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.

Farewell Atlantis

I'm not misty-eyed over the Space Shuttle: it was a beautiful white elephant. The SF-reading romantic in me mourns the loss of potential.

The bitter realist in me wishes we could have spent all that money and effort in cleaning up the planet we've got, feeding everyone and improving our lives.

The Shuttle was a dead-end: unsafe and limited. Humans won't ever reach other planets - the distances and laws of physics prevent it. We should have put our energy into unmanned craft, and rocket satellite launches. But its end still makes me sad.

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: