The bottom line is that space is a frustrating, ungiving environment, and you are trapped in it. If you're trapped long enough, your frustration metastasizes to anger. Anger wants an outlet and a victim. An astronaut has three from which to choose: a crewmate, Mission Control, and himself. Astronauts try not to vent at each other because it makes a bad situation worse. There's no front door to slam or driveway to speed out of. You're soaking in it. "Also," says Jim Lovell, who spent two weeks on a loveseat with Frank Borman during Gemini VII, "you're in a risky business and you depend on the other guy to stay alive. So you don't antagonize the other guy."
from Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Live in the Void, by Mary Roach
Space travel and the preparations people go through in order to get into space are always interesting. In a way, the Gemini program was the last great moment of midcentury American culture. And certainly there are still people willing to take the risks needed for space travel.
One wonders, though, how far this thing can be taken. As a species we evolved for the conditions prevalent on Earth. Some have taken a step or two off the planet. But colonization is a whole other basket of fish. Does anyone really want to live in the void? In theory, there are plans to settle Mars and then move on from there. This would require long periods, maybe lifetimes, of voyagers denying their human side. In practice we're not really exploring space as much as we're throwing our toys into it.
1 comment:
The book I've never forgotten was the astounding volume by Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff about the Mercury Program and the death-defying test pilots Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, and Gordon Cooper. While none will experience what those seven did it's still a very exclusive group of people.
Packing for Mars sounds to be a very different book and it's probably wrong of me to compare them without actually having read 'Packing' but scorn on the part of the author doesn't bode well for anybody actually taking the idea of physically going to Mars (or the moon) very seriously. Maybe she's done everyone a favor.
As you've clearly explained there are so many obvious problems without even touching on the ones bound to show up on the way and once landed.. or marsed or mooned.. I've read and enjoyed a lot of science fiction novels including Kim Stanley Robinson's imaginary realistic Red Mars that Elon seems to admire. Robinson wrote about the next stages too. They were fun but I never thought of them as real.
It's possible a highly disciplined society like China's might do something like that in a hundred years or so. Meanwhile, these so-called plans aren't really goals at all just more, and very silly, distractions. From what, we wonder?
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