Columbiad

3.

You fell from space, a tragic white bird,

falling, still falling, never touching down.

You plummeted down the clear blue morning,

a mournful meteor in perpetual plunge --

impossibly, like a dream,

forever falling toward unreachable earth,

never to arrive on the ground.

2.

The aching, desolate runway

lies forlorn beneath the firmament

in which you disappeared.

That morning she waited in vain

for a ghost homecoming,

for a ship mysteriously lost

somewhere in the sky.

1.

As your ashes rained that somber morning,

a solemn white bird lit on the dewy lawn.

It stood still and silent like a ghost

arrived from the mourning heavens,

its landing wistful yet triumphant.

It gazed upon us for a dreamlike moment,

then took flight and was gone.

Steven Holland

February 2003

 

T+50: The Last Shuttle

On the early morning of Sunday, April 12, 1981, I watched with eager anticipation as the countdown for the first space shuttle launch drew to a close. As Columbia's engines lit up and it finally, amazingly, lifted off the launch pad, I exclaimed, with a dorky bit of 10-year-old boy enthusiasm, "America, you've done it!"

And why not? After the national disillusionment and malaise of the 70s--Watergate, Vietnam, gas lines, hostages in Iran--the space shuttle was one of the things that began to lift American spirits in the brave new decade of the 1980s. To a child in the 70s, the space shuttle had been the shining promise of the future of space flight, the sleek, winged spaceship that would take us straight to 2001, and now it had finally become a reality.

A 1970s vision of the space shuttle.

After my exclamation, I ran outside of our Florida trailer and looked eastward, where I saw the white column of Columbia's exhaust rising into the bright morning sky.

22 years later, on a far different morning, I awoke to the alarming news that the space shuttle was "breaking up". The burning fragments of Columbia fell down the blue sky throughout the morning on TV, seeming never to reach the earth, like its ill-fated crew.

And now, 30 years since the first shuttle, NASA prepares to launch the 135th and last shuttle. For those with any interest in humanity's journey into space, it is a time for reflection. How do we evaluate the space shuttle program? Was it a success? A failure? Or some mixture of both? How will its place in history be regarded by future historians? Did it truly progress mankind's venture beyond the earth, or did it largely just tread water, unnecessarily keeping us in low earth orbit for decades after the moon landings?

It is true that the space shuttle did not deliver on much of its promise. It did not make space flight routine, nor particularly economical. And even though shuttle missions never actually became routine, the romance wore off after awhile and the shuttle began to seem as everyday and prosaic as an airliner rather than exciting and futuristic. People stopped paying attention, the media stopped broadcasting launches and landings or even mentioning it on the nightly news. Only when disaster struck, in 1986 with the Challenger explosion and in 2003 with the disintegration of Columbia, did most people remember that the space shuttle even existed. Even so, few seemed to understand or care about what the space shuttle did.

So what did the space shuttle do? In the 1980s, pre-Challenger, it launched a number of commercial satellites--a goal which came to be seen as not quite worthy of risking human lives post-Challenger--and it also carried a number of science missions, including Spacelab. A Buck Rogers-type rocket pack was tested in space. There were a few top secret military missions. The Hubble Space Telescope was launched, then repaired, and gave us the most awe-inspiring views of the universe we had ever seen. Space probes were launched across the solar system. In the post-Cold War 1990s, the shuttle docked with the Russian space station Mir. Perhaps most importantly of all in the long-term history of space exploration, the International Space Station was constructed... and, if not quite as stylishly and elegantly as what Stanley Kubrick envisioned, the space shuttle did ferry crews back and forth to this large orbiting space station, just in time for the actual year 2001.

The space shuttle did not deliver either on the promise of opening up space flight to the masses, but it did open it up to a wider variety of people. Not only did it carry America's first female and non-white astronauts--a fact due more to changing social attitudes than to the technology--but it also enabled non-astronauts to journey into space: a schoolteacher (who tragically did not make it), sitting members of Congress, and even aging Mercury astronauts (well, one, anyway).

