ASTRONAUTICS IN THE SLACK OF THE COSMOS
voyage. Comme des artistes, ces ingénieurs créent leur oeuvre technique sans jamais savoir exactement à l’avance comment la mission évoluera ou même se terminera. Un vaisseau lancé vers l’espace est une création incarnée exclusivement d’imagination et d’intelligence humaine. C’est la marque d’une émancipation des hommes et des femmes de leur condition terrienne.
MAGIE DES FORCES
Richard Texier raconte la naissance (7) comme le contact historique avec l’élastogenèse qui a préparé à cet événement. On retrouve cette rencontre à l’échelle de l’humanité lorsque celle-ci quitte sa matrice terrestre pour se mouvoir en personne ou par machines interposées dans le mou du cosmos. Quelle pulsion, sinon élastogénique, a pu pousser l’être humain à vouloir quitter son berceau (8) ? Les astronautes vivent l’arrivée en orbite comme une deuxième naissance, une mise en relation avec un nouveau monde, extraterrestre, rempli d’une substance qu’ils décrivent parfois comme une sorte de marshmallow invisible et infini.
La magie des forces mise en jeu depuis le Big Bang ont permis l’apparition du vivant et surtout son évolution et sa pérennité. Le caractère global et bienfaisant (9) de ce mode de pensée de l’univers mérite bien son qualificatif d’élastogénique. Un astronaute en apesanteur observant sa planète par le hublot finit par oublier qu’il possède un corps. Il devient une conscience flottante immatérielle connectée par ses sens et ses émotions à tout ce qui l’entoure, à commencer par son vaisseau protecteur. Il prend conscience à plus grande échelle de cette
Chaosmos élastogénique. 2016.
Peinture sur toile et isolant en porcelaine organique paint on canvas and organic porcelain insulation. 178 x 146 x 7 cm même fonction enlaçante et protectrice assurée par notre planète à toute la biosphère qu’elle abrite. Il est en même temps bouleversé devant la beauté du spectacle offert par l’ensemble du cosmos et les objets qui s’y meuvent. Le voyageur de l’espace ne manque donc pas de s’interroger sur la genèse de tout cela. Existe-t-il un artiste suprême, imbibé d’élastogenèse, à l’origine de cette oeuvre cosmique protectrice, enveloppante et inspirante ? Difficile pour l’astronaute de ne pas y songer sérieusement.
1 Richard Texier, Manifeste de l’élastogenèse, Fata Morgana, 2018, voir p. XI de ce numéro : « Mou certes, mais innervé ». 2 Ibid., p. V : « matière blanche sur la surface brouillée de la rivière […] le tourbillon se transformait en vortex ». 3 Ibid., p. IXX. 4 Ibid., p. XVII . 5 Ibid., p. XV : « À l’opposé du mode virtuel qui cherche à désincarner, l’élastogenèse, au contraire, choisit la matière. » 6 Cf. note 2.
7 Ibid., p. XIII : « Elle […] annonce l’avènement de la naissance [qui] restera la révélation fondamentale. L’essence même du contact historique avec l’élastogenèse qui a couvé silencieusement notre expansion au coeur de la matrice. » 8 Constantin Édouardovitch Tsiolkovski, scientifique russe considéré comme le père et le théoricien de la cosmonautique moderne, disait : « La Terre est le berceau de l’humanité, mais on ne passe pas sa vie entière dans un berceau. » 9 Ibid., p.V : « Cette force ne vient pas de l’extérieur, elle est panthéiste, structurelle et déploie un principe enveloppant, équilibrant, proche et bienfaisant. »
Jean-François Clervoy, successivement actif au CNES, astronaute de l’ESA et de la NASA depuis 33 ans, est brigadier général de réserve. Il a notamment effectué trois missions à bord de la navette spatiale : en 1994 pour étudier l’atmosphère, en 1997 pour réapprovisionner la station spatiale russe Mir, et en 1999 pour réparer le télescope spatial Hubble. Désormais retraité du corps des astronautes, il continue, entre autres, à gérer les vols d’AirZeroG et travaille comme auteur, inventeur et conférencier professionnel.
