Space Race 2
The Chinese are due to send a man into space this fall. The Brits have sent a robot to Mars; its landing will be closely followed by a Japanese one this winter. India plans a manned moon mission by 2015. Even though the US and Russia have toned things down, the rest of the world is picking up the slack, even if it is only for symbolic reasons, like the urge to build ever-taller skyscrapers, or the drive to create a perfect pair of robot monkey pants.
When I was thirteen I had a Belgian friend of mine live at my house for a year. When he went back to Belgium for Christmas he bought me a present. The present was a signed copy of the biography of Dirk Frimout, the first Belgian in space. Dirk Frimout has, without a doubt, the funniest name of anyone who has ever breached the atmosphere. He has these bewildered eyes and a goofy nose and a moustache and lightsocket hair but he’s bald on top so it just sticks out like steelwool on the sides and at the back. In all the pictures of him in a spacesuit he has this look on his face like “what the fuck am I doing here?”
I never read the book, which makes me feel bad because Stan and his mother apparently lined up for three hours to meet Dirk, and I forgot about it until now. He was a “Payload Specialist”. Here’s a picture and a bio of Dirk:
http://195.13.10.37/UK/EDUCATION/INFORMATION/frimout/bio.htm
Here’s that Dirk link. He is breathtakingly handsome.
The Space Race always seemed a little weird to me. Like every little boy I went through a stage of pro-space astronaut worship, but at some point I started looking at the whole thing as a little silly. Of course we should be sending out robots for research purposes, but a lot of the people into space exploration are in it for really weird reasons. National pride works for a lot of people, but if you carry it far enough it becomes nostalgia for colonialism. Do we really need mines on Mars? Haven’t they seen Total Recall? And some other justifications are about how earth is bound to be fucked in a few decades so we should get ready to move on. That’s some slash-and-burn thinking on a galactic scale, man.
I guess my global priorities are something like this:
1. Eliminate dependence on fossil fuels
2. Rework ‘globalism’*
3. The War on Hunger
4. declare arms dealing illegal
5. The War on Cancer, AIDS
14. increase zero-impact deep-sea exploration
31. Friday is Global-Freakout Day
32. Underwear abolished
33. Half-price wings everywhere, everytime
34. Manned space flight.
In case anyone’s asking, which of course they are not.
* I’m in over my head here.