Speaking of the Mercury program, this first U.S. manned space flight program, the one that put the first American in orbit, was followed a few years later by Project Apollo, which put the first man on the moon. In between the exciting beginning and the majestic culmination of the race to the moon, there was Project Gemini. Gemini did not go anywhere new. It went into near-earth orbit just as Mercury had done. But it tested many new techniques and technologies that were essential to the success of the moon landings, including orbital rendezvous and docking and extravehicular activities (that would be "spacewalks" for all you laymen). In other words, Gemini served as a bridge. The middle is usually not the most exciting part of the journey, but it's hard to get to the destination without passing through it.

In a larger context, the early space program leading up to the moon landings was the exciting beginning of the journey, and our next ventures into space--back to the moon, on to Mars--will represent a new pinnacle of human space exploration.

In between, there was the space shuttle. With the vastly increased toolbox that the shuttle program developed, humanity is now more prepared to extend its reach across the solar system. Like Gemini, the shuttle itself did not go there, but it made the next giant step much more possible.

Back in the shuttle's halcyon days of the early 1980s, I read a short story by Isaac Asimov called "The Last Shuttle". As the story progressed, various surprising clues were dropped which made it evident that the launch of the titular craft was taking place further and further into the future than the reader might originally have imagined. Finally, at the end, it is revealed that "the last shuttle" is lifting the last human beings who remain on earth into space, the rest of humanity having already moved off-world. Once the last shuttle roars off into the blue sky, earth is left abandoned--a peaceful, humanless paradise.

I remember that story now, on the eve of the real-life last shuttle. But the story is enough to make me wonder if this is really the last shuttle after all. I doubt that humanity will ever actually move en masse off the earth, doubt even more that it would be in any way desirable to do so, but perhaps the larger point conveyed by the story was that the shuttle was the beginning of some distant, as yet unforeseeable end. The shock of the story is that this--the first launch of the space shuttle in 1981, for which occasion the story was written--might culminate in something as ultimate as that.

It is surely too grandiose to imagine that the space shuttle will be seen historically as the beginning of the end of humanity's residence on planet Earth. Space shuttle romanticism, even of the less grandiose type, is as quaint now as being amazed by PCs and Atari video games. So we will not think of the space shuttle as having been the beginning of the end.

When the last shuttle rises from the launch pad this Friday, it will only be the end of the beginning.

T + 50: At Home in the Universe

Today, April 12, marks the 50th anniversary of the flight of Vostok 1, which made Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin the first human being in space. For half a century now, Homo sapiens has been a spacefaring species, the first earthly creature to venture beyond the atmosphere of this planet into what we call "outer space", which is of course almost the whole of physical reality. It would be more accurate, in fact, to say that we have always been in space, and that Yuri was the first human to leap off the tiny dust particle that we perceive as "the world" and to float apart from it for a spectacular, brief moment, alone in the inconceivably immense, dark sea of which our world is but an infinitesimally small part.

In those days, space flight was imbued with the aura of wonder, the way the world is when we are young children. It was perhaps inevitable that the glow would fade with time. Yet the disappearance of magic from the world, which we perceive as the product of maturing vision, like eyes adjusting to the bright light of day, is only an illusion. Adulthood does bring certain types of clarity, the corrective lenses of age that help us outgrow simplistic or simply false ideas. But age also brings blindness, and one does not need to be very old at all to have become blinded to the wonder and the beauty, the mystery and the majesty of the world we live in. It is still there, just as surely as it was when we were very young; it is we who have changed and become unable to see its luster.

Such has been the fate of space travel. Our space probes have beamed back a multitude of workmanlike photos of planets and moons, revealing these once-mysterious worlds to be as exotic and interesting as vacant lots. But this too is an illusion. It is like looking up one's childhood home and yard on Google Maps and seeing it revealed as the most plain, ordinary, and unremarkable place on earth, worlds removed from the happy, magical kingdom that you know it was.

The question is: which contains more truth and reality? The objective facts provided by the cold, detached view of science (or Google), or the subjective thoughts and feelings that make up our human response to reality? The mere facts about the world, like the dry recitations of an accountant, or the rich, meaningful experiences we have of the world, the stuff that makes up memories and dreams?

