"vintage Nasa photographs, 1964-1983 -An
exhibition detailing the achievements of Nasa – covering the golden age
of space exploration – featuring over 100 rare photographs" - The Guardian on the For All Mankind exhibition at Breese Little gallery, London, 22nd January – 22nd February 2014
This is tomorrow, again?
So asserts the For All Mankind catalogue:
"The achievements of NASA and
the Apollo programme languished in the popular imagination from the end
of the 1970s until the early 2000s, neglected in the wake of previous
euphoria. The exploration of Mars, space tourism, the commercial
satellite market and China’s recent rover landing on the Moon are clear
signals that space exploration is once again at the very forefront of
public and, increasingly, private agendas. The exploration of space has
likewise renewed its grip on the popular consciousness. Motion pictures
such as Moon (2009), Gravity (2013) and Interstellar (due for release 2014) are fresh examples of the narrative possibilities of space in the Hollywood science fiction tradition."
Definitely does seem to be an uptick of cultural interest in outer space, for no apparent reason.
However, the actual "space exploration, it's ON again" stuff that's been happening recently.... Okay, it's cool that it's going on on at all, after such a long hiatus... China's Moon rover indicates serious intent to restart the space
race, even if it is mostly impelled by the urge to flex geopolitical
muscle (make space a Chinese place). (India too has grand plans, for
similar reasons).
But if you think about it, all China has done is repeat something that was achieved 43 years ago.
Not even repeat it, because NASA got a bunch of human beings on the
lunar surface - a much huger endeavour than getting an inanimate entity,
a titchy robo-vehicle, up there. So far at least, the People's Republic
has reinvented the wheel, and on a miniature scale.
Branson's Virgin flights into the bit of space just above the atmosphere - again, it's hardly vacations on the Moon, is it?
lift-off of the final Apollo mission to the Moon in 1972, the one with the Eugene Cirnan monologue that Daft Punk used on "Contact"
from Martin Wolf's review of Mariana Mazzucato's The Entrepreneurial State in the Financial Times, evidence to strengthen the argument that if we had a Socialist World Government we'd have a colony on Mars by now and manned missions to the moons of Jupiter... and that there's literally no future in late capitalism
"... innovation depends on bold
entrepreneurship. But the entity that takes the boldest risks and
achieves the biggest breakthroughs is not the private sector; it is the
much-maligned state.... The US National Science
Foundation funded the algorithm that drove Google’s search engine. Early funding for Apple
came from the US government’s Small Business Investment Company.
Moreover, “All the technologies which make the iPhone ‘smart’ are also
state-funded ... the internet, wireless networks, the global positioning
system, microelectronics, touchscreen displays and the latest
voice-activated SIRI personal assistant.” Apple put this together,
brilliantly. But it was gathering the fruit of seven decades of
state-supported innovation.
"Why is the state’s role so important? The answer lies in the huge
uncertainties, time spans and costs associated with fundamental,
science-based innovation. Private companies cannot and will not bear
these costs, partly because they cannot be sure to reap the fruits and
partly because these fruits lie so far in the future.
"Indeed, the more competitive and finance-driven the economy, the less
the private sector will be willing to bear such risks. Buying back
shares is apparently a far more attractive way of using surplus cash
than spending on fundamental innovation. The days of AT&T’s
path-breaking Bell Labs are long gone. In any case, the private sector
could not have created the internet or GPS. Only the US military had the
resources to do so.
"... The
state is also an active entrepreneur, taking risks and, of course,
accepting the inevitable failures.
"... policy makers increasingly believe the myth that the state is
only an obstacle, thereby depriving innovation of support and humanity
of its best prospects for prosperity. Indeed, the scorn heaped on
government also deprives it of the will and capacity to take
entrepreneurial risks.
... government has also increasingly accepted that it funds the
risks, while the private sector reaps the rewards. What is emerging,
then, is not a truly symbiotic ecosystem of innovation, but a parasitic
one, in which the most lossmaking elements are socialised, while the
profitmaking ones are largely privatised"
Reference to Bell Labs reminded me that my argument in the Laurie Spiegel piece was that, being a monopoly, Bell Telephone was able to achieve the heft of a small nation-state -- it therefore had the far-sighted, long-term mentality that lent itself to long-term research, pure research without thought of immediate commercial benefit. Competitive capitalism fosters short-termism and short-sight.
Who draws parallels with the curious fact about acceleration, that "as an object approaches the speed of light... you can throw more and more energy into accelerating that object" but "it becomes increasingly reluctant to pick up speed. Instead, that
energy gets added to the mass of the object, making it even harder to
accelerate. Eventually, despite any effort you might make, the object
just becomes more massive, stubbornly staying short of exceeding, or
even completely reaching, the speed of light"
and limits-to-growth, innovation-gets-harder-and-more-expensive type ideas
"As John Horgan pointed out in his book The End of Science
the cost of making fundamental technological discoveries has been a
steady march from basement tinkers to the Large Hadron Collider. Where
we could once make fundamental leaps for the cost of some polished
lenses and a few pounds of chemicals, it now takes massive international
efforts to move the goal line an inch. To make the kind of
breakthroughs required to reach the Singularity, or clear any of the
hurdles standing in its way, an investment greater than anything we’ve
seen before will be required."
as well as the mystery of why we haven't heard from alien civilisations yet, given that there's millions or even billions of solar systems that could have planets that might support life.
