Bill Kay's Life on Mars

This week I sat in the world's geekiest cinema. All it was showing was a continuous strip of thermal images from Mars, which looked like the grainy, grey image you get from photocopying a blank page. Minute after minute after minute.
The good news is that is cost nothing to watch, courtesy of the ever-generous American taxpayer (ie me!). It was on the regular tour of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in the mountains at the northern edge of Pasadena. JPL, as it is inevitably known, is part of Caltech (California Institute of Technology) and is one of ten mainland US outposts of NASA (National Aeronautical and Space Administration), which is responsible for non-military spaceships and scientific projects. Just thought I'd get the nuts and bolts out of the way, because most people are a little hazy about how it all fits together.
JPL is part of daily life in Pasadena, symbolised by the 267 bus which trundles through the town with its distinctive JET PROP LAB route terminus indicator. So it seemed remiss not to have paid the place a visit.
The biggest hassle is booking onto the tours, which take place weekly on alternate Mondays and Wednesdays. No, I don't understand either. Bookings only by phone, no voicemail, email, snail mail or any other form of communication - oh, and take official ID to get through the checkpoint on the road to the campus.
This apparently high security is just a charade. Sure, the man in uniform wanted to see our passports, residents cards, driving licences or whatever else we could sling at him. But there was no attempt to frisk the car for explosives, guns, knives or any other unfriendly implements. A friend who used to walk his dog in the hills above JPL assures me that there were plenty of vantage points from which to fire a rocket launcher or a rifle.
And, although there was plenty of opportunity to slope off to do some snooping - numbers weren't counted as we entered or left buildings, let alone having ID checked - in truth there weren't many secrets to snoop unless you broke into an office and rummaged through a computer or a filing cabinet.
The main problem with a tour of such a technical facility is that the guides have to connect with such a wide variety of knowledge and interest among the public, especially as there were quite a few young children who were quickly bored by the descriptions of what the various probes were up to in outer space.
Plenty of scrap metal to drool over, if that's your thing, and the geeky cinema as well as a genuinely informative film narrated by Harrison Ford. Lots of photos of Moon and Mars landscapes, plus JPL alumni celebrating major events - including a certain Wernher von Braun, who was behind the first launch, Explorer, in the 1950s, and later the Apollo space programme. The guide enthusiastically described him as the father of modern rocketry, omitting to mention that he cut his teeth on rocketry by helping to design the V2 (Vengeance 2) German rockets which killed thousands in Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands and elsewhere during World War II. He was a member of the Nazi party and the SS, but later claimed he joined only to further his rocket research. Once Von Braun realised defeat was inevitable he decided he preferred to surrender to the Allies rather than to Russia. As soon as they got hold of him the US invasion force spirited him away across the Atlantic. He died a garlanded US citizen in 1977.
In terms of what was available to see of JPL's live activities, the tour came down to the mission control room and the assembly hall where spacecraft are built: not a lot, in a three-hour visit, but I suspect that there isn't much more to see.
Mission control is the area where TV always shows shots of JPL executives hugging and kissing when a craft lands. Naturally, none of that was happening while we were there. News to me from the displays on the wall was that the space industry uses Greenwich Mean Time as its clock for scheduling launches and landings - with a difference. On the spurious grounds that they wanted a non-terrestrial name for their flash-sounding atomic clock, GMT has been rechristened UTC - Universal Time Coordinator or Clock. Luckily, Brits aren't quite as childish about such snubs as the French were in 1884 when they lost out on the right to 0 degrees longtitude and therefore the basis of all time zones. They refused to recognised GMT for years afterwards, silly frogs.
There was more activity in the assembly hall, which was supposed to be ultra-hygenic to prevent earthly bacteria being transported to other planets - we tourists were in a sealed-off viewing gallery. But, while the workers were in all-over suits, they weren't fitted with goggles, let alone wraparound helmets, so thousands of bugs a second were falling from their eyes, noses and the rest of their upper faces. But it was fun to see a bit of machinery that will be sitting on the Martian desert in a couple of years. This new craft will be powered by a nuclear battery, technology which must surely have implications for earthbound electric cars.
I referred to JPL as a campus, and it does have a university feel. The inmates all seem very relaxed, as if their jobs are not likely to come under threat and everyone knows what they are supposed to do. It looks a very pleasant place to work, with nice long deadlines and a customer - the US public - which is nowhere near as demanding as it used to be when manned launches were all the rage. JPL has cornered the market in robotic space probes, which don't generate nearly as much interest. Until the day comes when their metal shovels scoop up a pile of dust that turns out to contain a living creature. But there are no little green men or women in out solar system, and I learned that the nearest neighbouring system is 40,000 light years away. Now I wonder if that has a planet as restless, argumentative, questioning and generally ill-behaved as the third rock from our sun?