Outer space is still there, above our heads, its unfathomable depths miraculously visible to us on clear nights, when we can simply look up and with our own eyes behold stars that we could never reach even if we traveled at the speed of light for a thousand years. The amazing thing is not so much that we can now, by the aid of our advanced technology, travel upward in a feeble attempt to reach those stars, as the fact that we are already there. For, of course, we are already, and always have been, in the universe. The exciting thing about space travel is not that we are venturing "into" space, as though we had previously been outside of it, but simply that we are exploring it, finally beginning to experience more than just one tiny little speck floating in the vast ocean.

It is the objective, scientific view that sees the truth that our globe is a vanishingly small part of everything that is. But the childlike vision that takes in more of reality than the sober "realism" of adulthood knows a deeper truth: that significance has nothing to do with size, and that the earth we live on is incredibly interesting and important. The immensity of space does not diminish its stature, but only makes us realize that beyond the wide earth, the world we call home is a far bigger and more wondrous place than we could ever imagine.

T + 50: The Bus To Nowhere

For those in my generation who were children when the space shuttle program started, it might seem strange now (or perhaps just make us feel old) to find ourselves at the end of the space shuttle era. In 1981, when the space shuttle Columbia first roared aloft early on a bright Sunday morning in April, the space shuttle seemed new, futuristic, exciting, and even a little glamorous. During the second and third launches, which occurred during school hours, my 5th grade class spent the day watching the launch coverage on TV.

By the time the space shuttle became operational, in late 1982, I decided that it was no longer worth paying a lot of attention since the whole idea of the space shuttle was to make space flight "routine". Despite the tragedy of the Challenger explosion in 1986 shocking us into the realization that human space flight would "never be routine", the general public, my space nerd self included, relegated the space shuttle to the storage closet of its consciousness. Few saw it as even remotely central to current American or world history as many had seen the space program of the 1960s. Only on rare occasions, such as the return to space of John Glenn in 1998 and above all the destruction of Columbia itself in 2003, did the average American pay any attention to the space shuttle, and in the case of the Columbia disaster, it was largely to question why, exactly, we were doing this anyway.

The question is worth the asking. Why indeed? Why, after landing on the moon "before the decade [of the 1960s] is out", did we spend the next 40 years focusing the resources and energies of our national space program on a shuttle... essentially a bus between earth and near-earth space? Given the tremendous strides the space program made in the 60s (from the first American in space in 1961 to landing on the moon in 1969), the space program since the 1970s has been nothing if not tame. Little wonder that people lost interest and enthusiasm. People are inspired by poetry and adventure, by daring and mystery, not by prosaic workaday chores and errands which the poor space shuttle, the workhorse of NASA, has so often been consigned to do.

The space shuttle was compromised before it even got started because of the Nixon administration's stinginess. The whole concept of a space shuttle is to provide taxi service between the earth and an orbiting space station, as depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It might have seemed at the time (1972) that NASA being committed to developing a space shuttle was bringing us one step closer to the fulfillment of the future imagined by that film, but there was one crucial flaw: the space station was left out of the picture. So the shuttle was doomed to become, for many years at least, a bus to nowhere. Many of the early flights were devoted to launching telecommunications satellites for corporations. Hardly romantic or inspiring.

One of the sad ironies of the space shuttle program is that, even though it never actually succeeded in making space flight routine (which had indeed been its primary reason for existence), it did succeed in making it feel routine to the American public. This is not the fault of the space shuttle itself. The shuttle, born out of compromise due to budget limitations and a lack of political will, was perhaps doomed from birth not to live up to its full potential. The shortsightedness of our national space agency and our Congress only further prevented it from realizing its full potential by being what it was meant to be: a humble but integral part of a fully functioning space program--a space program, and therefore a space shuttle, that had some clue about what it was there for and where, exactly, it was going.

T + 50: Whence the Vision and the Dream?

Left: An abandoned launch pad at Cape Canaveral.

A number of years ago I had what seemed at the time a rather strange and unbelievable idea for a story. It took place sometime in the future, and involved a couple of children who were fascinated by space travel--which to them was entirely a thing of the past, a sort of romantic historical curiosity, the way 20th century children viewed pirates or cowboys-and-Indians. Rather than futuristic, rockets and space for these children were quaint symbols of bygone days.

