People think it s cool that I’m working on a proposal for a major new NASA Venus mission. But when they ask when it will launch and I answer, “If we’re lucky, perhaps around 2020,” they suddenly appear less enthusiastic, like I’m describing a crazy pipe dream.

Maybe you have to be a little bit crazy to do this for a living. At the very least, you need to be comfortable with delayed gratification. Interplanetary spacecraft take a lot of time and work before any metal is cut, and most of them go nowhere. We spend years designing, proposing, and planning missions that never get selected for funding and so never make it anywhere near a launch pad.

Because there is no wiggle room in planetary orbits, these projects, once selected, cannot slip schedule without consequence. There is precious little chance of fixing any mistake discovered after launch. If you make it to launch, you get to enjoy moments of intense anxiety as something you’ve poured years of your life into sits on the pad on a stack of rockets loaded with enough fuel to blow it into shrapnel.

At a time when jet travel has shrunk our home planet to within a day’s travel time, planetary exploration requires timescales, and levels of patience, more characteristic of an earlier era of oceanic exploration.

Charles Darwin was the naturalist on board the HMS Beagle from 1831 to 1836. His 5-year mission was to explore the strange new worlds of South America and the Pacific, seeking out and cataloguing new life. His discoveries and insights on this voyage repositioned humanity within the web of life on Earth. Now, less than two centuries later, we’re exploring other planets, searching for other sites of Darwinian evolution.

Cassini, the crown jewel of NASA’s current interplanetary fleet, took 7 years after a 1997 launch to reach the Saturn system. The timescales required for sailing ships to cross tens of thousands of miles of ocean in Darwin’s day, and for unmanned spaceships to cross hundreds of millions of miles of interplanetary space today, are similar.

Long voyages across empty seas were often punctuated by brief stays in exotic new places. Today, after the adrenaline rush of launch comes the long, lonely interplanetary cruise – only a year or so for the inner planets but a great deal longer for the outer planets – sometimes briefly broken by an exciting encounter with a planet or asteroid. No wonder that some of our interplanetary spacecraft are named Mariner, Viking, Magellan, and Beagle.

We desktop explorers don’t have to leave home for years and wonder if we’ll ever see our loved ones again. But there is real risk involved, and sacrifice. People put significant fractions of their lives into missions that might, or might not, return data while they’re still alive. Even when things seem like they’re going right, we can still experience a catastrophic failure at any moment.

The payoff during the long years of proposing and planning is that we still get to do work that is mostly fun and interesting and enjoy being part of a community committed to exploration. And we do not endure harrowing storms, high seas, and years of isolation. Even on days when I put in long hours in meetings, telecons, report writing, calculating, and consultation, I can still go home, sit on the couch, watch Star Trek re-runs, and dream of future planetary encounters.

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