So, first Richard Branson and now Jeff Bezos have made their quick joyrides into space (or its neighborhood: in Branson’s case, it depends on whom you ask) and, critically, back. The flights were a victory lap of sorts for science, human ingenuity, and immense entrepreneurial drive. Not everyone was pleased.
Read MoreReaders of Stephen Walker’s fine new account of how Yuri Gagarin, a 27-year-old Soviet air-force major (he was promoted from lieutenant while circling the Earth), became the first man in space will discover quite a bit about Gagarin the man, but a great deal more about the program that put him into orbit 60 years ago, on April 12, 1961.
Vasco da Gama, Gagarin was not. For all his skill, toughness, unflappability and courage, he was no explorer. In a way, he was merely the most important of all the fauna that the Soviets shot into space. The first astronauts had relatively little control over their capsules; the first cosmonauts had far less.
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I don’t know where I was when I heard that JFK had been shot, but I can remember where I was at teatime the following day — at home in the east of England, watching the very first episode of Doctor Who. It was the halting, creakily paced beginning of a long, beguiling tumble through time and space that, in the absence of any proper space program of our own, became an eccentric and quintessentially English alternative to Gemini, Apollo, and footsteps on the moon.
Not for the first time, we had sweetened our failure with fantasy. NASA’s Mission Control may have been the acme of American industrial cool, a collection of (Alfred) Sloan Rangers, calm, crew-cut men in white shirts methodically guiding tiny vessels over immense distances, but we had Doctor Who, an almost-perfect embodiment of the chaotic, improvisational genius that Brits like to believe is one of their better national characteristics. The doctor generally appeared to have little control and less interest over where or when his spacecraft might land — but wherever and whenever it was, and whatever the perils he encountered there, he invariably managed to emerge victorious at the end. To be sure, he was an alien from another world, but he was a very British alien, amateurish, surprisingly effective, and clad in vaguely Edwardian clothing, a wistful nod to a lost empire’s last good time.
Yes, the fact that the Union Jack would never preside over some far lunar crater was a disappointment to a nation still proud of its explorers of old, but it was with a certain sardonic, stoic grace that this once-great power came to terms with its role as a space-race spectator and concluded that it performed that role rather well. In addition, the world famous Jodrell Bank Observatory was, Britons told themselves, an essential element in man’s thrust into the unknown, a listening post that provided the Americans with invaluable assistance, not least in eavesdropping on the intriguing Soviet spacecraft that sailed through the heavens. These vehicles were shrouded in mystery and lies, yet were quite capable of delivering a series of spectacular achievements — the first orbit by an artificial satellite, the first man in space, the first space walk, the first successful soft landing of a probe on the moon.
To tell the truth, we were able to take more pleasure in those Soviet triumphs than were our cousins across the Atlantic. Naturally, we were more or less on the side of the Yanks, our allies, “family,” and, don’t say it too loudly, heirs, but we had a touch more room for the idea that the us-versus-them that counted most was man against the dangers of the universe, not man against man.
When, in August 1961, four months or so after his pioneering orbit around the Earth, Yuri Gagarin visited the British capital, the London Times sniffed that he had “received a welcome that sometimes bordered on hysteria” (this was before Beatlemania). At just three years old, I was a part of the frenzy. My parents, no stooges of the Kremlin, decided it was “important” that I was taken to stare at the Soviet spaceman. Sadly, I have no memory of this historic event, but I like to believe that it played a part in triggering my lifelong fascination with what might lie out there among the stars, a fascination only partly attributable to my subsequent abduction by aliens (well, you never know), a fascination rocket-powered throughout my boyhood by the way that science fiction and science fact played off each other in that first great age of space exploration, an era that promised, or so it seemed, to make a reality of the wonders already foretold by Asimov, Clarke, and the best of the rest of the paperback seers.