Today, with the looming retirement of the space shuttle, the cancellation of the Constellation program (and therefore no clear successor to the shuttle), and a general lack of public interest in and political support for space exploration (which has been the case since the moon landing some 40 years ago), that story premise no longer seems so far-fetched.

Back in the 50s and 60s, space exploration seemed like the obvious next step in human history. This was especially true for many in the U.S., a country which, as one of the world's two great superpowers, saw itself as leading the way for the rest of the world (at least the "free world"). All the frontiers of the United States had been explored and settled; a prosperous and (more or less) peaceful postwar American society, with ever-advancing technology and science, was poised to begin humanity's next great adventure: exploring outer space, which of course is simply to say the universe beyond our small planet ("this island earth", as the title of one 50s sci-fi film described it).

To understand what happened to the dream of spaceflight, it might be worth asking why we had the dream in the first place. Where did this idea--the idea that space exploration was the inevitable next phase of human history--come from? Or, to put it another way, how did space travel move from the realm of children's fantasy (a la Buck Rogers) to a realistic, serious expectation for the near future?

Some say it all started with the publication in 1949 of a book called The Conquest of Space. With its magical paintings by Chesley Bonestell, this hugely influential book sparked the imaginations of many children and adults and made space travel suddenly seem like a real possibility in one's own lifetime.

Then, in the early 1950s, Collier's magazine published a series of articles, again with many wondrous illustrations by Bonestell, elaborating how "Man Will Conquer Space Soon".

Both this book and these articles were written, and the ideas within them dreamed up, by what we might describe as a bunch of "space nerds". Foremost among them was the famed German rocket scientist Werner von Braun, who was instrumental in helping to develop modern rocketry.

But why did the ideas of a few brainy rocket scientists and space nerds, who had been laboring for decades in obscurity as members of "rocket" or "interplanetary" societies, so capture the popular imagination in the years after World War II? What exactly was it that so captivated our imaginations and excited us about leaving the safe, familiar confines of the world we had always known and venturing out into the great black infinite abyss?

Some would say that, despite all the practical justifications for space travel (whether economic, political, military, scientific, or technological), the essential reason we want to "go there", the truest and deepest reason, the real reason that we are too pragmatic and prosaic to admit... is simply because human beings have an innate urge to explore.

In this view, space exploration needs no justification outside itself... it is indeed obvious. Of course we have a drive to explore. Exploration and expansion to new territories, be they literal or figurative, are an essential and inescapable part of human history. It is part and parcel of human nature to be curious about what is "out there", beyond what we know, and to seek to discover for ourselves some part of reality as yet unknown to us.

But just because the exploration of the "final frontier" might be obvious as a desire or a goal does not mean that it is inevitable as an actual action or event. When one loses inspiration, motivation, and vision, one is not likely to achieve a long-held dream. The dream will not automatically turn itself into reality... but the dream must first exist before it can come true.

T + 50: 50 Years of Man in Space

The year 2011 marks two important anniversaries in the history of human spaceflight:

• 30 years since the start of the space shuttle program, which is due to come to an end this year.
• 50 years since the start of human spaceflight, when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (pictured) became the first man in space.

And of course, it is now a full decade on since the once-fabled year 2001, made mythic by Stanley Kubrick's masterful film of the same name (see my earlier post about that film).

Here's today's $64,000 question: Should 2001: A Space Odyssey be reclassified as historical fiction?

In this new occasional series, T + 50, I aim to explore the significance of human spaceflight, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. What used to be seen as the crowning pinnacle of modern civilization and the very symbol of humanity's future had become passe long before we arrived in the 21st century. Were we all just deluded by science fiction fantasies back in the 1950s and 60s? Or did we lose a grand and optimistic vision of expansion beyond the earth? Why should we care about exploring space anyway?

As a lifelong space fan, these are questions that have haunted me for most of my adult life and that I wish to investigate further in the present series. Whatever your level of interest in outer space and its exploration, I hope you enjoy taking this thought journey with me.

As the Amazing Criswell once said, "We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future."

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