a night launch, which this one was not, though it was originally scheduled to be
“Godspeed, Atlantis” — a message assembled in black letters on the sign board of a church here in Titusville. we saw it last night, out in the cool, dark breezes. we went to the water’s edge, too, last night, and looked out at Atlantis on her launch pad, flooded with spot lights. those lights were like the Aurora Borealis, slowly shifting as eerily beautiful light-shapes, only, unlike auroras, were sharpened into a cone. the quiet luminescence, the quiet anticipation of the next day’s launch, were beautiful, and there were breezes. the breezes made flags flap persistently, and it rustled the leaves of a 40-foot palm. and then the waning gibbous moon rose before our eyes above the horizon, bright, huge, and deep red. we saw it moving across the sky.
today, though, today was the launch. it was profound. it was incredibly loud. the light of the rockets was blinding. we could still see Atlantis as a small bright careening dot when she was traveling at 2,500 MPH.
this is what i wrote in my notebook half an hour before the launch:
like its namesake city, the orbiter seems a dream, a vector of the nostalgia for infinity. is a shuttle launch politicially neutral? why are these people here? to celebrate the achievements of man, not of nations, to revel in the play of excessive discovery. no one in this crowd of thousands will riot. all will be silent and awed, or else unified in exuberance, at liftoff, and all will wish Atlantis godspeed, and a safe return home to our planet.
this turned out to be true.
Godspeed, Atlantis! safe travels through the universe, and come back home to us safely, and with new knowledge!
You would have loved it, I think. It was momentous and very human.
I often wonder if God gave us fossil fuels as a strange sort of sacrificial (in its destructiveness) special revelation. Perhaps He wanted us to see that whole galaxies too were beautiful and He was willing to let us destroy civilization to achieve it. Soon there will be no more shuttles, no more Hubble telescope, and the skies will be dark again and veiled in the mystery of the ancients. This generation’s science will be the next’s mythology.
What’s up, man. Brilliant. Have been without access to the intertubes, or else I would have responded earlier. I’ve been pondering things along these lines since the launch myself, but haven’t been able to express the problem this well. Beautiful.
This is a very important bit of speculation … I have yet to figure out for myself whether, in general, beauty is “worth” (problematic concept in itself) mass destruction – much less if, as in this specific case, whether cosmic beauty is worth the destruction that fossil fuels wrought. As you know, I’m not convinced that the beauty of Mozart was worth the destruction of unsustainable agriculture. But perhaps there are problematic assumptions here – that Mozart necessarily required agriculture, that seeing the beauty of whole galaxies required fossil fuels, etc. Do we know enough to know that certain paths of destruction, that lead to beauty, are the only paths? Not sure …
Anybody else have any preliminary ideas for this grand issue that Henry is raising?