The fantasy of departing this planet, of achieving escape velocity and coasting into the heavens, has a powerful allure during times of crisis. Sometimes the world weighs too heavily on our shoulders. If just vicariously, we want out.
In such a mindset, I recently flew down to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center to witness Artemis II and its four astronauts blast off for a trip around the moon. After I arrived, alas, the rocket launch was delayed until March due to hydrogen fuel leaks.
A mere pause, I told myself. After all, the last human beings to venture beyond Earth’s grip were aboard Apollo 17 in 1972, when I was growing up in a house with one black-and-white TV, rotary phones and a complete, shiny set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. My older brother used a slide rule to do his calculus homework. With paper route money, I bought a newfangled Texas Instruments calculator featuring sine and cosine functions. It weighed a ton.
In the evenings, my mother called her children by standing on the front porch, pursing her lips and whistling. I can still hear that high, melodic sound. Come home, dinner’s ready.
Now my parents are deceased; my daughter is nearly middle-aged; and my wife works full-time as I muddle about in semi-retirement. A long time, indeed, has passed since the glorious, if primitive, days of Apollo; what’s another month waiting for twin-sister Artemis to launch?
In such a mindset, I recently flew down to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center to witness Artemis II and its four astronauts blast off for a trip around the moon. After I arrived, alas, the rocket launch was delayed until March due to hydrogen fuel leaks.
A mere pause, I told myself. After all, the last human beings to venture beyond Earth’s grip were aboard Apollo 17 in 1972, when I was growing up in a house with one black-and-white TV, rotary phones and a complete, shiny set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. My older brother used a slide rule to do his calculus homework. With paper route money, I bought a newfangled Texas Instruments calculator featuring sine and cosine functions. It weighed a ton.
In the evenings, my mother called her children by standing on the front porch, pursing her lips and whistling. I can still hear that high, melodic sound. Come home, dinner’s ready.
Now my parents are deceased; my daughter is nearly middle-aged; and my wife works full-time as I muddle about in semi-retirement. A long time, indeed, has passed since the glorious, if primitive, days of Apollo; what’s another month waiting for twin-sister Artemis to launch?
In the meantime, I visited a spaceship at Disney World.
The world’s most famous geodesic dome, dubbed Spaceship Earth, appears like a huge, white bauble, or ornate golf ball, inside Disney’s EPCOT theme park. Within that dome, I boarded a very slow pod and took a corkscrewing ride past scenes of man’s civilizational progress. Via the herky-jerky wonders of animatronics, cavemen painted horses on walls, Romans built roads, Irish monks copied books by hand and whiz kids invented the PC in a garage.
Then, at the top of the dome, a luminous Earth appeared and the ride’s narrator, Dame Judi Dench, announced that we “stand on the brink of a new Renaissance.” Well, Judi, we’re on the brink of something, I grumbled, and the pod slid backwards down a starry corridor and deposited me into the Florida sunshine.
The world’s most famous geodesic dome, dubbed Spaceship Earth, appears like a huge, white bauble, or ornate golf ball, inside Disney’s EPCOT theme park. Within that dome, I boarded a very slow pod and took a corkscrewing ride past scenes of man’s civilizational progress. Via the herky-jerky wonders of animatronics, cavemen painted horses on walls, Romans built roads, Irish monks copied books by hand and whiz kids invented the PC in a garage.
Then, at the top of the dome, a luminous Earth appeared and the ride’s narrator, Dame Judi Dench, announced that we “stand on the brink of a new Renaissance.” Well, Judi, we’re on the brink of something, I grumbled, and the pod slid backwards down a starry corridor and deposited me into the Florida sunshine.
Disoriented, I sat next to a statue of Walt Disney, at aptly named Dreamers Point, and looked across EPCOT’s lagoon, its banks studded with pavilions idealizing a handful of countries.
Buckminster Fuller, born in Milton, Massachusetts and buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, coined the term Spaceship Earth in the 1950s. In his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969), he presented an engineer’s vision of the planet as a highly complex machine that we, as crewmates, must care for through the application of sustainable design and technology. On the surface, it’s a lovely metaphor: Earth as celestial vehicle for our lives and history.
