Eat your heart out, JG Ballard…

Here's a time-lapse video of the space shuttle Endeavour making the two-day trip 12 miles from an airport in LA to its final resting place in the California Science Center.



It's poignant, and deeply sad, though I can't help feeling that the music and the photography does most of the work for us. JG Ballard's evocations of an exhausted near-future world in which a few connoisseurs and obsessives go mad in the tumbleweed-strewn abandoned launching pads they see as symbols of existential anomie were fundamental to my teenage years. Surrounded by political cynicism, crumbling infrastructures and above all a planet which we are consciously driving towards ruin, I felt I'd missed out on the Age of Optimism.

I grew up: I learned that the Space Race was a costly, military-driven diversion into extra-terrestrial willy-waving, sucking in billions of dollars while the poor starved in every superpower country. I learned that the Shuttle was a beautiful white elephant, its lack of ambition summarised in its unadventurous name ('shuttle': may as well call it a taxi). I mourned the loss of Star Trek's innocence as it moved into The Next Generation, harbinger of Liberal Interventionism as its crew rampaged through the galaxy enforcing neocolonialism reassured by the presence of a bloody Ship's Counsellor with her big puppy eyes. Alien and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Red Dwarf presented an alternative, less idealistic version of space, as a hostile, proletarian hell in which boredom is only occasionally relieved by existential terror.

I began to understand that the exploration of space is a myth designed to distract us from our problems here and now. We're never going to other solar systems: perhaps our machines will, but the distances are too vast and the purposes too far. I still read an awful lot of SF, but in a sadder and wiser fashion, and perhaps I read sadder, wiser SF too. I don't believe in space 'races', or 'conquering' space, or any other militarist or technocratic metaphors.

And yet, I'll miss the shuttle. Useless, expensive, unreliable, unsafe but beautiful in a way that the superior Russian rockets aren't. Retiring something called Endeavour really is symbolic, even for us cynics. I would like to have been there, to have walked every step of the way. It was clearly a semi-religious experience, judging by the crowds who lined the route to see this battered, behemoth negotiate suburban streets, passing homes and strip joints and parks, stop-lights and no-parking signs, utterly out of place down here on earth. We all respect the bloodied, unbowed veteran as it's reduced from heroism to attraction: Endeavour is just such an artefact, Moby Dick turned into a heap of blubber and bone.

The end of Endeavour is the end of our space-childhood. Despite being a miserable compromise, its beauty and promise persuaded us – for a while – that we were nobler, better than we really are. But now it's time to put such childish things away and become adults; start to clear up the trash, to engage with the boring but necessary tasks required to pull ourselves out of the mire; to stop acting like the universe owes us a living. Endeavour, Enterprise and Discovery are where they belong - children's toys put aside until some younger, fresher generation finds the energy and leisure to play with them again.

All hail Gagarin

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight into space: a wonderful achievement for itself, and a key moment in the cold war - hence the Russian determination to celebrate it so heavily this year: they got there first and they're still flying reliable vehicles on a regular basis, whereas the much better-funded American manned flight programme is in all sorts of trouble.

The Space Age is over: it was never much more than a bit of super-power posturing, which is a shame. I'm an avid science and science fiction fan, and would love to see us ruining colonising other planets and becoming a galactic civilisation, but the fact is that the distances are too huge, the dangers too great and the rewards too few: there aren't any habitable planets in a million years' travel unless we manage to break all the laws of physics to develop warp drive, which we won't. Extra-orbital space is for machines and information collection. The romantic in me wishes this wasn't the case, but the pragmatist tells us to fix this planet rather than dream of others.

I bought this Soviet-era print a few years ago: a beautiful, whimsical celebration of the 10th anniversary of Gagarin's flight. Hope you like it. Click to enlarge.

Order Two Zero Zero Five: Code 11A

Another of the shuttles landed for the last time today: Discovery.

I'm in two minds about it. The rational lefty in me says: the space program was a militaristic, masculinist fantasy of Cold War willy-waving with very little serious science achieved (though we do have sat-nav and non-stick frying-pans), and the shuttles were the silliest of the lot (the Soviets copied it, flew their version once, then went back to rockets). Add to that the money which could have been spent on feeding, clothing and educating people down here - and the stupidity of those American techno-loons who think it's OK to despoil our planet because hey, we're all going to live in space or upload ourselves at the singularity and the case for giving up on manned space trips is conclusive.

The SF-reading romantic in me is very sad. The shuttles were simply beautiful. Space is the 'final frontier'. People need a dream, and there's something very seductive about being off our world, swooping amongst the moons and stars. The space program offered the possibility of striving for something more noble than the squabbling for petty advantage which makes up our quotidian existence, even if the original motivation was less honourable. Looking down from space gives every astronaut a new perspective on our priorities and behaviour: looking up at space should do the same for us. I'm genuinely sad that as a species we've largely given up on adventure, even though I know that we should be asking all the genius scientists who made it possible to focus their energies on cleaning up our water and air, replacing oil, feeding the hungry and finding new apps to distract me from doing any actual work.

I'm saddest of all that William Shatner will never get a trip into space. If one man deserves a free ride, it's him. And that the shuttles are just landing, rather than having a dramatic auto-destruct sequence and going out in a blaze of glory across the skies. Not even the Enterprise, named after the fictional spaceship after a campaign by fans.

Here are two auto-destruct scenes from the show and a later film:



and the result:

Get some perspective

Watch this. Start at 1.49, sound on and stick with it until the end. It's begging for a Sigur Ros backing track, though the sounds themselves are beautiful enough.

I love geeks

The final Twittercast (I know, I know) from the LCROSS satellite deliberately (and unsuccessfully) crashed into the moon the other days was a Douglas Adams quote - the first (and last) thoughts of the sperm whale which materializes above Magrathea then plummets to its doom.

To boldly go(rgonzola)

Thanks to Christine, who sent me this article about space cheese! Somerset cheesemakers launched a cheddar cheese 30km up, to the edge of space, on a weather balloon. The idea was for the balloon to burst and the cheese to plummet to earth (surely it would melt on re-entry?) - but their GPS has failed so nobody knows where it is.

So, readers, look out for a massive block of cheese embedded with meteorites. Christine suggests this is a mission for the Map Twats, and I agree. Look to the skies, people, look to the skies!

Forget offshore - let's off-planet!

Yes: solar power collected in space then beamed down to earth as radio waves then converted to electricity is GO! The company needs less than $5bn to do it - £3bn or so, which is less than a decent express rail line.