"astronomy" vs "space"
A spaceship was supposed to launch today. Artemis I, the uncrewed test run of America's ~*return to the moon*~ was scheduled to launch a few hours ago. But an engine showed a line of frost, the frost lining a crack, so the launch was put off, or scrubbed. They may try again in a few days, the next launch window being September 2, September being alarmingly soon, if the engine issue can be resolved by then.
As what we thought was launch day approached, I felt a weird lack of excitement. I follow lots of space people on twitter, scientists and reporters, and there was buzz, there was hubbub. Friends were getting press passes and flying to Florida, bracing to wake up ass-early the morning of the launch. All I envied, though, aside from internet friends seeing other internet friends without me, was their proximity to the Vehicle Assembly Building, an incomprehensibly large structure I've been desperate to see ever since reading about it in Leaving Orbit. Seeing a rocket take off? Sure, cool. Big flashy and loud. But the rocket launching a capsule around the moon, the capsule paving the way for human exploration? I couldn't find a part of myself that cared. I almost... un-cared, wished it weren't happening at all.
When you write about astronomy, it feels weird to be unmoved by big space news. I did some light introspection, enough for a tweet: What was going on in me that I just didn't care? Or, what was going on with this mission that made it not move me? Do I not care about human exploration? Has the invasion of NASA by corporate spaceflight concerns (many of them run by harmful assholes (Elon Musk)) soured me on the whole enterprise? I love telescopes and rovers and far-flung probes, and have nothing against rocket launches themselves—the JWST launch was can't miss Christmas morning viewing last year. Is the moon just too close to home?
Like I said, I tweeted this, and Josh Sokol, one of my favorite astronomy writers, clarified a lot of it for me. He said, "I always feel a similar ambivalence and I think it's common in the astronomy world, which I came out of. That is: there's an inexact fit between what I'm principally interested in (cool shit in nature) and "space" as a journalism beat or a social-cultural activity."
I had never quite thought of it that way: "space," as a journalism beat or national endeavor, has very little overlap these days with "astronomy." Since the days of the first satellites, their Venn diagram has been pulled farther and farther apart. Yes there's nationalistic poison in both, but the very core of human exploration, the idea that "we" need to be there for it to really count... I just don't care. Yes I know there are scientific reasons for this: an astronaut can do in minutes on Mars what takes a rover months. But I don't know that I find it particularly meaningful for humans to set foot on other worlds just for the sake of foot-setting. If I had a choice between sending a person to Mars and sending a probe to an understudied planet or moon in the solar system, I wouldn't have to think for a second. Uranus or Europa would win for me in a second.
There's a parallel here, too, in that space:astronomy::UFOs:ET. I don't know that it's a precise analogy, but at least on the surface, "space" as I'm using it here, as a governmental project, with military influence, as a question largely of technology and engineering, parallels questions of UFOs (or UAPs as they're now more officially called). Whereas astronomy and the search for life beyond Earth feel to be more about science and discovery, questions of what is out there rather than right here. Or, as Josh put it, "cool shit in nature." space:astronomy::human:nature, sort of, too.
That's my favorite new idea I've encountered in the thinking about the first JWST images, too. I wrote about this for Slate—did I ever share that link here? Well, here you go: Surely There Must Be Someone Out There In All That Space. I wrote about that title sentiment, the feeling of looking at the JWST images, especially the deep field, and having your mind go immediately to aliens, and the idea that if space is so vast, surely we must not be alone.
Long story short, that feeling is lovely but we absolutely could still be alone. But in researching that piece, I encountered an even more powerful idea, in talking to anthropologist Lisa Messeri, whom I also interviewed for my book, and whose work always expands and deepens my sense of what astronomy means. Here's that bit from the piece:
The places in JWST’s first images are not places for us. But instead of seeking to speckle them with familiar, Earthly worlds, we can give in to the alienation and embrace the loneliness, let it transmute into a new kind of awe. Messeri told me that the JWST image that made her gasp was the one of Stephan’s Quintet, the galaxies tangled in gravitational dance. “It was the scale of it,” she said, but not just that—the Deep Field shows far more galaxies, after all. “Seeing these galaxies engaged in something—that, itself, is about not being alone.” There doesn’t need to be life for there to be communion. “There’s another way to think about what it means to be alone that isn’t a question of biology, that is instead a question of geography and gravity.” Messeri called their relationship a “kind of galactic community.” But it’s a community we cannot access.
That resonates, here, too. Going to the moon makes the moon for us. And I don't care about space as for us. I think the science that has nothing to do with us is the most interesting, and I think remembering that space isn't for us is the most meaningful, too.