War and Space

It was around 1:30 am, and the traffic leading away from Wallops Island was finally letting up.   We'd watched, along with thousands of others, as a Minotaur V had heaved a lunar probe from our world.

At point-blank range, it was awesome.  The fire of the launch was a stark white, not like a sunrise, but like we were on the set of some Spielberg flick and he'd just kicked in a couple thousand kilowatts worth of klieg lights.

As the sky lit, being Americans and all, we hooted and hollered with visceral glee.  I think I may actually have said the word "Dang,"  in that stretched out way that marks me as at least part Southerner.

The launch vehicle itself was invisible to the naked eye, but the long comet-tail of white fire danced upward and away, refreshing with each stage, until it was a vague orangeish dot at the very edge of the atmosphere, on its way to being just another star in the heavens.

It was well worth the trip.  And now, a full day behind us, the boys were asleep in the car.  The big guy was snoring and twitching, the little guy finally shut down after tiring of Minecraft.

Alone with my thoughts and the road, I found myself in a reverie about war and space.  The rocket that went up was, after all, a repurposed ICBM, so that tended to shape my thinking.

So much of what we think about in our human storytelling about space revolves around war and conflict.  Since we began to have a sense of the depth of it, we have cast space in terms of conflict.  H.G. Wells began it, as implacable minds coveted this world.  Now, there's the endless Star Wars franchise, which Disney will sustain for a thousand generations.  There's also Star Trek, which seems to have evolved from boldly going where no man has gone before to boldly blowing things up at a pace no-one has seen before.  We have visualized the vastness of the universe as being filled with monsters, who will one day arrive with their tripods and their death rays and their vast battle fleets, bent on the annihilation of humankind. 

Watching that rocket recede to nothing, though, I found myself pondering the absurdity of that thinking as I drove through the darkness.  War?  In space?  It feels like a projection, an assumption that has no grounds in the actuality of space itself.

Why do we war?  What is the point of it?  It's power, of course, and our desire to control resources and territory.  It's an old thing, a deep part of our organic animal nature.  We want our progeny to flourish, so we need to control the resources that will insure their survival.  We want to expand the circle of our influence, and so we sweep across the world, dominating and destroying anything that might threaten our power.  It's what primates do.  It's what so many animals do.

Looking out into the Deep, the idea that war has much of a place in it seems absurd.  It seems so for several reasons.  

War is about resources.  In the universe, there are resources potentially beyond measure, an abundance so great that it boggles the mind.  

In that vast cornucopia of material resource, we also see that life is a rare thing.  Creatures that need to take resources are not plentiful.  And so as we listen and peer into the deep, we do not see or hear our story of violence being played out anywhere in our wing of the spiral arm.  Space may be filled with energies, but the sound of war drums is so far notably absent.

And life that has reached the stage that it can venture out of the kiddie pool would by necessity need to adapt itself to space.  We are not there yet as a species, being tiny little bipeds that need to cart along a prohibitively large amount of stuff to sustain our existence.  We are, as H.G. Wells observed, creatures of this world.  When we finally move among the stars, we will need to be different.

One of those differences, I would hope, will be that our old hunger for war will fall behind us.  

On a cosmic scale, it just feels so...irrelevant.

Missiles, Swords, and Plowshares

Years ago, when the boys were small, we took an impromptu road trip.  The journey was Eastward, towards Chincoteague, land of wild ponies, but this trip had another goal.  We piled into our minivan and went to the Mid Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops Island, in what proved ultimately to be an unsuccessful effort to watch a rocket launch a satellite into orbit.

It scrubbed, lamentably, launching later in the week.  While the trip made for a beautiful viewing of a sunrise, that weren't whut we was there fer.  Fiddle.

I've still never, ever, ever seen a rocket launch, not once in my forty-plus years of existence.

My elementary school age kids are now both teenagers, and this afternoon, with a major launch scheduled for tonight, we're taking another swing at it.  We'll drive the almost four hours there, and then wait, and cross fingers, and drive the four hours back.  Road trip!

As of right now, the launch of the LADEE (that's pronounced like a Scotsman addressing a child) probe is still a go.  It's a car-sized probe, designed to measure the rarified but nonetheless present atmospheric conditions on the lunar surface.

So it's a rocket, and it's going to the moon.  This, I want to see.

Having researched the LADEE effort and the science behind it, I found myself wondering about the launch vehicle.  We 'Murkans have stumbled badly in our recent support for our space program.  In the absence of a Soviet Union to compete with, we've gotten fat and lazy, content to sit around and polish our gun collection while renting launch space from the Rooskies to get our stuff into orbit while we noodle around dreaming about past glories.

