This to me is an upsetting image. People that know me know that I’m a nerd, but perhaps not many know that the common childhood dream of being an astronaut is one that has stayed with me far longer than it perhaps should have. Now I’m not naive – I know I’ve got bugger all in the way of skills to offer NASA and the like, so I know full well I’m not ever going to realise this particular dream. Even if I DID have anything to offer, the chances are still getting smaller every day because no-one seems to want to pay for space exploration any more.
The picture at the top there is of the Russian space shuttle “Buran” which appears to have been left out in the open at Baikonur (the Russian version of the Kennedy Space Centre) since… well, since the end of the cold war. I find it both fascinating and depressing that the end of that admittedly horrific period in history where we were expecting nuclear armageddon at any moment also seemed to herald the end of any attempts to go further into the cosmos.
Yeah, ok, Apollo was the big one and that was way back in the 1960s, but up until 1989 or so there was stil the impression we’d try and get to Mars, if only to stop those awful Commie bastards from getting there first. Now… well, if we’re not launching communication satellites we seem to have given up. Thousands of years of intellectual endeavour have given us Sky Arts.
It’s 2009, damn it. We should be out there. All it’s going to take at the moment is one big rock and, as a species, we’re done. And that’s just on a practical level. We’ve just got no idea what’s out there. I’m not expecting aliens and monsters but doesn’t it BOTHER anyone that we haven’t got our shit together enough to get off this mudball. I mean look at this:
Mars. We’ve got robots trundling around over there (when we’re not cocking up our maths and ploughing them into the landscape, anyway) but we’re all the way over here. There are people arguing that we don’t need manned spaceflight, we can do it all with robots and computers. Balls to that; we should be on Mars. We should be all over the inner solar system by now – we should (as described in Transmetropolitan which I endlessly refer to) have covered Mercury in solar panels and be beaming the power back here. We should be acting like the species we’ve evolved to be instead of sitting around gawping at “Britain’s Got Talent” and “America’s Next Top Cretin” or whatever it’s called.
We’ve been great – just because we’re no longer fighting the Red Terror doesn’t mean we have to stop being great.