In her book Spaceship Earth (1966), the anthropologist Barbara Ward referred to the human race’s “pilgrimage through infinity” on a precarious planet. With great hope, and a dose of naiveté, she stated that “we have become a single, human community. Most of the energies of our society tend toward unity.” Like many of us back then, Ward believed that the Space Age could usher in a golden era. Yet, in a sober moment, she also foresaw calamity “if we cannot, as a human community, create the institutions of civilized living.”
The spaceship metaphor gained its most poetic traction when the astronauts of Apollo 17 took the Blue Marble photograph of Earth floating alone in space. In that endlessly reproduced image, our shared home seems beautiful and indomitable, yet vulnerable, too.
Fragile, even.
On second thought, however, the Spaceship Earth metaphor doesn’t work very well. A spaceship is supposed to go somewhere. It has an exploratory mission, a purpose. Earth, by contrast, just orbits the sun, tracing the same ellipse over and over again. It’s going nowhere fast. Moreover, the purpose – or pointlessness – of riding about on this merry-go-round rock continues to be a matter of intense debate.
Buckminster Fuller, born in Milton, Massachusetts and buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, coined the term Spaceship Earth in the 1950s. In his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969), he presented an engineer’s vision of the planet as a highly complex machine that we, as crewmates, must care for through the application of sustainable design and technology. On the surface, it’s a lovely metaphor: Earth as celestial vehicle for our lives and history.
In her book Spaceship Earth (1966), the anthropologist Barbara Ward referred to the human race’s “pilgrimage through infinity” on a precarious planet. With great hope, and a dose of naiveté, she stated that “we have become a single, human community. Most of the energies of our society tend toward unity.” Like many of us back then, Ward believed that the Space Age could usher in a golden era. Yet, in a sober moment, she also foresaw calamity “if we cannot, as a human community, create the institutions of civilized living.”
The spaceship metaphor gained its most poetic traction when the astronauts of Apollo 17 took the Blue Marble photograph of Earth floating alone in space. In that endlessly reproduced image, our shared home seems beautiful and indomitable, yet vulnerable, too.
Fragile, even.
On second thought, however, the Spaceship Earth metaphor doesn’t work very well. A spaceship is supposed to go somewhere. It has an exploratory mission, a purpose. Earth, by contrast, just orbits the sun, tracing the same ellipse over and over again. It’s going nowhere fast. Moreover, the purpose – or pointlessness – of riding about on this merry-go-round rock continues to be a matter of intense debate.
A better metaphor, perhaps, is Space Station Earth. Just as astronauts on the International Space Station have conducted experiments in low Earth orbit for the past 25 years, the human race has been running a series of massive, uncontrolled experiments on itself and the planet for thousands of years, but especially since World War II ended in 1945.
It’s as if we woke up one day and said, hey, let’s see what happens.
Let’s stockpile nuclear bombs that can decimate nearly all life, let’s increase world population from two billion to eight billion in just eight decades, let’s burn fossil fuels to such an astounding degree that global temperatures spike, let’s inundate ourselves with advertising and addictive social media, let’s throw away democracy for the iron hand of authoritarianism, let’s turbocharge income inequality and let’s release the AI genie in the bottle – and see what happens.
Yes, we live on Space Station Earth. And we’re all mad scientists.
Oh no, there’s that world-heaviness on my shoulders again. That crushing sense of 21st century gravity. I close my eyes, take a deep breath and imagine Artemis II rising up, up and away.
@@@
The Artemis II mission is now scheduled to launch no earlier than April 1st.
It’s as if we woke up one day and said, hey, let’s see what happens.
Let’s stockpile nuclear bombs that can decimate nearly all life, let’s increase world population from two billion to eight billion in just eight decades, let’s burn fossil fuels to such an astounding degree that global temperatures spike, let’s inundate ourselves with advertising and addictive social media, let’s throw away democracy for the iron hand of authoritarianism, let’s turbocharge income inequality and let’s release the AI genie in the bottle – and see what happens.
Yes, we live on Space Station Earth. And we’re all mad scientists.
Oh no, there’s that world-heaviness on my shoulders again. That crushing sense of 21st century gravity. I close my eyes, take a deep breath and imagine Artemis II rising up, up and away.
@@@
The Artemis II mission is now scheduled to launch no earlier than April 1st.
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