The Gentle Airs of Earth

"The Moon is the first milestone on the road to the stars." 

 – Arthur C. Clarke

Spaceflight has always been a roll of the dice. Despite all the safety checks and the dress rehearsals, space is still the harshest of environments for humans to live in. And just getting there is fraught with danger, not least of all the launch – all those combustible liquids coming together in a calibrated explosion. Like the blue touch paper and retire to a safe distance of about two miles, and wait for the shock waves to roll in.  

Climbing the gravity well on a barely controllable juggernaut. A near vertical ride, like scaling the face of the biggest mountain on the planet. As if Olympus Mons was on the Earth, not Mars. The first roll of the dice, quickly followed by another. The final stage burn all the way to orbit and then the thunderous silence. The submarine light flickering through the windows, as if you’re under the ocean. The sea of space in which the capsule now floats. Your pulse ticking in your eardrums like a metronome made of flesh and blood. The blue-green glow of Earthlight an eerie reminder of all that’s been left behind, a silent beacon just beyond the portholes. An eye staring in as they stare out.  

Too late to have second thoughts for the engines will soon reignite for the TLI burn – Trans Lunar Insertion. The strange vocabulary of spaceflight, which – for all its functionality –borders on the poetic at times. Strange locutions that the astronauts utter almost like incantations as they communicate with Ground Control and parlay with their own fate. The dice rattling again like the relics of a shaman. Then there really is no going back as the spacecraft leaves for the long fall towards the Moon. Floating in zero-G, adrift inside the “tin can” that Bowie sang about back in the day (the kid from Brixton with his eldritch eyes so right about what that trip would be like: how the stars look “very different” from the other side of the sky).

Ahead a journey of some two hundred and fifty thousand miles – their “Furthest South” in the parlance of polar explorers: ten days inside that interplanetary camper van. Will they get on each other’s nerves? Or are they too well adjusted? All smiles for the cameras, for the folks back on Earth. Just don’t open the windows to let some fresh air in because space is a vacuum and you’ll die if you do that.

A single slingshot loop around the far side of the Moon, that mysterious tranquil bay they’ll navigate while a hushed ticking silence presses in, muting the radio comms. The grandeur of the cosmos, even in this little corner of the Solar System, something that seems almost inexpressible. And nothing is as quiet as the inside of a space machine as it makes that long orbital traverse. Its occupants wondering if they’ll get a chance to come back and land next time. To put footprints in the grey powdery dust, just like Neil and Buzz did. Even at that distance, the craters passing before their eyes, there and gone again before they know it – like a conjuring trick at a fairground: which shell is the Moon under? – the engines firing up to send them home.

The capsule coming back just the way it did half a century ago: during the glory days of the Apollo programme. Splashdown! The parachute canopies – that patriotic explosion of red, white and blue – that will gently lower the diving bell to the surface of the ocean. To the waiting recovery crews, to the daredevil frogmen who will swim out to the capsule and help open the hatch, to let in the sweet smelling airs of Earth: the briny maritime aromas of the sea. With the thin horizon of a shoreline in the distance (or at least the deck of a waiting aircraft carrier, which will do just as well for a returning space traveller).

A palimpsest of history deceiving the eye for just a moment: the past overlaying the present, with just a hint of the future waiting in the wings. Welcome back Apollo 18. Welcome back Artemis II. What took you so long?   

Mark Stewart is the Editor of Odyssey – the arts and culture magazine of the British Interplanetary Society

Photo credits: NASA/Boeing