And as the decade progressed, each new program — Gemini, Apollo, Vostok, Voskhod, Soyuz — seemed to bring that reality ever closer, especially when it became clear that man was at last on the threshold of a visit to his planet's nearest neighbor. By the late summer of 1968, the finish line was coming into view. September saw the Soviet Zond 5 become the first vessel to circle the moon and return safely to earth — complete with a cargo of worms, flies, and a turtle or two. America countered with a sharp ratchet-up of the evolutionary scale, dispatching Apollo 7 into orbit in October, the first successful manned Apollo mission.
That, thought NASA, was practice enough. It had to be. Nobody knew what the Soviets might try next. In December, Apollo 8 headed for the moon — and possibly the most magical Christmas since Charles Dickens first published his tale of Ebenezer, ghosts, and redemption. Britain was enthralled. The moon made stars of science correspondents such as the dignified Peter Fairley from ITV (then the UK’s sole private television network) and the boyishly enthusiastic James Burke of the BBC, and gave an extra boost to the career of Patrick Moore, the marvelously oddball host of The Sky at Night, a show the BBC has operated as a vespers for insomniac astronomers since, astonishingly, 1957 — with Patrick, these days Sir Patrick, Moore always in charge. As for me, in between painstakingly monitoring developments on the telly and painstakingly boring everyone I knew with my command of mission minutiae, I pored over diagrams from the newspapers showing Apollo 8’s tricky trajectory (suitably enough, it resembled a figure eight) and preparing for the tense vigil for to come once Anders, Lovell, and Borman first disappeared behind the dark side of the moon.
Then 1968 evolved into 1969, and Apollo 8 into Apollo 9 and from that into the dress rehearsal that was Apollo 10. The Soviet program ran into difficulties, leaving history to Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins — and the future to the rest of us. Looking at the diary I kept that year, I can see that I had marked out the projected date — July 16 — for the launch (“US MOON SHOT OFF TODAY”) of Apollo 11 some time before the momentous day itself actually dawned. This launch was something to count the days to, a grand historical happening to which the later entry in my diary didn’t do much justice: “It took off successfully.” True enough, but not enough. I gazed that day delighted and agog at television pictures of the giant rocket rising majestically into a sky then unscarred by memories of the Challenger.
Eventually Apollo 11 vanished from my sight — but not from my mind. Obsessed by thoughts of the moon landing ahead (at last!) and where it might lead (Mars!), I stalked that spacecraft over the next few days. Nothing must go wrong! TV’s designated experts did what they could to explain what was going on, helped by the models and the charts that were the best — not bad — that British television could come up with in a primitive time long before CGI. But it could never be enough: I needed to know more. I scrutinized footage of the three astronauts. How were they doing? Were they okay? I checked out cavernous, disciplined Mission Control for clues. Was all well? Who looked nervous? Between the beeps that became part of Apollo’s soundtrack, I strained to make sense of those exotic, evocative communications between Houston and spaceship that NASA chose to relay to us back “home,” a word itself now given a larger meaning than ever before.
The night of July 20 found me allowed to stay up way past my bedtime and sip from a glass of, strangely, cherry brandy (a sickly drink then mainly associated with a minor scandal involving Prince Charles) that I’d been given so I could toast Armstrong, Aldrin, and, as my mother usually described him, “poor Michael Collins.” We watched as the Eagle slowly (or so it seemed to me then) descended onto the gray surface that I believed would soon (the exciting-sounding year 2000 sounded about right) play host to moon bases and other treats; I listened to the clipped, sparse commentary of a BBC that had the sensitivity to let the descent — and the men from NASA — speak for themselves.
And it was the BBC that we watched. Despite perpetual parental muttering about its (undoubted) left-wing bias, the Stuttafords, like most British families in that era, tended to turn to the Beeb for coverage of anything really significant. July 20, 1969, showed why. ITV’s coverage revolved around hours upon hours of Frost/Moon or, more accurately, David Frost’s Moon Party, a broadcast that drove one guest, Ray Bradbury, to walk off in despair. It was not, grumbled Bradbury later, “a night for Sammy Davis Jr. or Engelbert Humperdinck.” Indeed it wasn’t.
