The most heroic figures of last week were the astronauts crawling around the edge of the space shuttle to repair the craft in which they must return to the Earth 400km below. It’s an extraordinary testament to the defeated and sunless mood that we seem to be in that this was treated everywhere as a defeat. Nasa grounded its shuttle fleet until further notice, and there was a clear suggestion that the crew might be the last American astronauts.
One reason is that the shuttle is 25 years old, so it seems to many people astonishing that it should still work at all. One Nasa administrator said last week: “I wonder whether I could find a single electronics box in my house that’s 25 years old and still works. I don’t think I can. It’s the same thing with the orbiter.”
I find this attitude shocking in itself. My idea of the best engineering in the world is that it should last more or less forever, especially when Nasa’s budget is available to build and maintain it.
Instead of that, the shuttle turns to be the rocket-borne equivalent of an old tramp steamer, held together through hundreds of minor repairs and patches. Many of these have a bearing on the safety of the astronauts it carries, and more and more people are questioning why we need manned flight at all. The Americans, certainly, can send successful unmanned missions to Mars, even if Britain can’t, and there’s very little that the astronauts seem to add to the knowledge that can be acquired by smart robots. An unmanned space programme might cost a 10th as much as Discovery does.
Increasingly, one hears the argument that the future of space travel will be — should be — robotic. But this raises the question of why we are in space at all. There’s no one answer, and one important cause is not much discussed publicly: that both Russia and the United States hoped to gain military advantage by it, and feared that the other might. I suspect that without that motivation there would have been a great deal less prestige at stake in the space war and they might have agreed that planting a man on the moon was a pointless thing to do.
This motivation still persists. The idea that the Earth could be showered with missiles from space, common enough in 1950s science fiction, seems to have receded. Rockets launched from submarines would extinguish all life on Earth more cheaply.
Without satellites, however, a modern army could not fight at all. The satellites tell soldiers and their commanders where they are. The GPS equipment used to guide missiles of every sort can also supply photographs of astonishing detail of everywhere on Earth. We can see echoes of this in civilian technology: the satellite pictures provided by Google Earth are, in some places, so detailed that individual pedestrians can be distinguished as well as individual cars.
This kind of information is so valuable that there has been hyper-nationalist American talk of shooting down any rival network of GPS satellites.
But these military advantages aren’t the only reason we are in space. A much nobler explanation is human dreams. Space captured the imagination long before anyone got anybody up there. Rockets were built by men who had dreamed of them as boys. If there are many future generations, they may regard science fiction as the most important artistic idea of the 20th century.
As a predictor of actual technology, most science fiction is lousy. A million spaceships were launched in pulp stories by engineers equipped with slide rules. But there is one thing that was almost infallibly right: the purpose of technology in science fiction is to supply us with problems. The failure of technology has been an indispensable plot device ever since Gulliver’s shipwrecks.
The triumph over malfunctioning technology calls on all the virtues of an engineer. The coolness, the courage and the analytical skill of the shuttle astronauts, crawling around the skin of their tiny vessel, is a peculiarly modern sight. It is also the justification of the whole manned space programme. This may sound a breathtakingly cynical thing to write as the shuttle casts off from the space station and sets off on its long, blindingly fast spiral back to Earth. Suppose they all die? That will be truly terrible. But it won’t diminish the worth of their courage and example. The shuttle astronauts remind us that the best reason to be in space is that it gives us the chance to be heroes.