Out There and Back Again

I've never been much of a space person though I've long looked up at the stars and wondered whence their and my providence. The stars have always been something of brush strokes on a vast canvas to me, art to be appreciated but one never thinks of literally immersing oneself in a painting. So it is with space. I never wanted to be an astronaut. I never wanted to walk on the moon or been terribly interested in the remote possibility of life on Mars. It was all so distant.

 

Then last night I came on this video. It's of International Space Station captain Chris Hadfield singing his rendition of David Bowie's "Space Odyssey." Not exactly inspiring for me. In fact, I find it a little odd. I would think that for any spaceman, this song would be something of a jinx. Hadfield rewrites a few of the verses and it's a little weird to hear the song set against the backdrop which inspired it. But to me, Major Tom's plight has always been a poignant warning against the ambition of man.

 

Later in the evening I stumbled across this one. Now this one I find much more interesting. It's a video by NASA with cameras mounted fore and aft on the booster rockets of a space shuttle. Notice the numbers in the corners. The top left is, I believe, merely a second counter. The top right on the other hand, is, as it suggests, the speed of the rockets in miles per hour. You can watch how the rockets go from 0 to 3000 mph. Yet it doesn't look like much. You get an eyeful of flame and an eyeful of sky and not much in between to give you any sense of relativity. The roar of the engine gives you more of a sense of movement than anything else. But about the three minute mark, there's a separation between earth and space, between man and eternity. There's the creak and groan of distressed metal, the only sound for 26 miles in any direction. Here you see what Major Tom must see, tumbling through the edge of space, tumbling, falling but falling is a relative term. In the great canvas of space, there is no up or down, only an indefinite direction. Without slowing it reverses direction, coming back from whence it came, the penumbra between light and dark the only indication of anything. And then it does slow, counter intuitively. Like a child raised on the myth of the penny dropped from the top of the Empire State building, we expect it to speed up to the point where it could crack a man's skull. But science betrays us. Instead, it reaches terminal velocity - not so named for an ability to crack a skull - and slows, tumbling end over end, side over side, taken aback by the atmosphere, and plunged headlong into the sea, to space and back, relatively unscathed.

 

But it's those few minutes on the edge... out there alone with nothing but its own senses and the rumble of it's gut, the most pressing concerns of its humanity, it's natural instincts all there is to hold on to and at the same time suppressed by its impotence, its power spent, suffering the creaks and pains of old age, heading for a watery grave to spend eternity...