Loss of Columbia hammers one more nail into Space Age coffin

ONE of the ironies to emerge from last Saturday’s mid-air disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia is that CNN’s breaking news of the tragedy was for many people their first clue that a shuttle mission was underway.

This everyday neglect is worth remarking on, not least because against its backdrop the flood of hyperbolic tributes that followed Columbia’s loss strikes an odd chord. Suddenly a space programme that had been thoroughly routinised was re-imbued with transcendental import, while astronauts we’d grown accustomed to seeing as high-priced mechanics were made over as heroes ("noble" and "decent", in the words of President Bush). In the face of disaster, it seems, we were collectively being invited not to mourn, but to indulge a nostalgia for a Space Age that, in truth, died long ago.

It is hard to say exactly when the Space Age died, because over the years Nasa has been dealt so many potentially fatal blows. For decades, budgets have been slashed and visionary programmes terminated in favour of more pragmatic goals. The result is that Earth-orbit has prevailed over missions to Mars, the International Space Station has triumphed over lunar bases and robotic probes have replaced human voyages of discovery. Most spectacularly, Columbia’s demise was eerily foreshadowed by the explosion of Challenger in 1986, when another seven-person crew met its sorry end over America’s skies.

Of all the landmarks that line the trail of the Space Age’s death march like so many stations of the cross, the most disturbing is perhaps the first, which came in 1969, just minutes after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin touched down on luna incognita. Norman Mailer, in Houston to witness the Eagle’s landing, recorded the moment he voiced his incredulity at seeing reporters file out of the live telecasts in droves. Already bored with foot-printing and flag-planting, they weren’t going to stay to see Neil and Buzz scamper around collecting rocks. That’s how early ennui set in.

Of course, we still do things in space. We launch satellites and scientific probes, build space stations and space telescopes, and in the days of Mir at least, embark on missions of guile and endurance. But Mailer’s point still holds: the failure of the Space Age is first and foremost a failure of imagination.

Like others born in the 1960s, I was entranced by the moon landings and convinced floating space colonies, missions to Mars and intergalactic joyrides were par for the course. No doubt I was picking up on a widespread cultural conviction that technology would somehow transform the human condition - a conviction bolstered by the fact that space science seemed to be keeping pace with the futures predicted by science fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke. To them, space exploration was as natural as "a child running around on its own legs". Today, they promised, we would conquer the moon, tomorrow Mars, and before long the whole galactic treasure trove would be ours.

The trouble is that technology could not ultimately fulfil the Space Age’s air-whipped fantasies of cosmic conquest. Indeed, we never made it past the moon’s first base - a feeble effort by cosmic standards . Part of the difficulty is that the distances in space travel are simply too great for the old imperialist metaphors to work. It’s the problem of seeing the moon as a kind of Ascension Island, midway between posts that might someday trade with each other.

In addition, it quickly became clear that human bodies are not suited to long-haul space travel. Even relatively short stays in space can produce profound changes in the body - what Nasa calls "Space Adaptation Syndrome": a loss of red blood cells, reduced ability to exercise, a diminishment of bone density, weight loss, and cardiac arrhythmia. It’s as if experience has recast space exploration as a kind of trespass, or an evolutionary crime. At the very least, there are physical punishments involved .

Even before the Apollo programme fell to Earth, we had already internalised much of the Space Age’s outward-bound rhetoric. When, a short while back, I asked Apollo 12 astronaut Dick Gordon what we achieved by going to the moon, he spoke for all the astronauts overcome by homesickness, and told me: "We discovered the Earth."

Over and above the historic first of "getting there", Apollo’s lasting legacy is that it gave us singular insight into the fragility and preciousness of our home planet. It is no accident that the first Earth Day coincided with Apollo’s demise; that Bill Anders’ photographs became icons of the Earth First! and Whole Earth environmental movements; or that Space Age mystics everywhere began waxing eloquent about the existence of one global soul. Bit by bit, our outbound surge into space was redirected inwards, and from here everything else flowed: Gaia, designer Buddhism, transcendental meditation, the international peace movement, anti-nuclear protests, tree-hugging and rebirthing. The Space Age, in other words, came home to roost on Earth.

What all this portends in the wake of Columbia’s loss is still up for grabs. Already Nasa’s friends in big aerospace and in Congress are calling for more federal funding. Budget cuts, they argue, were responsible for unforgivable corner-cutting. Only by pumping more money into the remaining three shuttles can we preserve the manned space programme. Meanwhile, champions of increased automation say Columbia’s destruction should encourage Nasa to retire its ageing shuttle fleet , since there’s nothing astronauts do in space that machines can’t do better.

Whichever camp wins the day will have to contend with the fact that we inhabit a very different imaginative universe than we did in the Space Age. Today’s technology-fuelled dreams of artificial intelligence, cloning and nanotechnology have more to do with biology than cosmology, while science fiction has itself changed. In contrast to the realistic science fiction about rockets and space travel that dominated the 1950s and 1960s, with films such as George Pal’s Destination Moon and Robert Heinlein’s The Moon’s a Harsh Mistress, the genre was dominated in the 1980s by epic tales of far distant galaxies - think Star Wars. More recently, it is primarily sword and sorcery that has grabbed our attention, and hyper-realist tales of cybernetic intrigue. Space operas are almost nowhere to be found.

Perhaps we need a new mythos for space, one that leaves behind the imagery of colonialism and pioneering, of empire-building and alien contact. I don’t claim to know what it might look like. But if it’s going to hold us in its grip it needs to allow us to continue to reach for the stars.

MARINA BENJAMIN’S NEW BOOK ROCKET DREAMS, HOW THE SPACE AGE SHAPED OUR VISION OF A WORLD BEYOND, IS PUBLISHED BY CHATTO & WINDUS AT 12.99.