Space Launch Perspective

Cosmic Awe

by Titus Gee

Moonlight washed the rocks that once had flickered orange in our firelight. The stillness was complete. Gone the laughter and the banter, the s'mores and sausages and paper cups of chocolate – all the rosy hues of life and company.

The others were all sleeping or nearly so and I, in my chair with my childhood blanket draped around my shoulders, listened for their breathing as it slowed and steadied and slipped into gentle snoring.

As I watched the moon rise, I thought of the watchers I had read or seen on film, counting out the hours by the travel of that lunar orb. Waking one another to change the guard when the angle was right. Tonight I was the only watcher and the only waker for the morning.

Earlier I had cursed the moon's coming as we lay with our heads together atop a rock formation and picked out half-remembered constellations, trading Tao for silliness and back again in rapid succession. Then the moon had been an interloper in our game, washing out the depths of space with his narcissistic glare. He was full and I could see the Man staring down at me with his benevolent half-smile, throwing my shadow beside me with the intensity of his reflected sunlight. He no longer seemed an interloper but a sentry, counting out, with me, the late hours that soon would become early.

I sat and embraced the stillness, sending my mind to the zen-like state so necessary in surviving the tedium of the security booth that was my day job.

I had developed a mode for my mind like the mute on a television, partially tuned out but not turned off – a mode called Watching. It was not guarding exactly. There was no evident or likely danger. It was simply watching, sometimes pondering – that silent verbal monologue, a one-voice question and answer that in some ways feels like prayer. More often, I embraced the silence in my skull, simply seeing and listening and being, which may also be a form of prayer.

The moon slid imperceptibly higher counting off the night not in steps or ticks but in the smooth and thoughtless glide. The moon counts time like an ancient observer, not with the frenetic, watch-checking urgency of modern men but with the unconcerned sense of accomplishment that comes from seeing another quarter, then a half, and then three quarters of a night had passed in the creeping progression of eons.

The moon is a simplifier. He reduces the chaos of colors to light and shadow. He takes the minutes of out time.

I watched him gliding.

As my mind settled down into Watching and my body into motionless rest, I stared out into the silver desert. The night was cool and clear. The sand of the road seemed to shimmer. As I looked, my mental wondering steadily melted toward simple wonder. Wordless, unformed awe overtook me in a shivery embrace, and in that nearly timeless slide of moments, it was possible to glimpse eternity.

Then, like a sage or a spirit appearing from the whitewashed desert night, a creature appeared – a kangaroo rat bounding toward me, first silently and then with a tiny crunch of sand beneath each double legged bounce. It came straight to my feet and stopped, looking up at me with its head cocked as though considering whether I was stone or not.

I looked back, moving only my eyes, hardly breathing. Maybe I was trying to convince it that I was a rock after all. It seemed to work. The rat crept closer to my feet by tiny stages. Certainly it must have divined by smell what it could not determine by sight. Yet it came right up to the very tip of my boot, then froze. Perhaps it was that moment when it realized that I was animal rather than mineral. We looked at each other, or perhaps I looked and it stared. We stilled our bodies. We held our breaths.

I moved my foot.

The creature fled in apparent panic, its once quiet feet thumping the white dust with surprising power.

My mind began turning over again, still watching but also thinking unhurried thoughts. The night slid on. The moon grew slightly smaller. I thought about the rat gazing up at me, and myself looking up at the moon. I thought of my friends slumbering softly on the other side of the nylon tent walls. The old friends and the new friends and the moments we were sharing and would share come morning. Man and wife in one tent, three ladies in another and the bachelor in no tent at all, but curled in his sleeping bag under the moon. I thought of arriving at the campfire of my old friend and his wife, of the light and shadow dancing on the rocks behind, of discovering with him the rock formation that would become our stargazing platform, of hearing the transcendent chords of human voices wafting up to us on our perch, of leading the others to the spot and being careful of everyone's hair as we lay down. My thoughts brushed each one of them, as they slept, in a pleased and thankful prayer of protection.

Then the kangaroo rat returned, this time stealthily, taking cover under the picnic table before creeping into my own moon shadow. Maybe it was a different rat, but I like to think it was the same, that he had been circling around and unconsciously considering his next approach. I watched him nose around my shadow. I moved my feet, but he did not flee. After a few moments under my gaze, he did hold still again. Then he moved under my chair. I bent over and looked at him between my feet, but he no longer acknowledged me as a threat. I wondered what he was looking for. Had I set my chair down above some secret entrance to his den? Was he after food? Then he should have stayed under the picnic table.

I stood up and he bounded off into the desert scrub again. Maybe he was simply exploring, accustomed to solitude at this late stage of the moon crossing. Perhaps I was simply an oddity to him as he to me, another creature nocturnally awake and therefore out of place in the lonely consciousness of the night. Maybe he was just checking things out. I decided to do the same.

Our campsite was huddled in the shadow of the lookout rock that melded into larger formations and grew into a hill, all of sandstone and all sculpted by the wind. On the other side, the flat, scrub-covered sand stretched out to the distant hulk of other hills, broken only by the occasional Joshua tree.

There was no breeze, not a rustle or a rub of leaves. My boots ground the sand of the path in ghastly crunches that seemed to shatter the stillness. I was the only thing in motion, and I was wrecking the harmony of silence. I walked more softly, but still it was too loud. When I clearly heard someone roll over and cough in a camper still dozens of yards ahead of me, I veered off toward the rocks. How would I have felt to hear the harsh and steady tread of someone stalking my bivouac in the wee hours? I turned up a small canyon, still creeping to keep down the noise.

