04 June 2020
Is There Life On Mars?
Space race, arms race, race riots.
By Neil Tidmarsh
When did you last have a haircut? My last trip to the barber was on January 29. My hair hasn’t been this long since I was a teenager back in the mid 70’s. I’m not unhappy about it. At least it’s giving me another crack at emulating Bryan Ferry’s lounge-lizard locks. Probably even less successfully this time than last, but there we go, trying to look like the untouchable Bryan Ferry was a tall order then and it’s a tall order now. (But not quite as impossible as imitating David Bowie; 45 years ago, we all knew that was hopeless – in the first place, he was just too alien, and in the second he changed so often that any look-alike would be out-of-date within seconds). Mind you, even the glamorous Mr Ferry himself isn’t immune to the problem; he once admitted: “Secretly, I wanted to look like Jimi Hendrix, but I could never quite pull it off.”
But enough of this adolescent narcissism (“If you’re looking for love / in a looking-glass world / it’s pretty hard to find” Roxy Music, Mother of Pearl, 1973). To the point now. It isn’t just the length of my hair which has taken me back to my teenage years and the mid ‘70’s – it’s the stories in the news this week. Three races which we all thought – even hoped – had run their course in that decade are back in the papers. The space race, the nuclear arms race, and race riots.
No doubt David Bowie’s 70s classics Starman and Space Oddity enjoyed a blizzard of downloads here on Earth as the astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley blasted off into space this week, the first Americans to do so in an American craft for several decades. But their Crew Dragon mission to the International Space Station is a ground-breaking twenty-first century venture in two respects.
First, it’s the product of a public / private partnership between Nasa and SpaceX, Elon Musk’s company. This kind of partnership (which the Shaw Sheet picked up on five years ago – see To Boldly Go… In The Star Ship ‘Free Enterprise’) has led to big technical breakthroughs (SpaceX’s Falcon rockets are re-usable) and to significant cost savings (it seems that national governments just can’t afford the massive expense of space exploration these days). It remains as perilous as it ever was, though; between the Crew Dragon’s scheduled but delayed launch last week and its actual launch this week, a SpaceX prototype Star Ship exploded during engine tests at the company’s site in Texas. Bowie’s Major Tom must still haunt today’s astronauts.
Second, it’s the beginning of Nasa’s ambitious new programme, not just to return to the Moon (by 2024), but ultimately to land men on Mars (deadline 2040).
And of course it’s part of a new space race, the likes of which we haven’t seen for forty or fifty years. Last week, Russia announced plans to build a new space station where spacecraft could be assembled and re-fuelled. Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, said “We’re creating a platform for exploring far-out space. We’re going to put together, in orbit, spacecraft for flights to Mars, the Moon, and to asteroids, because it’s very difficult and challenging to bring such an entire construction up from Earth.” It will take at least ten years to build; in the meantime Roscosmos plans to send men to the Moon by 2028. Previous Russian space programmes, however, have been dogged by inefficiencies, irregularities and even cancellations (in 2006, Moscow announced that Russia would have a permanent base on the Moon by 2015 and would be harvesting the Moon’s resources by 2020), which seems to confirm the suggestion that modern space exploration is just too big and expensive for national governments to manage on their own.
What really makes today’s space race different to the twentieth century one, however, is that it’s no longer a two-horse race. Japan and India are in on it, but China is coming up fast on the outside. Last month saw the successful launch of its Long March 5B rocket from the Wenchang Space Launch Centre on the island of Hainan, delivering an unmanned payload (including a test capsule capable of carrying a crew of six) into orbit. China hopes to build a manned space station within two years and land men on the Moon within ten years. It plans to use the Long March 5 to deliver a rover to Mars this summer.
China, also, is the new, twenty-first century element in the looming nuclear arms race which otherwise seems to be another echo of the 1970’s. Last week The Washington Post reported that national security officials meeting in the White House on May 15 had discussed the possibility of conducting the USA’s first nuclear weapons test for decades. North Korea is the only country openly conducting such tests at the moment, but the USA suspects that Russia and China are secretly testing “smaller, low-yield nuclear warheads” (both countries deny this).
The discussions in the White House were exploring the idea of re-starting US nuclear weapons tests as a means of forcing Russia and particularly China into a new arms-control agreement. Last year, President Trump pulled the USA out of the Intermediate Range Strategic Nuclear Forces Treaty (agreed with Russia in 1988), accusing Moscow of failing to honour it; but the White House also suspects that China, not a party to the treaty, would not sign up to arms control unless the USA is free to persuade it to do so by re-launching its own tests. The New Start Treaty, signed in 2010 by US President Obama and Russian President Medvedev, expires in February next year, and President Trump is refusing to extend it if China doesn’t also sign up to it. So far China has shown no signs of co-operating.
As for the race riots in the USA… I really can’t bring myself to say anything about the tragic death of George Floyd. Three observations only. How ironic that the space race coincides with such atrocities just as it did fifty or sixty years ago; Gil Scott-Heron’s Whitey On The Moon is suddenly as potent today as it was in the 1970’s. Second, police officer Derek Chauvin’s name – chauvin – as in ‘chauvinist’, derived from a character in the Cogniards’ 1831 play Cocarde Tricolore, Nicolas Chauvin, a bigoted veteran of France’s notoriously brutal and oppressive colonial war in Algeria… Third, back to David Bowie and 1971 for the last word. “Take a look at the law man / Beating up the wrong guy / Oh man, wonder if he’ll ever know / He’s in the best-selling show / Is there life on Mars? / It’s on America’s tortured brow…”
