Cosmic Spider
Dear Susannah
“I’ll set her down as gently as I can but this may be a bumpy ride.” Tanya’s words kept tumbling in my mind, like a piece of space wreckage, as we made the descent. More than once we exchanged a look that might have come from a hockey old SimShow: brave space explorers venturing into the unknown, or Marines about to storm a beachhead. In a way that’s exactly what we were attempting, trying to set-up a landing stage on a foreign (how much more alien does it get?) and potentially hostile shore. I can easily picture how we must have looked to those back onboard Galileo.
Remember the pictures of the old Apollo landers floating spider-like above the Moon, sharply defined against the grey background (“Drifting to the right a little, picking up some dust, four forward….”). The most alien looking spacecraft we ever built, looking for all the world like one of HGs invaders, as though we were the intellects cool and unsympathetic, and the Moon the world we’d been drawing our plans against.
But our invasion, if invasion it was, faltered and you know my views on that. We barely managed to set up a bridgehead before we lost our collective nerve, before the politicians and public opinion — that most fickle of all easily manipulated forces — brought it all to a halt, turning the half dozen landings sights into museum pieces no one would ever visit. Our future stalled over two decades before the turn of the millennium, before Clarke’s historic deadline. The odyssey that was supposed to be well under way by 2001 never really started. And we never recovered. Only now are we accepting the challenge again, resuming a journey that began a lifetime ago. I hope this one won’t take as long to complete.
In the end, we landed on Hyperion in a craft that wheezed and puffed its way down to the surface. Had it really been a diving bell, water would have been leaking from every rivet and seal. We settled onto the surface with a thud, not at all gentle, coming to rest with a jolt. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the spacecraft had collapsed around us, trapping us on the surface, condemning us to a lingering death as our air slowly ran out. But the machine remained in one piece.
Which was so much more than I could say for my nerves.