Take your protein pills and put your helmet on
On space, frontiers, and finality
This week, a Space X rocket went higher than any other craft in decades.
" SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission kicked off early Tuesday, launching a four-person crew of civilian astronauts into orbit. And hours later they have already made history: reaching the highest orbit around Earth and surpassing a record set during NASA’s earliest days.
The company confirmed that the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying the crew reached its peak altitude of 1,400.7 kilometers (870 miles) at 9:19 p.m. ET on Tuesday.
That distance surpassed the record set by NASA’s 1966 Gemini 11 mission, which reached 853 miles (1,373 kilometers) during its trek around Earth.
NASA’s Apollo missions traveled farther but did not enter a traditional orbit around Earth. They were destined for the moon, which lies a quarter million miles away from our planet. The Polaris Dawn mission also marks the farthest any human has journeyed since the final Apollo mission in 1972 — and the farthest into space a woman has ever traveled. "
So human beings are no further into space than we were 50 years ago. Nobody would have expected that during the heyday of the space race.
For as much as we seemed to be tumbling towards outer space exploration in the 60s, it hasn't happened. Nobody had a space odyssey in 2001. But 40 years earlier it seemed possible they might.
Even though the last moon landings were years before I was born, when I was a kid there were still books (both fiction and of the “learn about science” type) suggesting it was imminent. (“How much would you weigh on the moon?”). Astronaut seemed, in some way, a viable career choice.
Decades of popular media have shown humans in space in the pretty near future. Captain Kirk, that hero of 1960s optimistic futurism, was meant to be born in 2233. Alien, offering a much grimmer, and working-class vision of space, takes place in 2122. The producers of Lost In Space thought it would all be much sooner: the Robinson family left earth in 1997!
In the Apple+ show, Hello Tomorrow, set in a retrofuturistic 1960s, the protagonist is selling real estate on the moon. (It’s a fabulous mix: they have cute robots to do all kinds of things in their daily lives, but still use fax machines)
It manages to be an imagined future, as well as an imagined past.
Because it wasn’t meant to be this way. The space race underlined the pace of development in the twentieth century. There were only sixty years between the Wright brothers and the Moon landing. No other period in human history saw technological shifts at such speed. Surely, 60 years after Neil Armstrong we should have been making giant leaps onto other planets.
Instead, it seems we've been treading water. I mean no disrespect to the work of the ISS and the scientists who have sent probes to Mars, but it doesn't seem to have been anyone's national priority to get humans further.
Even as scholars warn us against the dangers of colonizing space, the prospect seems less imminent. There are people on the ISS, but no colonists on the moon, let alone Mars.
Of course the Challenger and Columbia disasters turned people off: to the casual observer, making space just one more example of things the government can't seem to do any more. (The current debacle of NASA astronauts being stranded on the ISS and having to hitch a ride home with Elon Musk pretty much takes the cake).
Things could have been different. Our unmanned emissaries, the Voyager craft, are still out there - plunging further into the unknown. Their cryptic messages home just flickers of connection.
But we are not following them. I don’t expect to visit the moon, or for it to even be an option.
Sometimes the future comes at you fast, other times it stays out of reach.
Perhaps space was a cultural frontier and then it just became a technological one. The culture seems to lose vigour over time, as it invests so much inward rather than outward facing energy.
Apollo was actually quite unpopular at the time. The Apollo 11 launch had rather large protests, and popular songs campainging against it (e.g., Gil Scott-Heron's "Whitey's On the Moon"). Apollo spending was enormous - fully 10% of the *entire* US budget in 1966 - and there were a lot of people who wanted that money spent closer to home. And after Apollo 11, they pretty much got it.
Further, NASA became incredibly bureaucratic after Apollo as well; see Pete Worden's paper "On Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones" (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234554226_On_Self-Licking_Ice_Cream_Cones), which was written in the early 90's, but was applicable to any of the NASA programs after Apollo.