Kevin Myers: 'Space' Shuttle's 30-year lie is brought down to Earth at last
Wednesday July 27 2011
Last week the great 30-year lie of the Space Shuttle came to an end. The first lie is in the word "space", as in outer-space, which was precisely where the shuttle could not and did not go. The next lie is in the name of people aboard the shuttle: "astronaut". They did not go near a star: the 220-mile high orbit of a shuttle entitles them to call themselves astronauts just as much as a trip to Belfast by a Corkman entitles him to say that he is Sir Ranulph Fiennes.
This is the hard thing for man to grasp (and I pretty much mean man: women are explorers in much the same way as they are symphonic-composers and landscape-painters). Our species has pretty much reached the limits of where we can go: and where we can go is simply not very far. If an ordinary person walks directly upwards instead of horizontally from the GPO in Dublin, they would have run out of oxygen by the time they had reached the height equivalent to Santry. Even a hardened mountaineer would perish by Dublin Airport. The sea is worse. Few people can cope unaided with the consequences of descending the depth of a GPO Doric column. And almost no one can manage to descend the full height of the building, without either crushing their lungs to spam, or blowing them into a raspberry mist on their return.
So, given our extreme physical limitations, it's not surprising that our journeys from the surface of this world are so rare and so very cautious. But since the budgets for these things depend on extravagant ambitions, it's not surprising that the scientists looking for US government money have always painted a glossier picture than reality justified. How much money would the Shuttle have got had it been named the New York-Boston vertical-shuttle, since it flies as high as those two cities are apart? Certainly not the $210bn that was spent on it in its lifetime, not to speak of the 14 lives lost on its nonsense. At least, what we now know about the perils of "space" travel fully reveals the astonishing courage of America's moonmen, and the scale of NASA's technological achievement back then.
However, the PR fictions of "space" are still with us. The "space"-station is still in orbit; though it is as much a "space" station as the Dublin-Donegal bus is the Orient Express, circling the earth with its crew doing whatever it is that the crew do. Actually, the only thing that really interests me is how they go to the lavatory -- but the details about this are kept secret by the Kenn-edy "Space" Centre, apparently in order to spare the few she-astronauts any embarrassment. The secrets you girls keep: even now, I have no idea how Victorian women managed with their vast bustles. Longer arms, maybe.
Stories have been sedulous-ly leaked this week that the next big space project is to put men on an asteroid by 2026. Well, that's fair enough -- but if it's a good tale they're after, why don't they "reveal" that they're going to find the space-rock where Mother Teresa and Elvis have made their asteroid love-nest, and where Amy Winehouse has just joined them? It makes no difference. Whatever the alleged just-ification, mankind will never put a spaceman on an aster-oid. Nor will man ever land on Mars. Nor will people breathe water, sprout galactic wings or lay interplanetary eggs.
Yes, we'll still have a use for rockets, and I'm all in favour of satellites and things, though in my particular case, I can't get satellite-television because a two- centuries old beech tree stands between my house and Mr Murdoch's Sky-sputnik (just about the last time anyone used an honest word about "space" travel, by the way: sputnik actually means "wayfarer"). Moreover, without satellites, how could Met Eireann so regularly achieve their primary purpose in life, which is to use high technology to lure farmers into trying to make hay just as torrential rain is due?
The bit of our DNA which once caused us to leave the safety of the forests for the perils of the savannah still makes the more adventurous of us seek the unknowns of space. But mankind was able to survive on the great plains of Africa only after we had entered a relationship with the wolf. Once we had abandoned our arboreal Eden, it was dogs alone that enabled us to hunt and kill the giant cats and bears that had previously preyed upon slow, weak, naked, easy homo sapiens. They kept watch while we slumbered, and they scented nutritious spoor when our poor noses merely detected rock. Indeed, it might be said that mankind did not make the dog, so much as the dog made mankind.
For 100,000 years, we only survived on this earth with the help of dogs. If we are ever to survive in deep space, to which even now, 50 years after Yuri Gagarin's first flight, no man has ever been, it will have to be with outside assistance, yet again. Dogs not being of much use there -- vide poor Laika -- it looks as if we're staying put.
Irish Independent
