Thanks to Caerula,
href="http://eilatan.net/journal/">Natalieeee, and SWWooP. The full
explanation is here but
it's probably more than anyone wants to know.
Yesterday was the
fortieth anniversary of John Glenn's orbit of the earth, the first American to do
so, though not the first human. Blessings on
href="http://www.npr.org">NPR's collective heads for being the only news
outlet to cover it at length. From my readings about the early space program and
similar exploits like Lindbergh's crossing of the Atlantic Ocean, I have concluded
that there is nothing that has happened within my memory (too young to
remember Apollo's Moon landing) that has aroused so much public feeling -- the
best comparison I can come up with is the excitement of your city's team winning
the Super Bowl/Stanley Cup/World Series, only sustained for months nationwide,
instead of in one city for a day.
I wish the Apollo program hadn't
ended early. I wished the Space Shuttle had been launched in time to boost Skylab
back into orbit (and I have good reason to believe that was entirely due to poor
management, but that's another story). I wish the Space Station hadn't been cut
back to such a poor remnant. I wish we had civilians in space right now, this
minute, recreating, studying, healing, and working, as every science fiction
reader fifty years ago confidently believed we would.
NPR's
href="http://www.npr.org/programs/totn/">Talk of the Nation yesterday had a
live interview with John Glenn, paired first with a current astronaut,
href="http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/foreman.html">Col. Mike Foreman,
and then with Walter
Cronkite. They had them on for a nice long time, and it was a fascinating
interview. Col. Glenn said two things that surprised me greatly. One was when he
stated that he is surprised at how far the space program has come. It's true that
a case can me made that no one (save maybe Arthur Clarke) expected the sort of
satellite communications we now have, but the manned space program has been rather
a disappointment to most space buffs, including most NASA engineers I know (I used
to work for a contractor at the JSC). We are still only letting a small elect
cadre of people into space; we have no real direction; we have no commercial
traffic beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO); we have sent no one outside the Earth-Moon
system. I did a graduate paper once n the history of space station proposals and
was almost in tears at the end, because the International Space Station is such a
pale wraith compared to those once proposed, some of which had artificial gravity
(induced by centrifugal force), gardens, and large communities of people. And they
were talking about building these by the 1990s.
Glenn also shocked
me by making one statement that is flat-out wrong. In illustrating why a Mars trip
would be so much greater a challenge than anything we've done, Senator Glenn said
that the planets "are light-years away". No they're not! Proxima Centauri, our
nearest star, barring the Sun, is a bit over four light-years away. If my math is
right, that's something like 42,200,000,000,000 kilometers, or 26,200,000,000,000
miles away. The Sun, in contrast, is a mere 93,000,000 miles from the Earth (this
is called 1 Astronomical Unit, or AU). Mars comes as close as 54,500,000
kilometers, or 34,000,000 miles, to the Earth. That's a fairly large difference,
and I cannot believe Glenn doesn't know it.
Amusingly, every time
Col. Foreman addressed Glenn, he didn't call him Colonel Glenn, or Senator Glenn,
but John, as if to emphasize, "You're senior and I'm junior, but we're members of
the same lodge." Of course, the fact that they had offices two doors apart while
Glenn was preparing for his shuttle flight may also have had something to do with
it. The other amusing part was when Cronkite came on. It was clear from the awe in
her voice that to Lynn Neary, the host of this show, Cronkite has exactly the same
legendary-elder-in-the-field status that Glenn does for Foreman. The parallelism
was rather nice. And so was Cronkite's undiminished enthusiasts for space flight.