In space, no one can hear you tweet...
I thought that would be a clever opening line to this week’s column after reading Major Tim Peake’s last tweet before blasting off into space. Except that he will be able to tweet in space. They’ve got Internet up there!
You can do almost anything in space these days. I know that from watching a porn film set in space when I was 16. It featured the first ever zero-gravity cum shot. Unfortunately when I got the video home I found I’d been given the censored version. To this day I’ve still not seen that orgasm in space. I can only imagine it being somewhere between the bodily eruptions in Ridley Scott’s seminal film Alien (pardon the pun) and the floating love scene at the end of Moonraker starring Roger Moore.
“My god, what’s Bond doing?” asks M as the team makes audio-visual contact with 007 between the sheets with CIA agent Holly Goodhead (literally).
“I think he’s attempting re-entry sir,” says Q.
Let’s hope the content of Peake’s tweets aren’t as graphic as those sexy space odysseys or as dull as his playlist which features Beautiful Day by tax-avoiders U2 and Don’t Stop Me Now by apartheid apologists Queen.
If the 177 tracks average three minutes the playlist should cover the nine-hour trip from the launch site in Kazakhstan (famous for Borat and human rights violations) to the International Space Station (ISS).
The ISS is 240 miles above earth—that’s as short a distance as London to Scarborough, Paris to Poitiers or Trinidad to Saint Lucia. The station, which orbits at 17,500 mph, was visible from London 20 minutes before it began to dock. At docking time it was passing over India and had circled the earth four times.
From the ISS, the astronauts can see for thousands of miles in all directions and experience 16 sunrises and sunsets a day.
In Britain, Peake is the star. He’s only the eighth Briton ever to go into space. But Yuri Malenchenko, the Russian, is the main man. He manually guided the Soyuz craft into the ISS when the automated programme failed.
He goes into space so often he even got married there. It is unknown whether the marriage was also consummated in space. NASA issued an informal ban on sex on the space station in 2010.
Peake will spend Christmas in space, away from his wife and kids, but while I don’t want to be a Scrooge, one has to ask questions about the relevance of space exploration in the wider scheme of human existence.
According to NASA figures, each space launch costs US$450m, space shuttles cost US$1.7bn to build and the ISS, which cost US$150bn, is the most expensive structure ever built.
There’s something troubling about spending vast amounts on projects that a few experts take part in while down on earth millions of people will spend this Christmas homeless, stateless, sick, disenfranchised and poor.
Scientists have been talking about the advancements space makes possible. Astrobiologist Dr Zita Collins of Imperial College London spoke about research on immune systems and bones, vaccine development through studying protein crystals in free-fall, the rapid ageing of skin due to high radiation and low gravity and studies on curing asthma through monitoring the particles Peake inhales.
“Couldn’t we just do this on earth? Why go all that way?” asked the BBC reporter, summing up my feelings.
For me, space exploration feels elitist and unjustifiably expensive. That space is exciting and amazing doesn’t really absolve powerful governments from neglecting earth issues.
Within 20 years the Mars One project aims to put humans on the red planet.
It all makes me think about Neill Blomkamp’s film Elysium set in the year 2159 where rich elites live idyllic lives on a space station in a bubble while the poor ordinary folk remain on a post-apocalyptic nightmarish earth, occasionally attempting to smuggle themselves into the bubble but invariably killed by security forces during their attempts.
This year the UK published its first-ever national space policy. This week, Science and Universities Minister, Jo Johnson, said he wants to make Britain the European hub for commercial space travel and scientific exploration.
Asked about the costs, given the austerity measures British people have been under for five years, he said that space investment represents “a terrific return for the economy,” before making the vaguely implausible claims that “for every £1 we spend on space technology it returns £10,” that space will be “a big driver of jobs in years to come” and that the UK aims to “generate £30bn of (space-related) exports by 2030.”
David Cameron tweeted that “it was great to watch Tim Peake blast off,” with a picture of himself watching the live coverage on the BBC—a corporation whose budget he is slashing by £700m over the next six years.
The best public service broadcasting in the world, welfare, poverty alleviation or space rockets? I guess it’s a question of priorities.