Ambition meets a little gravity
Ronald Reagan was right when he said after the Challenger Shuttle disaster that the future doesn’t belong to the faint-hearted. But when you foray into the absolute extremities of human endeavour, a spirit of courage and adventurism will always be susceptible to failures in even the most minute details of maintenance and preparation.
In that respect something — perhaps several things — have gone seriously wrong for the International Space Station.
It is a noble outpost. But it’s also a hell of a commute. The booster rocket failure that forced a Soyuz flight’s U-turn 21⁄2 minutes after liftoff was dramatic and scary, as witnessed by the palpable relief of space agencies when the crew made it back safely.
Meanwhile, overhead, it would be overly dramatic to describe those still in the orbiting station as stranded. They have a capsule already docked up there and could get down on that, though it’s designed for 200 days’ orbit and even at a stretch – stretches not themselves being a good thing in space – by late January the capsule would be reaching its use-by date.
Replacement crews are indefinitely earthbound until the authorities figure out what on earth happened, so the station may be left empty. Having the station uncrewed is something Nasa assures us has been planned for and this would be right.
But that doesn’t make it a happy scenario. There’s been a reason why the place has been crewed for two unbroken decades. All the robotic smarts in the world (or slightly above it) don’t provide the problem-solving, science-conducting flexibilities that expertly trained people do.
Second problem: humanity also has its fallibilities and they seem to be evident here to a disconcerting degree.
As well as the Soyuz booster failure we have the almost B-grade sci-fi situation of the recently detected hole in the station. Again scary, and initially blamed on a rinky-dink meteorite. But now the Russian space agency has said flatly that no, the hole was deliberately drilled.
It hasn’t ruled out on-board sabotage. People get homesick. People under stress more so. Whatever stress the crew had already been under must surely be more intense now.
Still, politics aside, space history has tended to be a triumph of solutions over problems, never more so than the rescue of the Apollo 13 crew, who came seriously close to being the first lives lost in space. This latest attention-grabbing spasm of problems now before us comes at a time of a revived sense of ambition for the capabilities of a space presence, although we’re not thinking Donald Trump’s vision to turn the station into a hotel after 2024, when direct federal support will come to an end. That’s perhaps an issue for later.
What the world is seeing right now really doesn’t appear to be traces of barely suppressed panic among our space agencies. More like deep breaths, furrowed brows, and a we-can-fix-this mentality.
And back in the station, make what you will of the reports that among the most recent shipment that did get through to the station’s astronauts, there’s a supply of what’s touted to be the world’s strongest coffee.
‘‘This latest attention-grabbing spasm of problems now before us comes at a time of a revived sense of ambition for the capabilities of a space presence.’’