Celestial Spyglass
Dear Susannah
Galileo is something of a paradox, both crude and sophisticated. She was put together in a hurry and it shows. It’s neither comfortable nor particularly safe, and I often wonder what I’m doing here. The others are all career astronauts or scientists and I am very obviously the odd one out, a mere scribbler taken on to record the mission. I am the keeper of the journal but will the journal be the equal of the journey we are about to make?
This is real space flight, the way it should be. No warp drives or hyperspace jumps. No origami tricks folding space back in upon itself so that departure and arrival points co-exist in the same place. Just rusty old engines, pipes and valves, salvaged as if from a museum, and cracked into near working order almost by hand.
Think of Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen trying to keep the old tugboat’s engine going with an oily rag and a lot of faith. That’s pretty much the position we are in. We can repair but we can’t always replace components, so it’s often a question of mend and make do. Of hoping for the best and trying not to dread the worst that might happen.
Galileo is made of discarded components, mostly jettisoned external fuel tanks bolted together to form one long cylinder, plus a crew compartment at the front, complete with flight deck. In spite of this cobbled-together appearance (it has the look of something assembled in an orbital junkyard, designed and built by a scrap metal merchant) there is a strange elegance to the design, a grace that even the most ungainly spacecraft have. Perhaps it’s the setting, borrowed glamour bestowed by virtue of the environment the vehicle exists in.
Living space is the one thing you can’t live without on a long duration mission so they built our host vessel big, or rather long. Galileo should more rightly be called The Jules Verne in honour of the man who created the Nautilus and its idealistic captain, though we are now somewhat more than twenty thousand leagues from home. I also favour the name perspicillum, the word Galileo used to describe his first telescope. Galileo is shaped like a giant, roughly hewn cosmic lens, pointing directly at the worlds its namesake himself was the first to see through a celestial spyglass.
Whatever the reason, Galileo is not a difficult ship to love, in spite of the daily discomforts we endure. No doubt a psychologist could come up with all manner of reasons for this but the plain and simple fact is this: her sophisticated life-support systems keep us safe. And her fortress walls are all that hold the void at bay. Without them we would die quite horribly, with all the symptoms of Ebola, the rupturing of our bodies compressed not into days but seconds. I try not to think of that even as I contemplate the view. It’s a bit like a mountaineer admiring the grandeur of the summit even as he hangs by the most precarious of lifelines.
You learn to cultivate an almost Zen-like attitude to an environment that is both beautiful and deadly. I often think of the parable about a man who has fallen over the edge of a cliff, his grip on a nearby vine the only thing preventing certain death. His grip is quickly weakening and he knows he will fall in a matter of seconds. In those last moments of his life he spots a piece of fruit growing on the vine. He plucks the fruit and puts it in his mouth, savouring the taste, enjoying the final moments of his existence.
Whatever happens in the weeks and months ahead, I hope I will have the courage to enjoy this experience, even if I lose my grip on life itself in the process.