we saw an enormous hill and decided to find out what was at its summit. We made our way through some bushes and followed a dirt trail uphill for about 15 minutes. We stumbled upon a small building that resembled a guard booth at a parking garage. Then, some 30 feet or so beyond, we came upon a water tower, a separate radar tower with a red light, and two freestanding pillars that appeared to be claws reaching out of the ground. About a football field’s distance away was a staircase that led to nowhere.

We realized we were on top of the highest hill in town. At the time, it felt as if we had just conquered Mount Everest. And it felt mysterious, too. When we got back to my friend’s house, we tried to look up where we had been. After many unsuccessful attempts to find it on Google, one of my friends suggested we search the words “Brea Hills Radar.” Sure enough, four links popped up with pictures of the buildings we had discovered. The captions were what really made our eyes grow wide: “LA-29 Missile Site.”

We learned that in 1958 a nuclear warhead capable of destroying a large chunk of California was housed a few hundred feet away from the buildings and pillars we had stumbled upon. During the Cold War, when schoolchildren practiced “duck and cover” drills, the government built 16 missile sites in the L.A. area that made up one of the so-called “Rings of Supersonic Steel.” The government feared an aerial threat from our enemies and installed bases armed with anti-aircraft missiles around populated coastal cities vulnerable to an attack. Each base had approximately 120 soldiers with machine guns and a handful of vicious guard dogs—along with Nike Ajax and Hercules missiles.

In 1971, LA-29 was officially deactivated, as the Army cut back on missile defense systems and talks were underway with the Soviet Union to reduce missile stocks. By 2000, all the L.A. Nike sites had been demolished. Today, LA-29 is an oil field that also hosts cattle and commercial beehives. Where the missile silos used to be are just paved concrete lots.

Nobody talked much about these missile sites back when they were operational. My dad, who grew up in Orange County in the 1960s, heard rumors of something related to World War II back there in the hills, but he did not find those rumors credible. My mother had no clue there was a missile base five minutes from our house, and we never discussed such a thing when I was growing up.

After I told my mother about LA-29, she was not very supportive of me going back. But I had to.

This was the place I went to when I had to get away from the stress of school, when I wanted to be alone and read a book, when I wanted to watch the clouds, when I wanted to think things through, when I wanted to listen to nothing but the birds and the wind.

I still go today when I can. It’s easier now that I have a car. But the trip requires climbing up through a drainage tunnel that goes underneath the street because a fence now cuts off the foot trail. Every now and then I kick a beer bottle that echoes throughout the passageway, and I can hear my breath amplified as if it’s going through a loudspeaker. As I step out of the tunnel, I find myself in a trench inside the premises. The dusty dirt path to the top takes another 15 minutes, as I hike by rusty oil equipment including an unmoving “cricket,” or a pumpjack.

The guard tower and the two cement pillars are covered with graffiti on top of graffiti—I know I’m not the only one who comes here to get away from it all. But it’s like we’re all part of the same club. Others have even left behind a rope to make it easier to scale up the side of one of the 10-foot high pillars that I have nicknamed the “hill hands.”

There is no place I would rather be than here, at the top of a concrete pillar, on a nearly forgotten missile defense base. It might be strange to say this because I know I’m at a place that could have participated in World War III, but here’s where I find a feeling of peace.

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Aquarius is a school-bus-sized structure equipped like a camper that sleeps six, except this camper is pressurized to match the water pressure outside. That’s why Aquarius can have a Jacuzzi-sized opening in the floor, but the seawater stops at the brim, and the “aquanauts” inside can don gear and come and go at any time of day or night. And when they’re not in the water, they can peer through several large portholes, taking in the ever-changing view a few miles south of the Florida Keys and almost 60 feet below the surface.

SEALAB I in transit to Bermuda in 1964.

In live-streaming videos and Skype sessions, Cousteau and crew made it all look pretty routine. That was not the case 50 years ago this week, when four U.S. Navy divers swam into the first American sea-floor “habitat,” called SEALAB I—the Roman numeral optimistically suggesting that it would not be the last.

SEALAB I came at a time of great interest in pushing the boundaries of our known world. We were pushing ever upward in the space race and we were pushing down into the depths of the ocean, too. In 1963, for example, Jacques Cousteau set up a prototype base to house five aquanauts in the Red Sea at a depth of just 30 feet, but they stayed for a month, an experience immortalized in his Oscar-winning documentary, World Without Sun. (Fabien and his team often paid homage to the Red Sea crew—and his project was dubbed Mission 31, a reference to Fabien spending a day longer than his grandfather’s aquanauts had.)

