I will never forget the New York Times opinion...

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

I will never forget the New York Times opinion piece I read, years ago now, about the space program. About how its fatal flaw is the insistence on the return journey. The author of the piece recounted talking to a group of scientists, physicists and astronauts-in-training and all that, and asking them for a show of hands: how many would go into space, given the opportunity. Then: how many would go into space, given the opportunity, even if it meant they’d never come back to Earth. None of the hands went down.

It has a special resonance for me, right now, too, I think, because it helps to conceptualize what I’m reading for my BA, the diaries and the experiences of the people who set foot on a ship in England and stepped off months later onto unbelievably distant shores. I think it was Belich, whose book I particularly liked, who made a point about how sending thousands of people to Australia at the turn of the nineteenth century, after Captain Cook had only sketched the barest outlines of the coast in the 1770s, would be like starting full-scale colonization on Mars in just ten or so years. The unknowns—and, you’d think, the unpreparedness—are that great. And, maybe more importantly, the conceptual distance is that great for the people going.

I think a lot about space, though, strange as it sounds—it’s the failed astrophysicist in me, the student who wishes she could have gotten through all the school, the problem sets and the labs, though you should never misunderstand me and think I don’t love my history major—and something that’s stuck in my mind is this. Maybe part of the reason that the return trip isn’t as important as we’d think is, what could possibly compare? What could possibly be the point of coming back, after that? Or rather, not what’s the point, I can imagine plenty of reasons to come back, but I also have to imagine that it’s not like what you think it will be. That you never readjust. Some sort of PTSD, but not T, not trauma, rather that it widens your experience of the world—of course, the very use of the word ‘world’ shows just how completely a trip to space would blow that wide open—to the point where there’s no coming back. There is no life after that, so why pretend?

I certainly think you can have experiences like that without leaving Earth. Things that leave you changed forever. Things you never get over. But spaceflight must necessarily be such a singular brand of it.

I guess people can go on, having done that. There’s certainly evidence that they have—both the direct, the astronauts and cosmonauts who have come back and been able to continue to live, and the indirect, as in the analogy to Australia, to leaving familiar shores for all kinds of New Worlds. I don’t think I would be able to.