Space Launch Perspective
Looking Back from Space
by John Fox
On the evening of October 2nd 2004, my group of five drove North from Los Angeles to a camping site known as Red Rock. It's located forty minutes beyond where the 14 Freeway has petered down to a two-lane highway, and twenty minutes past the constellation of businesses which form the town of Mojave. Red Rock has rocks the color of chalk, except when they blush under a rising sun. We weren't planning on staying until sunrise.
We would rise at 3:30 a.m. and witness the launch of the private space shuttle SpaceShipOne, its third launch within the last month and the one that would clinch a 10-million-dollar prize. The mission of SpaceShipOne was to break the barrier that separated the average man from space travel, opening up avenues for civilians to experience weightlessness and obtain a God's-eye view of the earth.
Within five years millionaires will be able to purchase time in space, and to gain a metaphysical as well as spatial distance from our Mother Earth. Perhaps within ten or twenty years, affluent doctors or lawyers might be able to break gravitational boundaries. The aperture that previously admitted only a few highly trained individuals of particular nationalities will dilate to allow for those with swelled pocketbooks as well.
When we reached our campsite, we met with friends, a husband and wife who came down in the afternoon and set up camp for us. We ate a late dinner of hotdogs and bratwurst, warmed on coat hangers. Afterwards we made s'mores, and joked that it's never good to date someone who lights their marshmallows on fire, since it's symbolic of how they view relationships. The husband and wife laughed at us and proceeded to burn theirs. We concluded they were perfect for one another.
The fire died into coals and we lost ourselves in the pulsing pockets of embers until we noticed a half-sphere of light on the horizon. I tried to imagine what city it was coming from, but someone else guessed correctly that it was the rising moon. We stood and watched its approach.
The husband and wife scrambled for their technology, setting up a tripod to hold the Panasonic video camera and trying to steady a single-lens-reflex with a time-release option for nighttime use. The brightly lit LCD screen of the video camera interrupted the darkness. The single-lens-reflex blinked red sporadically, like a confused airplane too low to the ground.
The rest of us stood with pocketed hands and stared at the light ballooning from behind the hills. It was growing more potent, but slowly, teasingly. We avoided diverting our eyes because it seemed at any moment it would edge over the hills. "Isn't it scary to think that we're moving?" Mary-Renee asked. "That we're spinning through space and that's what's causing the moon to rise?" She shook her head and her eyes widened.
A corner of the moon breeched the mountaintop. Mary-Renee gasped, stepped back and grabbed the corner of the wooden park bench. "I just feel like I need to hold onto something," she said apologetically. She didn't let go of the table until the moon cleared the hills, and the lack of a reference point made her feel less queasy. The chalky hills were bathed in dim light.
Before the moon rose too high and washed out the sky, we headed up the hillside to a plateau shaded from the glare of the moon. We wanted to look at stars.
We pointed out constellations and witnessed thirty or forty shooting stars. One of them was a wishbone – it started as one and branched into two, which according to Jiminy Cricket logic should double the viewer's wishes.
The next hour we scoured the sky for satellites, but couldn't locate any. Perhaps they were servicing the other side of the world, swooping over India's or Mozambique's hemisphere, and I wondered how natives of certain countries felt about those additions to their night sky –people who see satellite pinpoints mingled with star clusters and do not have a GPS or cell phone to benefit from them, or witness the blinking white and red lights of planes crossing the sky and have never flown in an airplane.
*
At three-thirty the morning people were chipper after a draught of coffee and moved about with brisk efficiency, while the rest of us trundled from the tents to the cars like machines. It was still dark. The couple told us they were tired and didn't feel like seeing the flight; they left and drove home. The rest of us drove to the Mojave Airport in silence, paid our twenty-dollar entrance fee and found a parking spot. White tents offered T-shirts, inflatable spacemen and coffee mugs, all emblazoned with the X-prize logo. When we reached the runway, we found that viewers were cordoned off to a narrow strip next to the runway that was already packed ten people deep. We carved out a space with a blanket, and in lieu of chairs, sat back to back, leaning against each other in a fragile structure, sharing heat. An elderly man passing us said, more to his wife than to us, "Now that's friendship."