"Maybe civilizations just … run out of steam.
Maybe instead of a never-ending climb, we’re doomed to just follow an
arc of our own making, right back into the ground..... perhaps the answer to “where are they” can be derived simply
from the one intelligent civilization we know. Where are they? Nowhere.
They didn’t spread to the stars. They didn’t reach a technical nirvana.
Instead they just … failed.... They built systems in which technical progress was too closely allied
with the profit motive, and as the scale of investment increased and
the prospect of gain became both more long term and speculative, they
simply stalled out. Like a rocket with insufficient velocity to achieve
orbit, they surged up, up, up but eventually could not move any higher,
or even maintain the peak of their flight. They fell back. They used up,
wore down, wore out....
"One day going to the moon was a dream. Then it was a fact. Then it was history. Then it was a myth"
This "Moon landing as myth' idea reminded me of two things -- Daft Punk's "Contact", which I talked about at the Tomorrow Never Knows Symposium as an elegy for Space and the Western Faustian drive of a "perpetual spiritual reaching out into boundless space" (Spengler) and then I quoted not the bit that DP sampled from Eugene Cernan on "Contact" ("there's something out there" etc etc) but what he actually said, as the last man to stand on the Moon's surface, when he climbed up the ladder into the lunar module:
“As I take man's last step from the surface, back home for some time to come –
but we believe not too long into the future – I'd like to just (say) what I
believe history will record. That America's challenge of today has forged man's
destiny of tomorrow.”
The other thing "then it was a myth" re. the Moon missions reminded me of was that when I did an interview with Salon.com about Retromania, and during the course of it mentioned the space race, some idiot in the typically-Salon.com rebarbative comments section made fun of that: "how dated, he's talking about the space race" . As if the idea of Humanity pushing beyond its terrestial confines was somehow camp - not an epic civilisational project or essential spiritual imperative - but more or less on the same level as the open-necked shirt and medallion-in-a-nest-of-chest-hair. Something that went out of style in the Seventies.
Actually the analogy is more with something like Woodstock -- the Space
Race, as a locus of excitement and expectation, now regarded, with the
enormous condescension of posterity, as a form of generational
over-estimation - something it's embarrassing when the old folks keep
banging on and on about it....
"There’s a sense in which Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 argument about
how the idea of the frontier shaped American history can apply to the
entire modern project. Exploration, expansion, the promise that a better
life was just a long voyage away — all of these helped fuel the sense
of historical mission, the assumption of perpetual progress, which
shaped and defined the modern age. Go back and read the science fiction of the 1940s and ’50s, and you’ll
be struck by the vaulting confidence that this expansion would continue
upward and outward, and that a new age of exploration was just waiting
to be born.Today that confidence has vanished. Our Mars rovers are impressive and
our billionaires keep pouring money into private spaceflight, but
neither project captures the public’s imagination, and the very term
“Space Age” seems antique. "
"The Kepler 62 discovery might have earned
more headlines at a less horrific moment [i.e. the week of the Boston marathon bombing and the Texas explosion] but it would have fallen out
of the news soon enough. It’s possible that we’re less interested in space travel because we feel
that it’s a luxury good at a time when we have bigger problems here on
Earth. But it’s also possible that we’ve gradually turned inward, to our
smartphone screens and Facebook profiles, because we know that
spaceflight isn’t going to get us to another world anytime soon.
"Obviously exploration is not a cure for unhappiness or evil. But it can
be an antidote to the mix of anxiety and exhaustion that seems to
permeate the developed world these days.And after a week as grimly claustrophobic as this one... it seems worth hoping that the human desire for wider
horizons — for new worlds to wonder at, reach for and understand — will
someday be fulfilled again.
"President Obama's re-election is shaping up to be great news for NASA....
"Assuming that the rumored plans are indeed true, the next twenty to
thirty years of space exploration might play out like a real-life Carl
Sagan fantasy. Items on the rumored docket include: more manned missions
to the moon, a manned outpost on the far side of the moon, a mission
sending astronauts to an asteroid by 2025, and the commencement of
manned missions to Mars by the mid-2030s."
They were holding off talking about this until the results came apparently, Romney being less in favor of Gigantic Public Works and promising huge cuts to government spending.
The piece quotes Space.com for further background and details:
In 2010, President Obama directed NASA to work toward
sending astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025, then on to the
vicinity of Mars by the mid-2030s. To reach such deep-space
destinations, the agency is developing a huge rocket called the Space
Launch System (SLS) and a crew capsule named Orion.