The sandstone felt odd beneath my hands and seemed ghostly in the pale light. I thought of it as a moonscape, though it may have been more like Mars for all I knew. Would it be this still and quiet on the Moon? Perhaps it would. They said that Armstrong's footprints were still up there, slowly filling up with cosmic dust but never blowing away.

How could the astronauts stand it, shattering that silence with their buggy engines and sullying the lunar snow-dust with eternal tracks and boot prints? I was having a Bradbury moment.

Ah, but who were they disturbing? The moon himself perhaps, but why should he mind? The Man would not be disrupted in his benevolent watching by the rowdy antics of some boys with motor bikes and flags. And would in not have done the same, jumping to see how high I could go, turning clumsy summersaults in my spacesuit and maybe making snow dust angels to mark my passing. Would I not at least have clambered up the nearest canyon to see what I might find? With that I scaled a small rise and found myself back at our stargazing spot. That's what I found.

I shuffled back down to the road and tip-toed back to camp.

I checked the time on my cell phone, breaking the timelessness of the night as I had broken its silence. There was still an hour before I ought to rouse the others. I lay down between the tents and curled into a blanket. I thought of the kangaroo rat, wondered if he would return and how he would feel to find me given-in to slumber. Would it be lonely for him now? Or would he simply dive into some secret entrance beneath my chair and finally go to sleep himself?

My dreams were filled with moonlight and stars and the vague awareness of the shining white dust on which I lay, all mingled with the faces of my friends and the almost other-worldly little creature that had passed the endless moments with me.


I woke before the cell-phone alarm in my pocket had a chance to shatter both the timelessness and the silence of the night. The moon had jumped ahead and dwindled markedly, but still he ruled the night that was showing no hint of morning.

I stirred up the fire and put a kettle on to boil. The cell ticked off 3:30 a.m. and I cut off the alarm in the middle of the first beep. I wasn't ready to disturb the others. I set some things for breakfast and stood a long time by the fire, listening to the hiss of heating water.

At 3:45 I could wait no longer. I woke Fox first, nudging his sleeping bag and whispering. Then I put my head down beside the tent wall.

"Good morning." My voice was rumbly and deep after all the silence.

I heard the soft gasps of feminine waking and a wavering alto replied.

"Good morning." The voice was awake, but not the mind. The tent began to shuffle.

Soon Mary Renée appeared, then Annie, and later Jen. Fox rolled out of his sleeping bag and they all hobbled over to the fire, marveling about the not-morningness of the hour. But they smiled with sleepy eyes and drank hot chocolate anyway.

Bill and Alli were slower and surlier in rising, but just as grateful for the fire and the hot drinks. Perhaps, as Bill said later, marriage puts some age on you.

For me the rising of my companions was more a harbinger of morning than the rising of the sun would be. Morning came with the firelight and the other shadows against the rocks behind us, with the harmony of other voices.

They started waking up. Talking, even laughing a little in the muffled way of early risers. The day began to pick up speed; we had someplace to be.

We stuffed our gear into the trunk, then stuffed ourselves into the seats of Mary Renée's Saturn. She took it easy as we crept out of Red Rock park and onto the highway, then opened it up.

We had a spaceship to catch.

At Mojave Spaceport, we joined the crowd at the sideline of the runway. There were thousands of them with scopes and radios and cameras. The first private vessel ever launched into space was about to make its third run into the void. Success meant million in a race straight out of science fiction. Not to mention eternal bragging rites, a thumbprint in the chronicles of man.

The crowd began to shout as history taxied out to the end of the runway, turned about and faced us. It's name betrayed the romantic confidence of the team: SpaceShipOne. The rocket plane hung below the belly of a larger ship, The White Knight. Inside, Brian Binnie had one computer screen, two pedals and a stick. He had never been to space, but he was going and he was steering all the way.

The White Knight roared past us, lifted off and spiraled up to 46,000 feet, where SpaceShipOne cut loose. The vapor trail we were watching split in two. Binnie was coasting like the rock out of a sling. He hit his rocket booster and the world behind him roared for 84 seconds of pure acceleration. He shot out beyond the clouds, beyond the air. He came out into the void.

What he found there was silence. The spaceship slowed. Then it stopped. The ping-pong ball on its string in front of him was floating aimlessly. He pulled some M&Ms from his pocket and let them float around the cabin. The only sound was the chick they made when they hit the windows. Binnie looked down at us, but what he saw was the World – the blue curve of the earth below the endless black of outer space.

That must have put things in perspective.

I wonder if he didn't wish then for another rocket burst to take him farther out, on to the moon itself and out among the stars.

Then the ship turned back toward earth, began to sink. This ride had another half.

He fell.

The cabin turned to block the heat. The wings came about to break his fall like the feathers on a shuttlecock. Five times the weight of gravity squeezed him back into his seat as he dropped back toward us waiting on the ground. The wings came around again and then it was time to glide. He soared round and around above us, taking it easy, coming in slow.

Then he set her down, the tiny ship coasting in and touching its delicate landing gears once more on terra firma. The spaceship coasted to a stop and Binnie climbed out on top and unfurled a US flag for the flashbulbs. He had been for a ride outside and now he was back to tell the tale he could never put into words. You gotta see it, I guess.




In that moment, as in no other before or since, it was possible to believe that one day I just might set up camp on a real moonscape wilderness.

I might sit up late on the face of the Night Sentry himself, and marvel at the earthlight, with my friends all sleeping near.

Perhaps I'd meet some rare and undiscovered, sage-like creature of the night.

Perhaps I will experience a new – a wholly different – kind of awe.

posted July 12, 2006