The Red Sea venture was one of just a few preliminary forays into sea dwelling that preceded SEALAB I, but the U.S. Navy’s sea base was the first to tackle both a substantial depth and a prolonged underwater stay. In late July 1964, the 30-ton steel vessel resembling a stout submarine was lowered by crane nearly 200 feet below the Atlantic surface, about 25 miles southwest of Bermuda (a few hundred miles northeast of where Aquarius is).

It was a pivotal experiment in the science of “saturation diving,” the brainchild of Navy Captain George F. Bond. In the late 1950s, Bond, an iconoclastic medical officer and the father of SEALAB, began leading a group of Navy scientists and divers in a series of experiments—first with animals and then human volunteers—to explore the potential of a concept that would enable divers to go deeper and stay down far longer than ever thought possible. They called it saturation diving because it involved allowing enough time for a diver’s body to fully absorb and become saturated with the gases breathed under the pressure of a given depth. The deeper the dive (and the greater the pressure), the more gas saturation that can occur. It’s a little like a physiologically complex version of allowing a dry sponge to soak up a liquid—until it’s fully saturated and can absorb no more.

Standing at one end of SEALAB I with Captain George Bond, second from left, are the first SEALAB aquanauts, Robert Barth, Lester “Andy” Anderson, Dr. Robert Thompson, and Sanders “Tiger” Manning.

Many of Bond’s contemporaries were skeptical because saturation diving ran contrary to long-established conventional diving methods in which the deeper the dive, the shorter the possible stay before a diver had to begin the gradual process of surfacing, known as decompression. Decompression is what allows the gases absorbed into the blood and tissues to ease out in an orderly fashion—and not fizz the way soda does when you open a can. The emergence of bubbles—as happens in a body that returns to the surface without having been properly decompressed—is what causes the painful and potentially fatal condition popularly known as “the bends.”

With saturation diving, decompression would still be required, but it could be postponed indefinitely. In the meantime, a diver could spend an indefinite amount of time at a given depth and basically camp out on the seabed. Bond and his Navy group knew they would need some kind of shelter, like a mountaineer needs a tent or an astronaut needs a space station. On a slim budget—thousands, not millions, of dollars—they came up with SEALAB I. Instead of mere minutes at a depth of 200 feet, saturation divers could become part of the marine environment, in Bond’s vision, living and working on the seabed for days, weeks, possibly even months.

The SEALAB-style setup was risky, but it didn’t seem to prompt an outpouring of popular concern like, say, the prospect of burning up upon re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. For example, once a saturated diver was on the bottom, swimming for the surface for any reason—sickness, panic, habitat failure—was not an option. Death would come even before reaching the surface from “explosive decompression,” a fate that’s as nasty as it sounds. Saturation diving required a longer and more involved decompression process than conventional diving—the SEALAB I aquanauts would need to spend more than 50 hours crammed into a dank prototype capsule no bigger than an elevator.

The first of three aquanaut teams poses with SEALAB II in 1965 at the naval shipyard in Long Beach. Scott Carpenter, the former Mercury astronaut, is second from left in the front row.

There was also the nitrogen problem. When nitrogen is breathed under the pressures experienced at more than 150 feet or so below the surface, it causes a kind of inebriation that makes a diver behave like a drunken sailor. SEALAB I solved the problem by replacing a lot of that nitrogen, which makes up four-fifths of ordinary air, with helium. But it also gave aquanauts falsetto voices that sounded absurdly like Donald Duck, a phenomenon familiar to anyone who’s ever inhaled from a party balloon.

An impending hurricane forced the Navy to cut the intended SEALAB I mission of three weeks short by about half, but that amount of time was still unprecedented at such depth. And, despite a few dicey moments, SEALAB I gave the Navy sufficient confidence to put more money and personnel into SEALAB II, a larger and more refined habitat that was placed the following year off the Southern California coast, about a mile from La Jolla. There, darker and much colder water conditions added a considerable degree of difficulty, making for a tougher test of new systems and procedures. Also adding to the difficulty was accommodating many more aquanauts—three teams of 10 aquanauts were lined up to spend two weeks each living and working on the seabed. Scott Carpenter, the former Mercury astronaut, stayed down for a full month—no small feat at the base depth of 205 feet.

