{blog_title}

I missed most of the series while I was in Brazil, but I’ve been really enjoying the end of BBC TWO’s [Space Race][1]. They seem to have done a fantastic job digging up the real story of the race between the USA and the USSR to get a man on the moon, and some of the reconstructions and archive footage of the Russian part of the story have been remarkable.

Two images really grabbed me. The first was a reconstruction of [Yuri Gagarin’s][2] orbit of the the Earth. They showed him sitting in the tiny, padded capsule, gazing out of the little round porthole at the Earth below, and excitedly telling control that he could see the curvature of the planet. That really touched me for some reason. What must it have been like to be the first human ever to see our planet from space? To be so helpless and vulnerable, and yet to have such an overwhelming experience? Because he couldn’t control the capsule at all, there was nothing to distract him from what he could see, as there would have been for later cosmonauts and astronauts. All he could do was look. It was as if he had become a baby curled up in this technological uterus, being born into a new age of our species, suddenly getting a glimpse of the new world. Or something like that—-this kind of thing makes me unduly emotional and prone to sentimental hyperbole.

The second image was archive footage from the first flight around the moon, and showed the Earth rising above the surface of the moon. The a very similar scene was re-created in 2001¹, and I still think that it’s one of the best opening scenes in a film ever. Seeing the original footage—-grainy and poor quality though it was—-was spine tingling. I suppose that with all the images we see from space now, we should be used to it, but every time I see a shot like that, I’m struck by the fact that we live on a stunningly beautiful planet. Actually, it’s beautiful at every scale from the microscopic to the inter-planetary, but seen from space it’s a perfect blue-green jewel. I don’t know why, but it inspires such tenderness in me. It looks so small and vulnerable that you want to cup it in your hands to protect it. One of the reasons that I love the Kate Bush song, “Hello Earth” so much is that she articulates this feeling so much better than I can:

Hello, Earth. Hello, Earth. With just one hand held up high I can blot you out, Out of sight. Peek-a-boo, Peek-a-boo, little Earth.

I’m not really an ambitious person—-ordinary, everyday experiences seem amazing enough to me without wishing for more—-but if there’s one thing that I really would like to do before I die, it’s to see the Earth from space. I just want to look at it and cup it in my hands.

¹ This also had the Sun rising behind the Earth, so that Sun, Earth and Moon were all in alignment. ↑

[1]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2004/06june/24/space.shtml “Press Release from the BBC” [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YuriGagarin “Wikipedia entry for Gagarin”