Then finally (nearly 4 a.m., UK time — what had they been doing in there?), Neil Armstrong stepped out of the Eagle and onto the Moon. Sitting in a house in the quiet English countryside, we raised refreshed glasses and exhaustedly contemplated the spectacle of a man walking on a rock some quarter of a million miles away. The images transmitted from the Sea of Tranquility were blurry, shadowy, appropriately dreamlike, but what had taken place was clear, even if I didn’t remain awake long enough to see Aldrin join Armstrong out in that “magnificent desolation” of theirs. No matter. As my diary for that night records: “MAN on MOON.” And so he was. And so they were. And so we were.
There are, of course, those who say that the whole thing was both a waste of money and a blind alley. I don’t agree, but that’s a discussion for another time. For now, I’m waiting for Monday the 20th, and a chance to crack open the cherry brandy in a celebration of that extraordinary night of 40 years ago. Come to think of it, maybe not cherry brandy, but you get the point . . .
Ham's Grave, Aug 2001 © Andrew Stuttaford
The astronaut's grave is plain, a metal plaque on a slab of concrete on the grounds of the Museum of Space History just outside Alamogordo, N.M. There is no statue, no elaborate monument, just the silence of a desert hillside. Wreaths do not flourish in the dryness of the American Southwest, but some kindly individual has left a pancake-shaped cactus in memory of the dead flier. A face has been cut into the plant, two eyes and a jagged smile. The carving was, doubtless, well meant, a tribute, perhaps, to a simple, friendly, soul, but the impression it leaves is faintly grotesque, more Jack O'Lantern than Smiley. That is not inappropriate, because to modern sensibilities there is something disturbing about the story of the deceased, a small dark space pioneer by the name of Ham, America's first Astrochimp. Yes that's right. Ham was a chimpanzee, a space-suited representative of the species known technically, and somewhat insultingly, as Pan Troglodytes. It is largely forgotten now (although not in the Comoro Islands, a fine nation that, a few years ago, issued a stamp in Ham's honor), but the early days of America's attempt to storm the heavens were marked by the space-bound trajectories of a number of luckless mammals.
Various rhesus monkeys, all called Albert, were shot off into the sky from captured German V2 rockets. As the space program progressed to homegrown technology, other tiny simians, Able, Baker, Sam, Miss Sam, and Gordo all followed in the Alberts's exhaust trails, as did a squadron of mice, but this was not enough for NASA. Before Homo sapiens could be risked, the space agency moved up the evolutionary scale, turning to man's closest relative, known then, as now, to be the chimpanzee, but quite how closely related, well, in those days, nobody could be sure.
Times have changed. DNA testing has now made it possible to argue that the traditional division between humanity and the four species of Great Ape (Chimpanzee, Bonobo, Gorilla, and Orangutan) owes more to vanity than biology. According to this view, we are simply the fifth, and most sophisticated, variant. Within this new, and alarmingly expanded, family, our nearest relations, the chimps, turn out to be closer to us than they are, for example, to the gorillas. What is more, over the last 30 years, detailed observation of chimpanzees in their native setting has established that they have at least the rudiments of a culture, one that includes the use of tools, barter and primitive medical techniques. As noble savages, however, the often unruly and violent chimps fail to make the grade. The mark of Cain turns out, depressingly, to be a sign of a good brain.
Quite how good is far from clear. Measuring animal intelligence is difficult, and prone to anthromophic exaggeration, but it does seem that a chimp possesses the intellectual ability of a two- to three-year-old. That may be no revelation to a parent of toddlers, but it is a fact worth remembering when considering what happened to Ham in the years that followed his abduction from his African birthplace. The derivation of his name, "Holloman Aerospace Medical," gives the critical, ominous clue.