The success of SEALAB II emboldened the Navy to place SEALAB III at the daunting depth of 610 feet off the coast of Los Angeles, near San Clemente Island, in the winter of 1969. They had hopes of hitting another first in human exploration just before Neil Armstrong and the rest of the Apollo 11 crew headed towards the first moon landing. Jacques Cousteau’s son Philippe was on the aquanaut roster and Bond was in on a plan to have footage shot for a future film.

But in the wee hours of February 17, 1969, tragedy struck. Just as the most ambitious of the three SEALABs was getting started, an aquanaut died under mysterious circumstances outside the habitat just as it was about to be occupied.

Instead of a triumphant 60 days filled with pioneering military and scientific projects, and possibly even a Cousteau-produced film, SEALAB III suddenly became fodder for a month-long Navy investigation at SEALAB’s operational base in San Diego. There was tense talk of technical difficulties, human error, and even allegations of sabotage.

The program languished for about a year before it was quietly canceled—one reason you may not hear much about SEALAB’s 50th anniversary. But the program’s legacy endures in the form of diving depths and durations once thought to be impossible for a human diver to reach.

Even after the Navy got out of the business of building habitats like SEALAB, for instance, it continued to use saturation diving methods for undersea espionage, including on Cold War missions to tap Soviet communication cables along the sea floor. The offshore oil industry picked up on saturation diving early on to create an underwater workforce capable of putting in long hours on the front lines of drilling operations that were moving into deeper waters all over the world. Marine scientists gained a new window—and door—into the sea, and explorers like Fabien Cousteau point out that there are still many to open.

So does the staff at the Aquarius Reef Base, which named the boat that shuttles divers between the Keys and the base the George F. Bond.

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I was back in the Bay Area for Easter from Orange County, where I go to school. Within an hour of arriving and barely spending any time with my family, I had already stuck the keys in the ignition and backed out of the driveway. Andres and I were going to attempt to climb one of the towers of the most iconic San Francisco monuments: the Golden Gate Bridge.

Most of my time is spent living the mundanely routine life of a college student stuck in one of America’s safest cities—attending class, avoiding trouble, contemplating what to do besides going out to eat or socializing. The humdrum suburbia known as Irvine inspires a frequent desire to search for adventure.

So I seek out abandoned buildings, sewers, and ruins to explore or historical landmarks and other man-made structures to climb—an activity known as urban exploring (Urbex, for short). This is all in hopes of getting “the shot”: a unique view only seen from the depths of the underground, from extreme heights, places usually void of human presence. There’s no fun in taking photos in a world where practically every corner has already been discovered. But there’s the thrill of exploring areas where “No Trespassing” signs are ubiquitous. The only problem, of course, is getting caught.

I first became interested in urban exploring after coming across Andrew Wonder’s documentary film Undercity, which tracks the adventures of Steve Duncan under New York City, one late night my senior year in high school. My laptop screen illuminated with images of the hidden City Hall subway station, the sewer tunnel beneath Canal Street, the underground Lincoln Tunnel network, and the view from the top of the Williamsburg Bridge. These abandoned urban environments were either neglected or restricted—behind iron gates, locked doors, manhole covers, surveillance cameras, and motion sensors.

The philosophy of urban exploring is: “take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints, kill nothing but time.” These adventures reveal a beautiful grandeur hidden from view and unlock an appreciation for the locations’ complex history most people don’t know about. Though trespassing is against the law, we like to believe what we do is a victimless crime. We leave everything as found, with barely a trace of our presence, and keep specific locations secret to prevent any vandalism.

Finding places to explore is easy with the unlimited resources of the Internet. You have plenty of websites and blogs dedicated to urban exploring. Almost anywhere, you can meet up with strangers to explore hidden parts of a city.

Urban exploring sites are filled with brags about metropolises, such as New York, London, Paris, Dubai, Hong Kong, and Berlin. But rarely did I see San Francisco mentioned. Climbing the Golden Gate Bridge seemed to be the right place to begin.

Andres and I had made our first attempt to climb the bridge last year. The only preparation we conducted was visiting the bridge once during the day, and pinpointing the exact locations of security cameras and motion detectors on the bridge’s sidewalks in order to avoid them.

By getting around fences on the Marin County side, we were able to climb along the underside of the bridge deck. Unfortunately, as we got close to the surface of the bridge deck, we heard the sounds of voices shouting over the sound of drill heads hitting concrete. We had to turn back.

This night would be our second attempt. We brought gloves to grip onto ledges, cables, and the edges of gussets (the steel inserts between the cross-sections of the steel framework). They also protected our hands from rusted metal, barbed wires, and construction debris. We dressed in black to be inconspicuous.

