Space

[shermarama]

We spent Saturday night watching The Right Stuff, a film about the rapid progress from rocket-powered planes breaking the sound barrier to rocket ships putting men into space. Since the ISS is making lots of visible passes over this bit of the world right now, we went out to look at it twice on Sunday evening. It's so bright that you'd assume it was a plane going over, not something two hundred miles up in space. The first visible pass yesterday was at 16:40 or so, only ten minutes after sunset and not even out of civil twilight, but it could still be clearly seen once it had got to about thirty degrees up; magnitude -3.4, which is pretty much as bright as Venus, which is the brightest thing in the sky that's not the Sun or Moon. There's five men, one Japanese, two Russian and two American in it at the moment, but it's still difficult to imagine people inside when you're looking at it as a glowing, moving dot. And yet I find it very easy to imagine the people in a plane when I look up at one. It's been nearly fifty years now since Gagarin went round the planet, but space travel is still so distant from normal life. Fifty years after the Wright Brothers took off, you could get in a long-distance propeller plane in your lounge suit and fly across the Atlantic, albeit with refuelling stops, and by ten years after that it was commercial jet liners and a service not much different to what you get today. Non-manned space stuff has moved along, satellite systems are part of the contemporary world, but manned space flight seems unshakeably retro-futuristic. Like those people in the ISS have actually been up there since the 60s and are going to come back to Earth blinking in confusion at the modern world and cars without big fins. Mind you, one of them is pre-space-age; the commander, Jeffrey Williams, was born in 1958, and it's his 52nd birthday today. The man in charge of the ISS right now is 18 years older than me. And most of that crew have scuba diving as a hobby, which makes some sort of sense, actually. And they all have science and engineering backgrounds. Hmmm...