What could be slacker (1) or more dissolved than the space vacuum? Yet the latter is innervated by the laws of physics that are unavoidable for any body that is led to venture into it, starting with our own planet, but also our space shuttle and any other celestial object. The first manifestations of elastogenesis evoked by Richard Texier in his Manifeste (see pp. I-XXIV in this issue) spontaneously teleported me through time and space to my own past visual experience of our world seen from the space shuttle Atlantis, flying upside-down, pointing its windows and instruments at our world. A chance for me to admire the Earth at the rate of sixteen round-the-world trips per day, visually alternating between the seasons and day-night transitions every 45 minutes.
FREE-FLOATING
The description of the milk slicks evolving in vortices on the surface of a river (2) immediately reminded me of the volutes of clouds undulating randomly in curved, elongated forms, as if giant cans were spreading these milky ribbons on the thin film of gas which is so indispensable to life. Astronauts never tire of admiring the spectacle of the sky, sometimes peacefully dotted with small balls of cotton wool, sometimes powerful and virulent, generating huge whirlwinds whose strength can be guessed at by the size and luminous intensity of the lightning clusters bursting from within. From one orbit to the next, no one can predict what new shape or direction these cyclones, cirrus, altocumulus, cumulonimbus, etc. will take. Much further above the clouds, at an altitude of 50 to 100 kilometres, astronauts have captured images of elves and sprites, transient luminous phenomena which remain unexplained, and were discovered less than 30 years ago. They look like jellyfish several
dozens of kilometres in diameter, made iridescent by streams of electrified particles which appear to be born of this same indomitable energy of which nature holds the secret.
When Richard Texier describes elastogenesis as a force that “continually skims the surface of the visible world [and] manifests itself briefly, in unpredictable aspects,” (3) he sounds like a painter who has chosen the Earth as his model. Volcano plumes, which sometimes stretch over thousands of kilometres, the dance of the northern and southern lights extending their draperies like colourful curtains subjected to solar winds, the vortices of marine currents whose geometries vary according to the elements, mountain ranges, rivers, coastal contours, the turquoise beads forming oceanic necklaces outlined by the atolls of Polynesia or the Maldives are all enveloping and powerful elastogenic manifestations, whose harmony resolves the balance equation enabling sustainable life on our planet. In all this variety of forms, there are no sharp angles or outbreaks of sudden violence. Everything is curved, elastic, changing, but also powerful and convoluted.
Our own spaceship is not exempt from this universal force, known here as elastogenesis. The shapes of our pressurised modules are rounded, composed of cylinders and spheres. The cabin air is the same as that of the Earth’s atmosphere. A mixture of oxygen and nitrogen which is invisible but whose pressure force would crack any angular soldered joint. Richard Texier proposes elastogenesis as the “theory of flexibility.” (4) What could be more flexible as a habitat than the structure of a spaceship, deformable like that of a submarine in order to adapt to changing pressures? To the extent that the adjustment of our air leak detectors must be deliberately biased during launche. If it were not for this deliberate bias, the pressure drop caused by the expansion of the cabin when reaching the space vacuum would trigger a depressurisation alarm!
But the most obvious effect of elastogenesis in a space shuttle is manifested in the free-floating movements of bodies and objects in the cabin. Gravity is paradoxically the only remaining physical force at play, invisible and impalpable precisely because nothing stops or checks its effect of pure free fall on all bodies placed in orbit. Weightlessness is fundamentally elastogenic. It is invisible until matter is subjected to it. Like elastogenesis, it chooses objects and bodies (5) to express itself and give free rein to the imagination of possible movements in all directions, without effort. Thus, in space, an astronaut can move a quintal using only the pressure of his little finger.
