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Icon of the month: Space Shuttle
This article was first published in Third Way in September 2003.
In 1900, no person had ever flown. By 2000, we were bored of space travel. That’s a trajectory every bit as emblematic of humanity as Icarus’s.
Within a year of the moon landings, the only way Apollo 13 could win TV ratings was to offer the prospect of the first deaths in space. When Columbia broke up on re-entry in February this year, killing its crew of seven and scattering debris over 111 counties in the southern States, it also achieved major TV coverage. But rather than rekindling our fascination with space travel it seems to have put the lid on it. Every scheduled launch is under review, and even if they continue our hearts are no longer in it. Been there, seen it, done it. George Lucas does it better than NASA.
The fact is that space didn’t come up with the goods. Growing up with Space 1999, I was led to believe that by the millennium we’d all be living on the moon in cream flares, but Saturday morning TV lied to a generation. (About the moon, not the flares.) By now we should be holidaying on Mars and honeymooning in zero gravity. Instead we got the internet. We are already looking back on the space age, and making do with cyberspace.
The basic problem is that space proved too big and too boring. Our own star system is a bunch of bare rocks and gas balls, and we can’t go anywhere else till someone comes up with some new physics. So no galactic federations, no daleks and no soup dragon. (Mind you, if isolating stellar civilisations was God’s damage limitation exercise, you can see his point.)
The mundaneness of the shuttle is precisely what caught our imagination when it launched its new era of space travel in 1981. Looking more like a jumbo jet than a starship, the rocket that could actually come back assured us that soon space travel would be an everyday, down-to-earth reality.
Now though it just embodies the fact that space isn’t sexy. The only use NASA found for it is research into the effects of being in space on various scientific processes, discovering that it doesn’t have any. Rather than needing the space programme so they could continue research, they needed the research so they could do the programme.
George Bush I’s announcement of a manned flight to Mars was quietly forgotten after he was informed it would cost $450b and be fatal, which is a shame as his dynasty’s colonial instincts would benefit from being channelled into space.
But even for the most cynical, of course, the sight of a manned spacecraft disintegrating evokes something more than ennui. In fact our horror and pity are quite out of proportion wth the scale of the tragedy. Why do we feel so much more than if the seven had died in a Chevy?
Partly, it’s because the shuttle adds a celebrity factor that we know does strange and unedifying things to our perception of tragedy. Mother of Two Dies in Car Crash isn’t even local news. Mother of Two Princes Dies in Car Crash and the earth grieves.
There is more to it than that though, and this brings us back to Icarus again. His story has a message more basic than the dangers of wax-based fusilage in a hot climate, and that is the powerful idea of nemesis: when humans get too big for their boots, gods bring them back to earth with a crash (or splash). This anxiety is as ancient as Babel and as modern as Frankenstein foods. If we get too high or too smart, we will pay. Columbia rouses fears about playing God, interfering with nature, trying to improve our ordained station in the cosmos.
It is a primal fear that we should take with a pinch of salt though. If we seriously believed it, we’d have to live naked on berries. Nostalgia for a pre-technological age when we were in tune with nature would not survive a day faced with the realities of life without medicine, sanitation or education, and on a third-world diet. Genesis does not suggest humanity was meant to stay in Eden. We are commissioned to subdue the earth - to understand it and overcome its hostility. Those who have paid with their lives for the science that blesses our lives deserve undying gratitude. Flight may not have brought us any closer to heaven, but neither has it done the reverse.
looking more like
a jumbo jet than a starship,
the rocket that could
actually come back
assured us that
soon space travel
would be an everyday,
down-to-earth
reality