The myth of Atlantis

[cosmolinguist]

"Take our dreams with you," someone said on Twitter yesterrday when Space Shuttle Atlantis launched. All kinds of mawkish, sentimental things like this were clogging up my screen.

They're not doing anything of the sort, I couldn't help but grumble to myself at this point. STS-135 (this is the 135th launch of the Space Transport System, which is what the shuttles are technically called) has only four crew members, the smallest of any shuttle mission since STS-6 in 1983.

It's not carrying our dreams, it's doing work: ferrying supplies to the space station. Which is important and worthy work, but very quotidian.

I guess I'm just having another bad case of "the universe is always this amazing"-itis here. I remember after the Columbia tragedy there was much hand-wringing about how routine human spaceflight had become, but it did again as soon as the shuttles resumed flying again a year and a half later. yuki_onna wrote about seeing an Atlantis launch last year, evocatively proving that it's never a thing to be complacent about:

I expected it to be a pretty cool thing to see, but I was unprepared for just how extraordinary it was--the sound of it roaring and the ground shaking, yes, like an earthquake, and the clouds of pale exhaust pluming out. But what I felt wasn't really any of that, it was the collective desire of everyone in those stands, holding hands instinctively, just willing it to go up and up and up, to carry all our hopes with it (and yes, a simple research mission, but it didn't matter what they were going up for, just that a handful of humans were flying, flying into the heavens, further than any of us would ever go, better and faster and brighter, the hope that fuels all those novels and all those kids clutching toy shuttles), a group of earthbound advanced primates, our want and wonder so focused and sharp, willing everything to be perfect, for nothing to hurt, for the world to be as it should be, as it sometimes is in our books--us, our little folk, reaching further than our grasp, and for nothing bad to happen on the way there.

I had a toy shuttle when I was a kid too, and I've watched a fair few shuttle launches on the internet. I'm a little too young to have seen Challenger but I was reading about it in books soon after, devouring anything I could on the subject of astronomy.

I thought about those other shuttle launches yesterday; I couldn't help but contrast Atlantis's with Endeavour's a few months ago; I think one or two other people mentioned on Twittr that they were watching that one and the crowd at Kennedy Space Center to see the launch in person was much sparser than yesterday's, though even then the axe was looming heavily over the shuttle program; everyone knew this was the fleet's penultimate flight.

I don't want to give off a hipster-ish "I liked the space shuttle before it's cool" vibe (especially as I could be perceived as now saying "now that all of you like it, I am going to slag it off" here); I am genuinely happy any time that science hoves into the view of mass audiences.

Still, my Twitter hero for yesterday, the only person that I thought was talking sense about the shuttle, is a hero of mine anyway: Neil deGrasse Tyson. Luckily for my Twitter followers, my phone was playing up and didn't retweet half the things of his I wanted, but here's a taste:

Many lament the shuttle era's end. But that's misplaced sentiment. Lament instead the absence of an era to replace it.

A reminder that nobody lamented the end of Gemini because Apollo was set to launch from the pad next-door.

Apollo in 1969. Shuttle in 1981. Nothing in 2011. Our space program would look awesome to anyone living backwards thru time.

And it's not just human spaceflight that America is convinced it can't afford (despite that, as other Tyson tweets pointed out, the US bank bailout or two years of US military spending would each, on its own, exceed the amount of money that NASA has spent in its more than fifty years of existence): America hates science.

You've heard of the Hubble Space Telescope, right? It's spectacularly awesome, but it's also 20 years old now and a replacement is 85% finished. It's called the James Webb Space Telescope, and Congress might kill it off before it even gets to start doing its job. (If you American, please contact your congresspeople; more information about the JWST and a link to get in touch with your senators and representatives can be found here.)

You've heard of the LHC? There were plans to make something called the SSC, Superconducting Super Collider, bigger and sooner than the LHC, in the U.S. It too had been started before Congress took away its funding in 1993.

I know many would say we're in a recession, we can't afford science. I'll just be over here in the corner, mumbling about how I don't see how we can afford not to have science.

And echoing what Stuart said on Facebook yesterday:"Blue skies, Atlantis. Humanity is better for having known you and your sisters."