There is a place in the Pacific Ocean known as Point Nemo. Named for Captain Nemo of H.G. Welles’ 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, it’s just a zone of empty ocean, about three thousand miles east of New Zealand and two thousand miles north of Antartica. It’s the largest patch of ocean without any islands, devoid of human life and beyond the jurisdiction of any government. Other names for it are the "Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility” and the “South Pacific Ocean Uninhabited Area.” In the 1990s, Russian-Canadian engineer Hrvoje-Lukatela calculated its coordinates to the be most remote location on Earth.
So it makes sense then that the spacefaring nations of the world selected Point Nemo to be the dumping ground for their obsolete or otherwise undesired space projects. It’s the graveyard of nearly three hundred spacecraft, including Russia’s space station Mir and NASA’s Skylab, once grand symbols of human engineering and exploration. And it will soon be the fate of the International Space Station, which is set to be “retired” by 2031 and sent to its final resting place at the bottom of the Pacific.
It makes sense to want to clear the orbital zone of debris. Despite the tranquility suggested by those beautiful shots of astronaut spacewalks, pieces of metal the size of a grain of sand whizzing around Earth can cut through a spacesuit, and bigger chunks can rip apart expensive projects if they’re not avoided. Pretty much all of this debris eventually burns up in the Earth’s atmosphere, but it’s become a pretty steady presence up there. Satellite damage and destruction is common.
So again, “safely” guiding the ISS to its watery grave makes sense.
And yet there’s something dispiriting about the whole thing. Space flight - especially the 1969 Moon landing - may be looked on some day as the zenith of the United States in particular and Western Civilization more generally. It was propelled by a Faustian reach that defined the West for the last several hundred years. The spirit that carried men across dangerous oceans to all corners of the world led them inevitably to sail beyond that world, and the separation of mankind from its birth planet — however small in relative distance — is the species’ most significant achievement technologically, and one of it’s most potent spiritually. It also represented a high-water mark of collective social achievement in the United States. Yes it was fueled by Cold War competition, but the journey to space was a triumphant coalescence of American industry, government, and education — the effective and targeted investment in STEM at the grade school level upwards makes contemporary efforts looks incoherent and pathetic.
Space has been left to the moguls now. Perhaps there’s a true Howard Hughes-style Nietschean Man among Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and other aspiring space privateers. But I doubt it. And it’s not like Musk is a truly private actor anyway. It would be great to see him take us to Mars, but for now SpaceX is just another defense contractor drenched in DARPA money. I suppose it’s not like Werner von Braun was a startup operation, in Germany or in America. My inner naif remains at war with the cynic.
The wonder feels gone. Or at least no one seems capable of cultivating it. The journey from Cape Canaveral to Point Nemo feels like just another streamlined and bureaucratized conveyor belt, an efficiency equation with the trash heap in mind from the start. In this it’s like so much else that comes about once the vitality of emergent nations becomes the complex systems of empire, needed to keep the people in the life to which they have become accustomed. The frontier was settled, the railroad tracks linked East and West, Apollo put men on the Moon, and then the contraction began. Big machines replaced by tiny gadgets. Big dreams replaced by smaller Dreams(™) like you see in Levis commercials.
My own proposal would be to somehow — I’m clearly no aerospace engineer — propel the ISS outward. Attach some thrusters to it, offboard the crew, and push it out of Earth’s orbit into the great Beyond. Send her drifting out into space like a ship freed from its mooring, perhaps for some alien civilization to find millions of years of now. At least they might wonder over it. I try to be a forward thinker.
Opmerkingen