MARSHMALLOW SUBSTANCE
And yet, the energies involved in a space flight, both kinetic (speed—28,000 kilometres per hour) and potential (altitude—several hundred kilometres) are colossal, at the highest levels ever experienced by human beings. A ball of water released in a spaceship reveals the so-called “surface tension” forces which are imperceptible on Earth, because they are hidden by weightiness. It levitates and freely contorts in soft, curved, elastic shapes. How can we experience so much apparent lightness and freedom of movement when gigawatts were required to reach this state? Elastogenesis emanates from the hidden power of the laws of nature. Now let us broaden our field of vision. Through the window, the cosmos, of a deep inky black, seems infinitely empty, inhabited only by our planet, paired with the sun and the moon. The impression of the extreme loneliness of our world is very striking. So let’s turn off all the lights in the cockpit during the night-time periods of our orbital movement. The rods of the retina are activated. The pupils dilate. The seemingly empty universe gradually fills with thousands of colourful stars, sketching all kinds of constellations and other imaginary geometric figures. A huge, illuminated band, our majestic galaxy seen from the side, crosses the celestial landscape. Observed from the Earth’s surface, it has a dominant whitish hue, hence the name the Milky Way. Like billions of other galaxies, it is itself composed of billions of stars that swirl like milk in a river (6) or clouds in the atmosphere. Does elastogenesis permeate the universe? At the scale of our solar system alone, the convolutions of the movements of the planets, their hundreds of moons and asteroids, already evoke a certain harmony that has been regulated for billions of years. And just as fascinatingly, in the midst of this cosmic billiard table, humans have developed the capacity to apprehend these cosmic energies and to calculate the gravitational trajectories and rebounds of the interplanetary probes sent off to explore very distant space.
These calculations nevertheless leave room for random and unpredictable errors, which require adjustments throughout the trip. Like artists, these engineers create their technical work without ever knowing exactly in advance how the mission will evolve, or even end. A spaceship launched into space is a creation embodied exclusively by human imagination and intelligence. It is the mark of men and women’s emancipation from their earthly condition. Richard Texier recounts birth (7) as the historical contact with elastogenesis that paved the way for this event. We find this encounter
on the scale of humankind when earthlings leave their terrestrial matrix to move through the slack of the cosmos, in person or through the intermediary of machines. What impulse, if not elastogenic, could have caused human beings to want to leave their cradle? (8) Astronauts experience their arrival in orbit as a second birth, a connection with a new, alien world filled with a substance that they sometimes describe as a sort of invisible and infinite marshmallow.
The magic of the forces activated since the Big Bang enabled the emergence of living things, and especially their evolution and sustainability. The global and beneficial character (9) of this behavior of the universe deserves its epithet of elastogenic. An astronaut in zero-gravity, observing his planet through the window, eventually forgets that he has a body. He becomes an immaterial floating consciousness, connected by his senses and emotions to everything around him, starting with his protective vessel. He becomes more aware, on a larger scale, of this same embracing and protective function provided by our planet to the entire biosphere it houses. At the same time, he is overwhelmed by the beauty of the spectacle offered by the entire cosmos and the objects moving within it. The space traveller therefore never fails to wonder about the genesis of it all. Might there be a supreme artist, imbued with elastogenesis, at the origin of this protective, enveloping and inspiring cosmic work? It’s hard for the astronaut not to take this into serious consideration.
Translation: Juliet Powys
1 RichardTexier, Manifeste de l’élastogenèse, 2018, see p. XI of this issue: “Slack but innervated.” 2 Ibid., p. V: “white substance on the cloudy surface of the river […] the whirlpool turned into a vortex.” 3 Ibid., p. IXX.
4 Ibid., p. XVII. 5 Ibid., p. XV: “Unlike the virtual mode that seeks disembodiment, elastogenesis, on the contrary, chooses matter.” 6 Cf. note 2. 7 Ibid., p. XIII: “It […] announces the advent of birth [which] remains the fundamental revelation. The very essence of historical contact with elastogenesis which silently incubated our expansion into the heart of the matrix.”
8 Constantine EderdovichTsiolkovsky, a Russian scientist who is considered to have been the father and theorist of modern cosmonautics, said, “Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.” 9 Ibid., p. V: “This force does not come from outside, it is pantheistic, structural and deploys an enveloping, balancing, close and beneficial principle.”
Jean-François Clervoy, successively active CNES, ESA and NASA astronaut for 33 years, ranks as reserve brigadier general. He flew on three missions aboard the space shuttle: in 1994 to study the atmosphere, in 1997 to resupply the Russian space station Mir, and in 1999 to repair the Hubble space telescope. Now retired from the astronaut corps, he notably continues to manage AirZeroG flights and works as author, inventor and professional speaker.