Exactly 30 years after Neil Armstrong took one small step for mankind, a mission led by a woman and named after an Indian will take off o...
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Exactly 30 years after Neil Armstrong took one small step for mankind, a mission led by a woman and named after an Indian will take off on Columbia. For the US space establishment, these are exciting times. For the rest of humanity, it8217;s a bit of a bore. Mission controller Harvey Tananbaum assures the public that it is going to be quot;much, much better than science fiction.quot;
Sorry, Harvey, but we liked the fantasy better. The political correctness women leaders, Asian science is duly appreciated, but there is a depressing pedestrian quality about putting yet another X-ray telescope in space. NASA, of course, feels that the situation is not without drama. quot;This isn8217;t a trip to Grandma8217;s on a Sunday afternoon,quot; says one spokesman. Sorry, Jack, but it is. It8217;s just 18 months to 2001. We have a right to expect more. And bigger. And better. And definitely shinier.
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Back in the sixties, it was assumed that space science would change humanity beyond recognition by the millennium. It has, indeed, but in completelyunexpected ways. Primed by the examples behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains, the sixties feared that the future held totalitarian societies based on the denial of information. Today, we live in an information age. The future was supposed to be about free frontiers. Today, the world legal system is far more complicated and restrictive than it has ever been in history. The future was supposed to contain interesting aliens. Our only aliens are the hapless individuals who are regularly put back on return flights from international airports. The examples are too numerous to enumerate. Despite these changes, nothing much has happened in the core enterprise: space. In the millennium, space travel was supposed to be as easy and cheap as taking a bus. It is still the prohibitively expensive province of the richest governments in the world. Buzz Aldrin may invest in lunar tourism, but the futuristic projects that were supposed to make it possible are stillborn. The tachyon drives and gravity engines that were to makecheap space travel possible are still on the drawing board. Wormhole space is still a mathematical concept. Teleportation is a prestigidator8217;s gimmick. In 2001, the ship was run by a computer intelligent enough to go mad. In 2001, we8217;ll be thinking that Office 2001 is a pretty neat idea.
Somewhere in the seventies, the dream lost its trajectory. The intense rivalry between the superpowers that had jump-started the space race became too expensive to support. For cash-strapped national leaderships, results became more important than gestures, however flamboyant. Putting the first man on the moon or the first pig on Mars was no longer a reasonable national objective. Building the biggest comsat was. People got real. They thought small, and they thought local, which was not altogether a bad thing. The pity is that it put paid to the dream. Today, we are supposed to be content with the spinoffs of space science 8212; Velcro, integrated circuits, duralumin, credit cards, satellite phones. And ready-to-eatfoods, of course. Pity, but our dream stops here. It cannot extend to unknown worlds and unimagined life-forms. But at least there are no bandersnatchi under the bed, so what the hell?