The museum in Alamogordo takes up the narrative, although, sadly, the simian spaceman does not make it to the museum's pantheon, a plaque-bedecked Valhalla known as the International Space Hall of Fame. No, Ham's story is confined to the building's lesser regions, more specifically, a corridor decorated with a series of educational posters, the first of which provides a good prologue. It features a glorious color image of a rocket at launch and the headline, "Before there was John Glenn or Neil Armstrong there was…," and there right in the corner is a little circular cut-out of Ham's head, a Caliban satellite for the giant, gleaming Saturn 5, an enigmatic, humbling reminder of where we all come from.
Other posters show some of the chimponaut training process. We see three chimps being taught to become accustomed to sitting in one place for up to 24 hours. It is a scene out of daycare hell. One ape sits, impassive, a cross-legged lama, the second slumps, pensive with a hint of Rodin, while the third wriggles like the bored two year old he so clearly resembles. Another shot shows the three chimpanzees reclining side by side, each in an open container. Two are holding hands. Reassurance? Other grimmer tests ("windblast", "acceleration/deceleration") are, tactfully, not shown and nor is the darker side of the "mild" electric shock/banana pellet routine used to train Ham to pull the right levers when he was in his capsule.
There are, of course, pictures of the great day, January 31, 1961. Ham is in his spacesuit, an eerie mix of the futuristic and the primitive, looking like a suspicious old man as he stands with his trainer, showing few signs of the "friskiness" that had earlier earned him his ticket to the infinite (and with that ticket came a name; previously he had been known as "61"). Later, we see him lying in his "couch", NASA's Ikea-style description of his capsule-within-a-capsule. During the flight our chimpanzee Columbus is photographed staring out of his little window, face impassive, eyes as black as the space through which he was flying. Finally, after his safe return, Ham is portrayed reaching for his reward, an apple (John Glenn, it has been pointed out, got a Senate seat for pretty much the same achievement). He looks, to humans at least, to be grinning, but if it really was a grin, it must have been one of relief.
For the flight would have been a juddering, jerking nightmare for anyone, let alone for a passenger unable to understand what was going on, but bright enough to suspect that it was nothing good. To make it worse, almost everything that could go wrong, did. The exhibit skirts the issue, but, to put it bluntly, Ham was nearly toast. Right at the start, his rocket started sucking in fuel too fast. As a result, the angle of the craft's climb was too steep and too high, subjecting poor Ham to g-forces far fiercer than ever expected, a process repeated on re-entry sixteen minutes later, when the retrorockets cut off too soon, sending our once-frisky Icarus plunging down to earth at nearly 6,000 mph, 1,400 mph faster than planned. These were not the only difficulties. Quite early in the flight, cabin pressure collapsed, a development that would have been fatal for an astronaut, but not, fortunately, for an astrochimp safe in his self-contained couch. On the other hand, no one ever subjected Neil Armstrong to "mild" electric shocks every time he pulled the wrong lever, which was the threat that continued to hang over Ham even as his capsule careened through space.
In fact the redoubtable chimponaut, hardened by the rigors of his bleak training regime, performed very well, going about his preordained tasks (Watch for the white light, pull the left lever! Watch for the blue light, pull the right lever!) with surprisingly few outward signs of stress, despite the massive g-forces and the weightlessness. One final insult remained, however. On splashdown, the capsule promptly sprung a leak. By the time rescuers arrived on the scene (late, of course: they had expected Ham to land somewhere else), our hero was in severe danger of drowning. Once recovered, he appeared distinctly unimpressed by this shambles of a trip. Ham may have taken NASA's apple, but for a few hours the biting, irritable chimp displayed every symptom of the syndrome we now call air rage, something probably made worse by the gesticulating, shouting, flashbulb-popping Cape Canaveral press corps that surrounded him on his arrival back on dry land.
