An attack on space flight that veers off-course

Regular readers will know that I have a sort of allergy to the Sunday Times columnist, AA Gill. In the glossy magazine section, Gill spreads his wisdom about the utter pointlessness of space exploration and settlement. Bravo AA! No doubt some commissioning editor thought that what with all this renewed interest in space flight, the Google project, Richard Branson’s support for the Rutan project, etc, that it was time to do what Gill knows how to do best, arguably, the only thing he knows how to do – take the piss. Here is a paragraph (no web link available):

The one lasting aesthetically beautiful thing that did comes from the whole guzzling, ugly space business was that photograph of the blue planet; astonishing and moving and vulnerable, our great group photo. And ironically, that image did more than anything to galvanise the nascent ecology movement.

There is a nugget of wisdom here, but he grossly exaggerates. The back-to-nature-can-we-just-turn-off-the-whole-industrial-thingy?” movement arguably started as far back as the bucolic sentimentality of Rousseau and the Lake poets and their horror at the Industrial Revolution; I’d argue that books, however flawed and tendentious, as Carson’s Silent Spring did a lot to encourage the Green movement. Pictures of the Earth taken from space are indeed fantastic, but I doubt it got a lot of would-be Greens going; what those photos demonstrated was the brilliance of the space project, the daring, the sheer bloody-minded persistence required to get up there in the first place.

Gill lists, with his usual sneer, all the various inventions that are sometimes linked to the space race, like teflon coatings or GPS navigation equipment, the latter being ridiculous, he reckons, in that it allows us to reach Leeds without using a toll road. Such wit, such intelligence! (Has Gill ever met a person in the military, or a sailor or mountaineer for whom GPS has proved a lifesaver? Probably not). But one might as well sneer at say, the discovery of tobacco, the potato or other plants as a result of earlier “pointless” explorations. Earlier explorations drove the development of accurate clocks, which in turn improved standards of engineering; they encouraged development of storage of food, improved medical treatments to avoid problems like scurvy, and so on. No doubt some equivalent of AA Gill in the 18th Century would have mocked such things then (I am sure these people existed; they are of an ineradicable human type, alas).

Yet amidst all the smart-alecisms of Gill, he misses the really big criticism that one should make of the space race: it was almost entirely funded and directed by government. As a result of the gigantic sums raised in tax to spend on spaceflight, other, less spectacular but in the long run arguably more useful private ventures were squeezed out. If such private ventures could get going, it is hard to see how AA Gill or others could object to people risking their own money on such things although as his article implies, I reckon Gill would be quite keen to ban such “pointless” things if he thinks it somehow diverts precious resources from preserving the status quo on earth.

Here is a blast of fresh air on the subject, meanwhile.