The Mind's Mischief
Dear Susannah
Now that we are under way, things are a little less frantic. Almost every hour of the day is still given over to mission requirements but these duties are now performed at a more sedate pace.
Only five days into the voyage and already my head is playing tricks on me. The mind’s mischief. This is a little strange I know but I have the feeling We Are Not Alone. Like Hook’s ticking Croc something is following our invisible wake, waiting for one or more of us to slip overboard. Five people died building Galileo (three men and two woman), dockyard accidents in low orbit. So we’re already a ship of the dead. I somehow doubt they will be the last of our casualties.
I feel as though I’m travelling back into the past, caught in a retrograde current, circa the 1980s or thereabouts, post-Apollo, the way things should have turned out – the Moon and Mars colonised (even if with only one permanent habitation apiece), on the way to the outer planets, extending the Giant Leap instead of falling backwards. If only we’d done it, kept our nerve, held to the future the way we should have, instead of sinking back into the orbital shallows, into a slough of mediocrity. We could have caught a wave to the future instead of waving the future goodbye. We might have ridden the high crest of Encounter with Galileo 70 that ever-breaking wave, from whose summit anything might have been possible. We’ve all but done ourselves in listening to the advice of politicians who can’t see further into the future than the fixed terms of their own office. Better to have tried for the Moon and Mars than to have become what we became – zombies locked into our screens, accepting so much less than was our right, abandoning our future heritage for the cheap trinkets and daily panaceas offered by games shows and soap operas (those depressing peep shows into other peoples lives).
We could have done it. England could have turned its church spires and cathedral steeples into rocket towers, its playing fields into runways, its office blocks into launch gantries. But we lacked the courage and the vision. We preferred the view from terrace and pavilion. A nation that had once commanded every ocean on the planet unable to muster a single vessel to explore the seas of space, to venture into the local backwater of our own Solar System. It is difficult to imagine a greater failure of nerve, or a more abject abandonment of the future.
Why did we listen to the moral recidivists and modern day Flat Earthers who carped constantly about the starving millions, wearing out the already well-worn cloth of a stale argument, of a premise that was threadbare to begin with, and how the money might be better spent elsewhere. I don’t deny the fate of those millions was terrible but would they have been saved if the rockets hadn’t flown?