NASA did not seem to mind. The agency had what it wanted — good publicity (Ham made the cover of Life!) and good science. To quote from his tombstone, Ham "had proved that mankind could live and work in space." All was now set for Alan Shepard's historic flight. Unfortunately, America's Soviet rivals were even quicker to get the message. The next primate to leave the Earth, less than three months later, was Yuri Gagarin. As for the astrochimp, it was back to the barracks for him for a while, but a rival, Enos, got the first orbital mission, leaving the discarded Ham to be retired to the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. There, at least, there were no levers, no shocks, no crazed wild rides, but it was, apparently, a somewhat isolated existence, a miserable fate for such a gregarious animal. After 17 years this Chimp of Monte Cristo was moved to a more congenial zoo in North Carolina and, finally, the company of his own kind. He met Mrs. Ham; in fact, some say that he met two Mrs. Hams, but these better times were not to last. Within two years Ham had died of, poetically, an enlarged heart.
To judge Ham's treatment by current standards would be posturing of a type that is, these days, regrettably familiar. We are often too quick to apply contemporary criteria in measuring the supposed failings of the past. Nevertheless, from what we know now it is clear that humanity does need to take another look at its handling of the Great Apes. And if Ham's strange, sad odyssey can remind us of that, he will have helped out yet another species.
His own.
I suppose that we should not be surprised. NASA is, after all, a federal bureaucracy, little more, really than the postal service in a space suit. Nevertheless, the surly and self-important way in which the agency has handled Dennis Tito, Earth's first extra-planetary tourist, would have embarrassed even the IRS. Unless you have been living in Mars (and, perhaps, even then) you will know that Mr. Tito is an American aerospace engineer turned financial tycoon who paid a reported $20 million for a round-rip ticket to the Russian space station, Mir. Sadly, gravity, high-maintenance bills, and aging technology conspired to bring Mir down to Earth before Mr. Tito could get to visit. Undeterred by this setback, the Russians agreed to an alternative. They would fly their paying cosmonaut in a Soyuz to Alpha, the new international space station currently being built one hundred or so miles above our planet.
Mr. Tito's is a wonderful story. It is the tale of a man who works hard all his life, who builds himself the American dream, and then uses the proceeds to take a ride on a rocket ship. It is the stuff of myth, partly Ray Bradbury, partly Horatio Alger. NASA, unfortunately, had borrowed their script from the Grinch. Dennis Tito, the agency explained, would not be welcome on the space station. Oh, they used all the explanations, it could be dangerous, someone might get sued (trial lawyers, these days, get everywhere), the space station was not ready, 'protocols' had to be drafted, and the clincher, Tito was not a 'professional'.
If we wanted a reminder that the old, marvelous improvisational NASA, the NASA of pocket-protected dreamers who sent men into space in tin cans, was dead, this was it.
Fortunately, Russians these days know that a contract is a contract, and they insisted that their American was along for the ride. After a brief strike by the Soyuz cosmonauts and last-minute negotiations that included Mr. Tito's agreement to pay for anything he might break, NASA relented, and the millionaire is now in space.
To cash-strapped Moscow this is good news. The price that their passenger has paid for his ticket will be more than enough to pay for the next Soyuz mission, and there are, the Russians know, quite a few others who will be prepared to follow his example. As one Russian engineer explained to the press, " there are a lot of rich people around. Why shouldn't they go flying, enjoy themselves and help the [space] station at the same time?"
He is quite right, of course, but the real significance of Moscow's orbiting tycoon is much greater than that first $20 million. By selling a ticket to Alpha, the Russians are signaling that business in space is going to be far more than the operation of a few communications satellites. Tito's take-off may be one small step for free enterprise, but, for the rest of us, it could be a giant leap. For, if space really is to be opened up, it is going to take more than governments and their "professionals" to do the job. The real work will be done, as it has always has been at every new frontier, by the usual motley suspects, by capitalists, cranks, charlatans, and crackpots, by dreamers, drones, visionaries, hucksters, showmen, and opportunists and, yes, even by tourists.
The Russians now seem to understand this. Perhaps this was inevitable. After living for more than 70 years in a technocratic bureaucracy that disdained the individual and spent a fortune on science they have a pretty good idea where NASA is going.
Nowhere.