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Magazine
The greying of Space Age
TABISH KHAIR
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Fifty years after it all began, has the Space Age fulfilled our early expectations?
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Photo: AP
A child of hope in 1957: What good has come out of the billions poured into space research?
The Space Age has streaks of white and grey in its hair now. On October 4, this year, it turned 50.
It was on October 4, 1957, that the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 into orbit, and the Space Age was born. Like all infants it was not much to look at: Sputnik 1 was an unimpressive ball and it communicated via simplistic radio beeps. But it opened a door to another world. Or, in actual fact, it opened the door to space.
So much has changed since then. The Soviet Union is no more. In the 1950s, we, in the so-called ‘free world’, were living under the shadow of the Cold War, the fear of a possible nuclear conflict, the media-inspired distrust of the Soviet Union as an evil empire, as (later) the Satanic empire, as a bunch of crazy soldiers and politicians who hated our “way of life”. There was no silver on the dark cloud of Soviet manipulations, if the ‘free’ West was to be believed. Then the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union disintegrated and disappeared. But we did not breathe with relief. Oh no, we are still, in the ‘free world’, living with fear, with terror of Islamic fundamentalists this time — who, we are told, are evil, satanic, hate our way of life.
So much has changed, and yet so little.
What, then, do we make of this ageing child of 1957: Space Age? Has it fulfilled our expectations? Has it disappointed us? Is it still hopeful, still looking with wide eyes into a better future? Or has it succumbed to a sour, secretive, bitter middle age?
Let us look at Mr. Space Age (alas, it is still mostly male) as he turns 50.
Successful missions
There is no doubt our baby has grown in bulk, put on weight. By now, as New Scientist lists in an article, 80 successful missions have been launched to the moon, one to Mercury, 40 to Venus, 38 to Mars, eight to Jupiter, four to Saturn, one each to Uranus and Neptune, and a pioneering craft is on its way to Pluto. There have been missions to asteroids and comets, and hundreds of satellites of all sizes are circling the earth. In terms of the total tonnage of satellites in orbit, there are about 1,200 ordinary buses circling the earth right now.
All this sounds impressive and reports of astronauts can move one to poetry about our fragile and wonderful planet, but there is a subterranean streak of doubt creeping through the thinking community, and sometimes even infecting hard scientists. As the boy asks at the end of an account of a ‘famous victory’ in what is probably the first anti-war poem in English: What good came of it all?
For Space Age was a baby of hope in 1957. It was seen in terms of possibilities, possibilities to reach out across the globe and beyond. It was seen as marking a change that would, perhaps because we could have a perspective on Earth from the outside, finally unite humanity into a full realisation of its own oneness and its oneness with life on Earth.
Does that hope still linger? Or is Space Age a secretive professional in the corridors of power and classified military organisations now? And what good has come out of the billions poured into its development, upkeep, education?
This is a difficult question to answer.
To what use
Most of the satellites orbiting us are being put to military uses, or superficial commercial ones. Apart from filling our immediate space with junk (an increasing problem), the satellites have also led to a very real version of ‘big brother is watching’: the best U.S. military satellites are supposed to be able to pick out individual figures on earth, perhaps even identify them. We don’t really know because this is classified information.
Moreover, not much has come out of these multi-billion trips into space and to other planets. As, according to one estimate, a single such trip costs more than the combined annual budgets of the 100 poorest nations of a world suffering from malnutrition, illiteracy and war, it is not surprising that some people find the whole exercise a bit nauseating.
The argument that we need to ‘colonise’ space in order to escape extinction when the sun gobbles us up in five billion years or an asteroid bumps into us is weakened by the fact that we are much more likely to blow/pollute ourselves into extinction even before the seven million years that scientists give the human species, let alone the five billion that they give the earth. And yet, a number of tangential benefits have come out of space research: the telecommunication revolution being only one of them. The problem is not the expenses of maintaining a greying, polluting, secretive, middle-aged ‘Space Age’ — funded officially or by private enterprise (a booming field in the West). Neither is it just the fact that our earliest hopes (easy space travel, evidence of life, global peace and co-operation etc) have not been fulfilled.
To derive benefits
The problem is that the kernel of expensive, expansive space is our earth, a hugely neglected, over-exploited place in which the human race survives amid conditions of increasing violence and inequality, in which many forms of life sometimes just about manage to evade extinction. To derive any real benefit from Space Age, we will have to set our own house in order first. It is not the blue-eyed baby of Space Age that has let us down. We have let ourselves down over the past 50 years.
The writer teaches at the University of Aarhus, Denmark.
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