Andrew Malcolm

A soaring NASA rocket prompts thoughts of earthly politics a year from 2012 vote


In the days of my childhood, just before television, my father and I waited in a very long line on a very cold autumn Friday night outside an observatory in Cleveland. I grew up in the countryside, so black night skies full of countless twinkling pins of light were as much a part of life as trees and a family dog.

We had pilgrimaged into the city to shuffle slowly ahead in that line for a special occasion. The facility was opening its giant telescope to the public because one of the other planets called Saturn was unusually “close” to Earth.

It was a long shuffle though — my feet were very bored — down two sides of the block, along the sidewalk, up the steps, through the lobby, up more steps, around the giant telescope base and, one by one, up a few more metal steps to squit into the eyepiece.

Oh my God Almighty, there it was.

The thing was huge! It filled the lens. Covered with yolky swirls, tilted. And it really had those tidy rings; National Geographic was right. I had never seen nor imagined anything so immensely immense. I now know Saturn is nearly 800 times larger than Earth. My father recalls an unusually long silence enroute home.

Evidently, I never got over that intriguing and strangely comforting fascination with large things that made me feel small, very small. I suspect I’m not alone. Being in the presence of large airplanes, ships, mountains, oceans, machines and even personalities awards a welcome perspective. I saw a photo last week of a gaseous star nursery eight billion light years from my desk. That scale — a single light year is just under 5.9 trillion miles — remains deliciously incomprehensible.

It’s a reminder to humans, me anyway, that despite all the wondrous things we have accomplished, humans remain minute ants on this relatively tiny orb moving through space at eight miles per second.

Earthly lessons from NASA flights

I got to thinking about all this the other night, drawn to wait nearly five hours on cold cement in a damp field for the launch of that spot-lit white rocket just 15,000 feet away. It held the latest earth science satellite for NASA and NOAA, NPP, to study the intricate workings of this thin environmental envelope wrapped around the planet.

I was part of another grand NASA Tweetup to give regular Twitter users unusually open access to its amazing work. Here’s what the new two-ton satellite will do from 521 miles up — capture varied images and instrument readings of every square inch of Earth every single day, creating nearly real-time data for weather forecasters as well as an hourly environmental history database for study and comparison in coming decades.

You know those family e-mails you get that contain maybe 7kb, or 7,000 bytes, of data? Well, the satellite will dump back down to Earth 48,000,000,000,000 bytes of data every day. See what I mean about big?

Sitting in that field, my feet were cold, not bored. So why the personal excitement? I think it had to do with the approaching launch of that large, complex rocket painstakingly built by teams of American technicians, in contrast to the everyday small things we each live with in this country these days.

Instead of being united as a nation by some grand tasking — President Kennedy’s challenge to reach the moon comes to mind — many of us have by dint of the times become consumed with individual survival, keeping a job, a house, a car, like single swimmers flailing the water in fear and search of lifeboats.

There was a brief hope in 2008 for change to believe in, the enticing possibility of a newly re-discovered continental unity. But tough times and puny leaders have combined to create a widespread national ethos that Mike Royko once captured as the motto of Chicago’s local political machine — “Ubi est mea.” (“Where’s mine?”)

Watching earthlings with petty plans

Amid our own daily fears and priorities, we watch this crowd of elected officials cynically wrap their own ambitions and goals in the flag of national need. And so many of us, without really thinking much, pick sides to believe in and cheer for like a high school football game and immunize ourselves against reconsideration because we no longer share common big goals.

This administration and its House foes are, for instance, both whacking and reordering space programs, seeing them as lifeless sums of money, no longer enabling national goals or pride. The space shuttles, designed for 100 missions each, are all gone now after no more than 40. So, we must rent rides on Russian rockets. The American astronaut corps, once national heroes, has declined, along with morale.

When I arrived in that lumpy field near Vandenberg Air Force Base about 10 p.m. on launch night late last month, there were two of us monitoring the not-so distant $800 million rocket. By 2 a.m. there were hundreds — seniors, youngsters, teens, couples, all wanting to witness something bigger than themselves.

The spontaneous community played trivia games. told jokes, shared cellphone photos. A radio appeared. People danced. Strangers conversed in the dark, unable to decipher each other’s faces but fully grasping the shared thoughts.

At T-minus 90 seconds silence. One minute. Everyone standing, riveted. Thirty seconds. T-minus 20 seconds. 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2- Main engine ignition. For one second, nothing.

Then nine solid-fuel rockets ignite. A sudden explosion of silent sunlight shatters the darkness. “Ohhh!” everyone exclaims, wincing, in the suddenly lit field.

Silence where there should be fury

From the pad, still silence. The manmade sun begins to rise, slowly. At T-plus 3 seconds, barely clear of the tower, crackling thunder blasts through the crowd.

The bright light lifts, higher and faster. Faster. Even faster, arcing out over the Pacific. Hundreds of Americans, unknown to each other, scream, yell, exchange inaccurate high-fives in the resuming darkness.

When my father and I saw Saturn that black night not so long ago as space counts time, a jet pilot named Chuck Yeager flew faster than sound for the first time, Mach 1.

As we watched the other night, the Delta2 rocket and new NASA satellite soared away at Mach 26.

I felt wonderfully small — again.

Launch photos by James Eberling of Tomcat Photography