We almost backed out as we scouted the bridge from the Presidio side. The night was uncommonly clear—as I looked up into the clear, fogless sky, I knew the moon was brilliant enough to spotlight two shadows illicitly climbing the bridge’s infrastructure. Where was San Francisco’s infamous fog when we needed it?

We drove over the bridge as a way to embed the will to climb in our bodies. Passing through the unmanned tollbooth, the first tower grew as we approached it. I drove slow, noticing the shape of a police car enter my rearview mirror. We were reminded how closely law enforcement could be watching.

We parked at a vista point in Marin at roughly 1 a.m. and agreed 30 minutes should be enough to reach the top of one of the bridge’s towers. We got around a 6-foot-high barbed wire fence by scaling an unstable plastic pipe attached to a nearby wall.

“Shine your flashlight here!”

Andres found a crevice small enough for an average human to crawl through on his stomach. Peeking in, we found a labyrinth-like walkway at least three stories high, suspended from the bottom of the bridge and leading in a variety of directions. As we climbed down, we passed hundreds of cables, each as thick as my fist, fastened to a giant block of cement. We realized we were inside the infrastructure housing two of the four cable anchorages of the Golden Gate Bridge. We were standing right in front of the place where one of the main cables that suspends the bridge’s weight was securely tethered to the ground.

We scooted along a ledge barely a foot wide and climbed up an angled plate girder attached to the end of the platform, using nothing but the rivets for leverage and our upper body strength. At a maintenance platform right under the start of one of the bridge’s main cables, we were now about 200 feet above the water.

From there, I looked out over San Francisco Bay and saw the familiar outlines of the Bay Bridge, downtown San Francisco, and Coit Tower engrossed by flickering lights. The water reflected the intense brilliance of the moon. It was an inimitable view, unrestricted by guardrails. I could not help but feel that I discovered something miraculously wonderful. Then I photographed the scene knowing I would only be able to capture just a fragment of its elegance.

By the time I was satisfied with the pictures I’d taken, it was 2 a.m. The empty car in the viewpoint parking lot would surely spark some suspicion. We were tempted to continue because we were standing right at the start of one of the bridge’s main cables that led up to the top of a 500-foot Art Deco tower. We could have tightrope-walked right up. But it was getting late. The last thing we wanted was to increase the chances of getting caught.

The way back was faster than the journey in. The fear of getting caught overcame any fear of heights. We found our way to the anchorage’s labyrinthine stairs in the dark, with the aid of our cell phone lights. The knurled patterns on each ladder rung hurriedly climbed made impressions on my gloves.

We had made our way out of the anchorage—the home stretch—when we heard a whistle. Then, “Hey!” Then another call, closer and louder: “Hey!” We didn’t know who it was or where the voice was coming from.

We were out of breath, but we ran toward the parking lot. Andres jumped over the fence easily, but I was so exhausted, all I could muster was lifting my torso above the fence. I told Andres, “I can’t make it.” He pulled the rest of me over and in the process, ripped my pants. I fell to the ground feeling dirt enter my shoes and cold air hitting my leg. Andres was steaming with sweat and covered in dirt, cobwebs, and stains from the bridge’s characteristic international orange paint. I could only assume the same for myself. We were in the clear, but we surely did not look like we were tourists admiring the view from the lookout.

It was a relief to reach the parking lot and see the car still there, not surrounded by Bridge Patrol. Andres and I nonchalantly made our way over to the car trying to catch our breath, wiping dust from our clothes. We entered the car and couldn’t help but think how much closer we were to climbing a tower this time. I had plenty of pictures to upload on my blog to prove it. And we agreed: There is always a next time.

While climbing part of the Golden Gate Bridge isn’t the same as scaling Mt. Everest, it was a chance to explore for exploring’s sake. It was a chase that proved I existed outside of the routines of daily life. It made me realize I like living by interesting vices, not boring virtues.

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For most of American history, right back to the first Columbus Day celebration in New York in 1792, neglecting Columbus would have been unthinkable. My father grew up in Columbus, Ohio, where the explorer was idolized, second to only the local Big Ten football coach. In the U.S. Capitol Building, near where I live in Washington, a seventeen-foot tall bronze rotunda is dedicated to Columbus, with nine panels depicting the “glories” of his life. When I was a kid in school, Christopher Columbus was a heroic legend, like Johnny Appleseed, Davy Crockett, or even the first astronauts.

