Glory days for all, and for no one
THE theatre of the daredevil’s jump had a deliberate deja vu quality, evoking the heady dawn of the space age. There were the neat rows of concerned people at computers, resembling Nasa’s mission control in Houston. The calm voice on earth guiding a cryptic, staticky voice in the heavens. The picture of Earth spinning below. The puffy white suit and bulbous helmet. The utterance of one of those telegraphic banalities that become profound when issued from the dark beyond.
But when Felix Baumgartner fell back to us from more than 39,000m above, watched by millions, it was less a reprise of space age glory than a reminder of how different glory can be in our own time.
Different in two ways in particular. The endeavour, like so many endeavours in an age of tired, broke and austere governments, was a triumph of private rather than collective ambitions. And it was a triumph that seemed to belong to no one place but all the world – and as a result also belonged to no one.
The iconic letters of the early years of space travel – USA for the Americans, CCCP for the Soviets – gave way to new letters this time: they spelled “Red Bull”, for the energy drink company (which, like Baumgartner, is Austrian) that sponsored the expedition and reaped its payback in endless mentions in glowing news coverage.
The new letters underlined how space travel has changed in the nation that first put a man on the moon. With Nasa ending the Space Shuttle programme and re-focusing on orchestrating private missions, such work seems likely to go the way of sports stadiums and television shows. It will, more and more, be brought to you by somebody selling something.
When Baumgartner landed in the New Mexico desert after his free fall, his costume mimicked Neil Armstrong’s. But the ensuing moments disrupted the analogy. His double fist pump was the gesture of a sports hero, not a man just returned from “the edge of space”, as the marketing materials phrased it. The organisers had ensured that, before anything else, a photographer alighted from a helicopter and got the money shots for a planet of eager fans.
Though Baumgartner’s relationship with viewers was intimate, with the audience hearing him breathe and pant as he fell, it was also strangely solitary, as though viewers were merely voyeurs and not also participants. It came across so differently from the old television footage of the moon landing in 1969, when Armstrong’s “small step” seemed to be taken on behalf of every human who could not be there.
Armstrong was, of course, representing a country. He was a mere servant of a public mission voted, paid and cheered for by the American people. Baumgartner was on a much humbler mission, and it was structured as a private project – based in one place, with talent from some other places and funding from other places still.
Whether this more fragmentary kind of mission is good or bad depends on where you stand. Space seems likely to become yet another corner of the global market, with free individuals coming together spontaneously to pursue projects in their mutual interest. That, to some, might seem vulgar.
But if you’re an Indonesian and the brightest astronaut mind of your generation, the 1960s wouldn’t have been a great time to grow up. In this more fragmentary and open world, you might get to leave earth on a vessel built by Japanese, financed by Russians, guided from the ground by Americans and launched from Colombian soil.
And yet things so diffuse in their provenance can struggle to inspire.
Millions watched Baumgartner fall. But because the project belonged to the whole world, it didn’t much belong to anyone. People watched on their phones, their tablets, their laptops – on devices built for one – and on television, too. Some watched live; others, later. But the event lacked the emotive force it seemed designed to set off. There was none of the patriotism that can attend such things, because Baumgartner was presented as Red Bull’s sky-jumping man, not Austria’s, America’s or anyplace else’s.
It reminded me of the new stadium near where I live in New York. It’s not called Brooklyn Stadium, but rather Barclays Center. It involves a partnership among an American real estate tycoon, a rapper from the neighbourhood, a British bank, a basketball team imported from New Jersey and a Russian billionaire. They are working to make Brooklynites feel it is their own, but it strikes many as being not quite that.
There is in all this a kind of historical return. Many hundred years ago, before the nation-state had risen and perfected its taxand-spend prowess, many of the boldest human doings were of the brought-to-you-by variety – sponsored by private families like the Medicis, feudal overlords, clans and tribes.
The nation-state allowed for undertakings, like the investigation of space, that eclipsed what private ambition could achieve. But in a more fluid, interconnected world, in this age of private ascendancy and public contraction, that older type of striving is back. We may again know times in which the greatest human endeavours are private ones – thrilling, mesmerising even, and not quite ours. — ©2012 The International Herald Tribune