Memories of Mir - Orbital Drift
- markdestewart
- Jul 13
- 2 min read
Updated: Jul 14
A Metaphor Equation Micro-blog
In Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterly 1972 film adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris, a journey in space is represented by an endless trek over roads and freeways (in effect a motion sculpture of steel and glass and burnished chrome, much like the components of a 1950s spacecraft). It’s a brilliant and effective metaphor but in reality you can’t just drive up to a space station from the surface of a planet. The rendezvous – those great circumference spanning loops – takes time to accomplish. In the case of Helen Sharman’s journey to the Mir Space Station some two days. Not so much an upward drift, more a frictionless glide, the space capsule’s rocket engines sending them – Helen and her two fellow cosmonauts – ever closer, each firing a reminder of the gravity they had left behind.
And the stakes were high, as she explained in her autobiography Seize the Moment when she described the docking process: “If you miss by a mile you have another go. If you miss by six inches you have two badly damaged spacecraft and five dead cosmonauts.”
Helen made it of course and floated through the hatch into the habitat that would be her home for the next six days. Below her, a world that must have affected her as much as that fictional planet in Lem’s novel – its constantly changing image imprinting itself on her mind, a geological and oceanic countenance that would surely haunt the first Briton in space for the rest of her life. A spectral encounter in every sense.
Click an image above to enlarge it
Left- Even in low Earth orbit our home world can still seem like a distant goal
Right - The dislocation of time and space create a maze of entropy and ennui in Tarkovsky’s adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s novel
Read part one of our interview with Helen in the July issue of Odyssey.
And catch up with the first instalment in the “Memories of Mir” series here:
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