The Flaws of Space Exploration
written in 2018 for Kosmica. never published.
We are in a period where technology-wise and achievement-wise space exploration has never been more astonishing.
Regardless of what we might think of their methods and motives, what Space X is achieving is amazing. The image of the twin boosters landing vertically will remain burnt into my memory for ever. I gasped in awe.
Billionaire Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin are pushing them all the way
The smaller space agencies - Japan, India, and blossoming independent outfits - are really gearing up their ambition and capabilities
We're discovering Exoplanets at an unprecedented and even inconceivable rate
ESA is seriously planning a moon village
We have robots crawling over Mars and more are planned, we have astounding hi-res fly-by images of Pluto, we still get signals from the Pioneers and Voyagers launched in the 70s and leaving the solar system. The ISS has become so routine that nobody even pays attention any more...
Until someone drilled a hole in it.
That captured our attention. Now we are speculating about what that particular micro-action within the narrative of space exploration might mean. We are looking for flaws, for errors, for discrepancies, for failures and disasters. We don't want the narrative of technological salvation and real life Tony Starks with the ego driven fantasies and bizarre twitter meltdowns. We were riveted by the drama of Apollo 13. We were yearning to know what had happened to Challenger and later Columbia.
I want to see humans on Mars and back on the Moon, I want to to see the first art house noir shot entirely on a comet - but I would like to celebrate the glorious serendipitous failures along the way.
I want to celebrate the stuck wheel of the Spirit rover that in 2007 accidentally made the astonishing discovery of Silica. I want to know how the unfocussed Hubble first saw the universe before its vision was made a more perfect version of ours. I want to pick apart the ambiguous and hotly contested results of the Viking lander's Gas Release experiments. I want to rejoice in the absurdity of the probable sterilisation of the test site by Viking's descent rockets. I want to immortalise the super-extremophile, clean room proof bacteria that cling in pure defiance to space hardware.
During the Russian Venera 13 mission to Venus in 1982. The craft successfully touched down on the hellish landscape. But when a camera lens cap was ejected to image the local terrain, it came to rest at exactly the spot where a sampling arm swung down. Data relayed by the Venera lander's arm-mounted science gear dutifully reported on the makeup of the discarded lens cap, rather than the Venusian surface!
Lets explore the narratives of star tracker breakdowns, gyroscope failures, cranky batteries, unremoved clamps, overtightened screws, contaminated lubricants. The unbelievably fine and abrasive lunar dust that filled the landers, that gnawed away at the suits, that made everything smell bad.
This isn't laughing or mocking or belittling the stutters and hiccups that have plagued and characterised our 60 years of blundering into space. This is celebrating and recognising that everything we do is riddled with and enriched by errors and mistakes, but we get there anyway. Learning to stand is a process of learning to stop falling over.
These flaws can be embraced while we iron out the inequalities and under-representations of our presence, while we demand that space should not be militarised, while we ensure that cultural and commercial benefits are for all, while we adjust and ultimately discard our rhetoric of colonisation. Recognising that being in space is just another cultural expansion of a deeply imperfect organism and that the same culture that enriches us has always been richer for things going wrong.