Last night, just before 11 PM, I walked out of my parents' back door and looked off to the northwest. It was a clear night, but living as close to a good-sized city as my parents and I do, I couldn't see many stars because of all the light pollution. Orion and the Big Dipper always stand out, and a handful of other constellations whose names I don't remember, but the sky over Salt Lake generally looks pretty empty, so I was dubious that I'd be able to see the International Space Station, as the TV weather guy had been breathlessly promising for several days. And really, I wasn't sure why I was bothering.
I've been struggling the last few months with a growing ambivalence toward the subject of manned space exploration. It's something I've been fascinated with and supported as long as I can remember, but just lately... well, I don't know that I'm losing interest in the subject, but maybe I'm losing my faith.
When I was a kid, I was absolutely convinced that some modern form of manifest destiny was inevitably going to pull us "out there," that the human race would just naturally migrate outward to the other planets in our system, to giant orbital space colonies like Gerard O'Neill imagined, and, ultimately, to other stars, whether aboard "sleeper" ships that carried passengers in some form of hibernation, or on multi-generational vessels that would deposit the descendents of the original crew on distant worlds, or even, if some genius somewhere figured out how to do it, via hyperdrive starships, just like in the movies. Moreover, I was certain it would happen soon, within the next couple of decades, certainly by the time I was middle-aged.
It was easy to believe that then, and not just because I still enjoyed the inate gullibility of a child. The memory of the Apollo missions was still fresh in our nation's collective consciousness, and the first few men to fly aboard the shiny space shuttles were accorded with a certain level of hero worship by the media. Much of the pop culture of the 1970s and '80s was set in a future where human beings were travelling among the stars
These days, however... well, let's just say I'm become jaundiced about the whole thing, and that troubles me deeply. It feels very much like I'm losing something that used to define me. Perhaps this is a superficial comparison, but it's a similar feeling to the disappointment I experienced when George Lucas started defending his revisions to the original Star Wars trilogy by dissing the version we all grew up on, in essence telling us we were wrong to have loved it all these years. I think I'm experiencing a paradigm shift.
I now understand things that I didn't when I was younger. I understand that Apollo, while a magnificent and historic achievement that should be remembered and celebrated, was really just a political stunt motivated by a sense of competition with another nation and by sentimentality for the dead president who suggested it.
I understand that living on another world, or even in Earth orbit, that simply reaching those locations, is a helluva lot harder than it always seemed to be to an imaginative adolescent.
I understand that the space shuttle, as thrilling as it still is to watch when it lifts off like a rocket and lands like a plane, was never quite the machine it was intended to be. Indeed, it was -- is -- a mass of compromises that was designed to do several things adequately, but does nothing really well.
And I understand that the International Space Station has no apparent purpose for existing. What is its mission? Is it intended for scientific research? If so, research into what areas? Is it going to become a support base for missions to the moon and beyond? Or is it really just a monument to unfocused ambition, a thing we have to finish building because we've come too far and spent too much on to abandon it now? Damned if I know...
Nevertheless, I found myself standing in my parents' back yard in the middle of the night, searching the skies for a glimpse of the thing. Just out of curiosity, I suppose.
I couldn't see the horizon from where I was standing. There was a clump of trees in my way, a couple of roofs beyond that. And there was a street light in my peripheral vision. I held up my hand to block the glare and fixed my eyes over the top of the trees. I waited... and I waited a little while longer. I saw nothing out of the ordinary. I thought I must've missed it, that it had passed already, or that the same amber haze of cityglow that screens out most of the stars was hiding the station as well.
I was about to go back inside, disappointed. And then I spotted it. A reddish spark rising above that clump of trees in the northwest, just like the weather guy said it would.
It was moving faster than I anticipated. I shouted through the screen door to my parents that I'd found it if they wanted to see. By the time they'd slid the screen aside and joined me, the spark had already risen to a spot directly above me, and it had gotten much, much brighter, presumably because it was high enough to catch the rays of the sun that had departed from my half of the world a couple hours earlier. The ISS looked, for all the world, like a lone LED indicator lamp shining out there in the black.
I had my father's binoculars in my hand, and I had a quick glance through them, hoping to see a silhouette, some regular lines and sharp angles, anything to indicate that I was looking at a manmade object. But the glasses weren't powerful enough. All I saw through them was a larger spark.
No... that wasn't all... I also saw stars. Faint shining stars that were invisible to my naked eye, washed out by the streetlights and cars and parking lots, but still up there, looking back at me and waiting, just where they always have been. Just where they will always be, at least in human terms.
I was so awestruck by the sight of long forgotten stars that I almost let the ISS get away from me. I finally lowered the binocs and watched the red spark of the station start to fall toward the eastern mountain range. Its brilliant glow was fading now as it plunged toward Earth's shadow. It got dimmer and dimmer and then... it just vanished, gone well before it reached the jagged tips of the mountains.
The whole encounter took maybe three or four minutes.
I stood for a time after the station had passed and thought about the fact that human beings had made that light in the sky, that there were human beings inside it, hurtling around the globe every 90 minutes while those faint stars I'd glimpsed through my dad's old Bushnells shone upon them. That's an amazing thing. And it's a thing that I hope we don't turn our backs on, at least not in principle.
I think I've lost my faith in NASA, and I honestly don't believe that the current initiative to return to the moon will pan out. But I still believe in the idea of human beings in space... and maybe that's enough.