But astronauts likely won't head straight to a space rock
when SLS and Orion are ready to fly together in 2021. In the last year,
word has begun leaking out that NASA wants to explore Earth-moon L2 a
point in space that lies beyond the moon's far side, as a precursor ...
so NASA (and perhaps international partners) can learn more about
supporting humans in deep space. Astronauts stationed there could also
aid in lunar exploration — by teleoperating rovers on the moon's
surface, for example.
Well, colour me surprised. I really can't imagine how all this is affordable, more's the pity.
"There is reason to believe that even by the fifties and sixties, the
pace of technological innovation was slowing down from the heady pace of
the first half of the century... [but] because the space race gave everyone the impression that remarkable
advances were happening, the popular impression during the sixties was
that the pace of technological change was speeding up in terrifying,
uncontrollable ways.
"Alvin Toffler’s 1970 best seller Future Shock argued that
almost all the social problems of the sixties could be traced back to
the increasing pace of technological change....Humans were not psychologically prepared for the pace of change,
Toffler wrote. He coined a term for the phenomenon: “accelerative
thrust.” It had begun with the Industrial Revolution, but by roughly
1850, the effect had become unmistakable. Not only was everything around
us changing, but most of it—human knowledge, the size of the
population, industrial growth, energy use—was changing exponentially....
"While many of the historical trends Toffler describes are accurate,
the book appeared when most of these exponential trends halted. It was
right around 1970 when the increase in the number of scientific papers
published in the world—a figure that had doubled every fifteen years
since, roughly, 1685—began leveling off. The same was true of books and
patents.
"Toffler’s use of acceleration was particularly unfortunate.
For most of human history, the top speed at which human beings could
travel had been around 25 miles per hour. By 1900 it had increased to
100 miles per hour, and for the next seventy years it did seem to be
increasing exponentially. By the time Toffler was writing, in 1970, the
record for the fastest speed at which any human had traveled stood at
roughly 25,000 mph, achieved by the crew of Apollo 10 in 1969, just one
year before. At such an exponential rate, it must have seemed reasonable
to assume that within a matter of decades, humanity would be exploring
other solar systems.
"Since 1970, no further increase has occurred. The record for the fastest
a human has ever traveled remains with the crew of Apollo 10. True, the
maximum speed of commercial air flight did peak one year later, at
1,400 mph, with the launching of the Concorde in 1971. But that speed
not only has failed to increase; it has decreased since the Concorde was
abandoned in 2003."
among Graeber's arguments is that the misleadingly spectacular space race happened because the USA imitated the USSR -- NASA and Apollo was a gargantuan feat of planning and state-organised mobilisation of resources, and in that sense profoundly unAmerican... and (once the race to the Moon was won) quickly abandoned
"It’s often said the Apollo moon landing was the greatest historical
achievement of Soviet communism. Surely, the United States would never
have contemplated such a feat had it not been for the cosmic ambitions
of the Soviet Politburo. We are used to thinking of the Politburo as a
group of unimaginative gray bureaucrats, but they were bureaucrats who
dared to dream astounding dreams."
"I was referring more to the spirit of the world’s reaction to both the
launch of Concorde and the Moon landing than to the Expo itself. But
it’s not only about technical prowess: it’s more to do with what can be
imagined and what dimension imagination has in serious life. An
organization like NASA was, essentially, 4,000 people seriously
entertaining fantasy: that scale of working on visionary elements is now
incredibly reduced. At the moment we want to achieve goals that are
very imminent, very realistic. Few organisations are able to define an
unconventional aim and then to engineer its implementation, even over a
period of ten or 12 years. These days, projects often have a maximum of
only four years in which to be realized, as that’s the typical period
that a politician is in power.... [What fascinates me is] the combination of
imagination and government action, of architecture and bureaucracy. The
public sector is the sector with vision, and I think this is something
that, for whatever reason, we haven’t had for a very long time."
oh and Neal Stephenson has been banging on about the absence of Big Visions of the Future in science fiction and launched something called the Hieroglyph Project to agitate for more Optimistic and Heroic imaginings of the future (as opposed to the surfeit of dystopias and cataclysms and entropic wind-downs):
"The Hieroglyph project’s first concrete achievement will be a sci-fi
anthology from William Morrow in 2014, full of new stories about
scientists tackling big projects, from building supertowers to
colonizing the moon. 'We have one rule: no hackers, no hyperspace and no
holocaust,' Stephenson says. He and his collaborators want to avoid
pessimistic thinking and magical technologies like the “hyperspace”
engines common in movies like Star Wars. And, he adds, they’re 'rying to get away from the hackerly mentality of playing around with
existing systems, versus trying to create new things.' "
The idea seems to be that these visions and all this positivity and ambition will directly or indirectly inspire scientists, policy-makers, children who'll grown into those roles etc etc to actually make them real, or things of this Heroic Scale. But (if Graeber is right) that would seem to be a doomed attempt at top-down, superstructure-leading-the-base, change...