We sat for an hour, sensing, through our closed eyelids, the sky brightening, until a cry rippled through the crowd and everyone surged forward against the ropes. We glimpsed the White Knight for the first time. It had a double hull, out of which sprouted wings, and between the hulls dangled a smaller spacecraft, SpaceShipOne, which would detach from the main craft for the final ascent into suborbital space. It was white except for red slashes on the flanks and black circles like freckles on the tip of the nose.
It idled down the runway. The crowd waved as it passed. It taxied to the end, swung about, and readied for liftoff. I imagined it summoning energy, shrinking into itself as though to store up enough power to explode up off the earth and catapult itself into the sky. Finally it barreled down the strip of cement and rose gently off the earth, the tips of its fuel-laden wings bending down towards the ground, and barely cleared the brown mountains. In its draft, two tailing planes took off.
The crowd unsheathed their technology. Many people had binoculars they turned to the sky, and a few had telescopes perched on stands that they slowly rotated to trace the trajectory of the planes. People held cameras with long snouts and nocturnal-sized eyes, and affixed them to their faces as the planes crossed above. A few people gave play-by-plays of the action on their cell phones. The remainder of the crowd, which included my friends and I, blocked the sun with a fist and looked skyward with naked eyes. The halo around my fist made my eyes water.
It took forty-five minutes for the White Knight to ascend to the proper altitude. When it did, they alerted us by way of the speakers, and counted down to the separation of the two planes. The white vapor trail in the sky split into two, and one arced around and down while SpaceShipOne aimed straight up, accelerating under the power of hundreds of gallons of nitrous oxide, piercing into the heights of the sky and aiming higher and higher until after eighty-four seconds the white trail disappeared and I knew, even though I couldn't see, that the pilot was still moving up by way of momentum, and after thirty seconds they told us he had come to a full stop, hovering between space and earth, with the windshield full of the darkness of night, and in that limbo between leaving earth and returning he had enough time to take pictures of the night sky and watch M & M's hover in mid-air. For a moment he hung up there, viewing the green and blue patchwork quilt, separated from those below not only by an enormous gap in miles but by a gap in privilege.
The speakers announced the altitude. The crowd clapped again, and interspersed with the clapping was hooting and whistling. But I wondered about this cheering. The most famous space quote by Armstrong situates his small individualistic step in context of the large step of humanity. But what kind of victory do most of the inhabitants of the earth receive from technological advances? So many – billions – employ their feet rather than gas-propelled wheels, stare at the clouds rather than riding inside them. Technology – the hope of modernists, as humanity steadily progresses towards perfection – always benefits mankind, yes? At least some of them.
SpaceShipOne began plummeting to the earth, but without a vapor trail to mark its passage, the audience could see only sun and sky. They told us the pilot was experiencing five to six G's, enough for his limbs to suck all the blood away from his brain and cause him to blackout. The craft was freefalling, using only the drag of its shuttlecock design to slow its passage through the atmosphere. Eventually the instruction came to look 18 degrees above the sun, and a tiny white speck appeared in the sky. It descended the rest of the way in a corkscrew, spiraling around our heads as we spun to keep facing it, until it glided down on the runway and people clapped and cheered.
We left soon afterwards. The event was over, and the press had first priority on the participants. Hordes of people fled with us to the dust bowl parking lot. We waited in a long line to escape the airport, inching forward car by car, until we reached the main road and traffic loosened up.
As we were passing through Mojave, heading home, I saw a man walking on the side of the road. His clothing seemed ratty and he walked with the indolent step of someone not headed to any particular destination. He looked up quickly, just as we passed, as though interested in a ride, but his thumb wasn't out and we passed him within a moment. The highway soon transitioned into a freeway, which meant traffic thinned because of the extra lane. Our driver was hungry and tired and wanted to get home soon, so she accelerated quickly, and as she accelerated I imagined we were the spaceship powered by propellant, and magnified the pressure of my back against the seat into several G's. She pressed the pedal down and we reached fifty, and then switching lanes around a slower car, she sped up to sixty, and had only free road in front of us so she sped up to seventy, and then to eighty, and they rolled up the windows up but I wished they were still down so I could feel the whip of the wind against my body and hear it buffet my ears, because I was flying through space on an asphalt strip, soaring through the universe on a machine of mankind's own making, and for a slight moment I enjoyed a fraction of the speed that the pilot of the plane must have felt. But as I leaned my head back against the seat and shut my eyes, I pictured, as if through the wrong end of a telescope, that man walking on the side of the road that we had left so far behind.