Then the story changed. Today, so many people revile Christopher Columbus that three states—Hawaii, Alaska, and South Dakota—do not even observe Columbus Day. In Berkeley, California, the holiday is instead called Indigenous People’s Day. So I thought I’d take a look at how school textbooks have treated the Genoan explorer over time—to see how Columbus went from hero to villain. Does Chris Columbus need a PR specialist in crisis management?

The heroic depictions of Columbus began not with textbooks but with a bestselling biography: Washington Irving’s The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, published in 1828. It celebrated Columbus as “visionary” and “extraordinary,” responsible for “nations, and tongues, and languages which were to fill” the lands he discovered.

Irving’s version of Columbus was disseminated through The McGuffey Readers, a series of schoolbooks that were a staple in 19th-century classrooms. (From their first publication in 1836 until 1920 they sold over 122 million copies.) Their author, William Holmes McGuffey, used selected texts from renowned writers to deliver strong moralistic and patriotic messages. For a description of Columbus, McGuffey chose an excerpt from Irving, who makes the explorer sound like the type of man my mother would want me to marry:

[Columbus’s] ambition was lofty and noble, inspiring him with high thoughts, and an anxiety to distinguish himself by great achievements. His conduct was characterized by the grandeur of his views and the magnanimity of his spirit. Instead of ravaging the newly found countries, like many of his cotemporary discoverers, who were intent only on immediate gain, he regarded them with the eyes of a legislator; he sought to colonize and cultivate them, to civilize the natives, to build control of law, order, and religion, and thus to found regular and prosperous empires. That he failed in this, was the fault of the dissolute rabble which it was his misfortune to command, with whom all law was tyranny, and all order was oppression.

19th-century Americans could also read a laudatory account of Columbus in Elements of Useful Knowledge, a book by Noah Webster, of dictionary fame. “[In Haiti,] he landed, entered into a friendly intercourse with the natives, built a fort, in which he left a garrison of thirty eight men, with orders to treat the natives with kindness, and sailed for Europe,” Webster wrote. That Columbus died “neglected” by his country was a misfortune Webster blamed on the jealousy of others.

In 1887, a book called The Adventures of Columbus: Early American History for Children, portrayed a Columbus who would have felt right at home in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which was published nine years earlier. The Adventures of Columbus described its hero as “a mere lad, busy with thoughts concerning that unknown land.” The natives who Columbus encountered were supposedly just as childish, saying, “These wonderful beings have brought their thunder and lightning from the skies and will protect us.”

A less fanciful depiction of Columbus appeared in David Muzzey’s textbook An American History, first published in 1911 and considered one of the premier textbooks through the 1950s. While it read in part like an adventure story, with Columbus and his crews worrying about “horrible monsters might be waiting to engulf them” and facing the Odyssean fear that they might never get home again, An American History also examined Columbus’s final years of incarceration and penury. “So passed away in misery and obscurity a man whose service to mankind was beyond calculation,” Muzzey lamented.

The first major blow to Columbus came in 1980, when historian and activist Howard Zinn released A People’s History of the United States. Zinn’s book told the story of an egalitarian and harmonious community of Native Americans who were enslaved and killed by Columbus, forced into hard labor and a search for gold that did not exist. Columbus had been responsible for “a genocide” of millions of natives and “murder in the name of progress.”

Today, contemporary textbook publisher McGraw Hill offers a slightly less damning depiction of Columbus—but only slightly. On one of its websites, McGraw Hill plays up the thrill of discovery but also stresses greed and ruthlessness: “The enslavement, torture, murder, and extermination of the native people of the West Indies followed quickly on the heels of Columbus and his men.”

This is in keeping with textbook trends. According to a University of Michigan study, history textbooks in recent years show a strong trend of portraying Indians more positively and placing Columbus on “a more complex positive/negative trajectory.”

In short, Columbus seems to have gone from all good to all evil. As I see it, the result is a caricature-like, ahistorical understanding of the past. Not to mention colorless. Many of the histories leave out some of the most intriguing aspects of his 1492 saga, like the fact that Columbus, for all his determination and vision, made a colossal mistake in believing (until the day he died) that he’d reached Asia. Or that, undeterred by shipwrecks, disease, and a return trip to Europe in shackles, he actually made four separate voyages to the New World.

Now that’s a lesson I could have taught my class. Take big risks, embrace serendipity, and celebrate some of your more interesting mistakes. Just don’t go forth and enslave.

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