In the well-reported absence of a significant heavy lift vehicle, I found myself wondering just what we'd be using to heave the equivalent of a Chevy Spark out of the earth's gravity well and into lunar orbit.  An Atlas? A Delta?  I was reasonably certain those vehicles were no longer in use.

It's a Minotaur Five, as it turns out.  Standing a tick over ten stories high, the blunt-nosed and purposeful profile of the Minotaur is a familiar one.

Back when I was fourteen, splitting the difference between my son's ages, the Minotaur went by a different name.

Back in the 1980s, it was called the Peacekeeper.  Or the MX.

Its initial design purpose was to hurl a Multiple Impact Reentry Vehicle at the Soviet Union, meaning it was the rocketry equivalent of a thermonuclear scattergun.  Why hit a city with one nuclear weapon, when you can hit it with up to ten warheads at once, each one over ten times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, for a total yield of three megatons of explosive power?

The Cold War was such a delightful time.

During the massive and arguably insane weapons buildup during the Reagan years, we built just over a hundred Peacekeepers.  They were capable of delivering the destructive equivalent of ten thousand Hiroshimas, at a cost of $400 million.

That's four hundred million dollars per rocket.

And in 2005, we decommissioned all of them.  Fifty billion dollars worth of rockets.  Never used.  Thank God.

So rather than leave them just lying around, a few are being repurposed for the space program, the gleanings of what could have been a great harvest of destruction.

It's good they're being used, and for a different and far better purpose.  Those swords make far better plowshares.

The Shuttle Goes Down

I was there the first time around.

As a lifelong Washingtonian, I can remember back to that day in the mid-1980s, as the shuttle Enterprise was flown around the Beltway on the back of a 747.  It was awesome, as a young teen, to watch as it soared by.  I stood on a bikepath overlooking the highway, and the jet roared low and slow overhead so everyone could get a good long look.

It was amazing.  That image, of the iconic silhouette, of the reality of the first orbiter, well, that's still burned into my cortex.  It's an important memory.

It was an emblem of America's commitment to peaceful space exploration.  Oh, sure, the Enterprise herself was just a testbed, a functioning prototype.  But it was a profoundly hopeful thing to witness with my own eyes.  Here was powerfully real evidence of our nation, committed to the future.  We were making it happen.  We were getting it done.   The prototype?  On her way to be stored by the Smithsonian at Dulles, where one day a museum would rise to house her.  Other shuttles, a fleet of them, promised to open low earth orbit to all manner of exploration.  And then?  The future seemed filled with possibilities.

Today, the shuttle Discovery made the same rounds.

Across my Washington DC area social network, there was much excitement.  Pictures snapped from smartphones and culled from local media sources popped and repopped on Facebook.  The local newsradio station hummed with shuttle sightings.

So exciting!  A real spaceship!  Right there in the skies above the Nation's Capital!

I can't quite feel the same excitement now.

In the place of the Discovery, there is nothing.  Oh, there are and were plenty of pipe-dreams.  We'll go to Mars, said a president!  We'll set up a moon base, said a candidate!  Sure we will.  That talk is nothing more than the yarns told by your always-broke uncle, spinning a story about how he's going to make it big from the same sofa he's living on in your grandparents basement.  It's just not real.

We've become a nation that has forgotten the effort required to make things like that happen.  Our drive for space has faltered.  Our capacity for heavy lift to orbit is functionally zero.  We have no real plans to get back on track.  NASA's funding is waning.

Heck, even North Korea, a starving, struggling, mostly insane backwater tyranny, shows more motivation to get into space.   We're content to stick out our thumbs and let the Russians do the work.    Or not do anything at all, except perhaps weaponizing the program so it can be funded covertly.  Going into space as a nation requires resources, which means paying for it, which means taxes.  We've forgotten how to do that after years of being told you can get something for nothing.  That is and always has been the easy lie of charlatans, quacks, and politicians.

So now we have nothing, and are too distracted and unfocused as a nation to even realize we should be ashamed by that reality.

The possibilities that the Enterprise represented have faded.  The future that the Discovery worked towards is not to be seen.

It may yet resurface.   I hope it does.  But today over the skies of Washington came a reminder of how quickly future becomes history, and how easily potential can be lost without both commitment and effort.

First Presbyterian Church of Nowhere

In a conversation with one of my church folk the other week, we were going over the list of primary assets of our earnest but struggling little community. For her, the A-Number-One asset was our building. It's a big and architecturally complicated modernist structure, a building most notable for not having a single right angle where the walls meet. It can be a bit disorienting for new folks. There's a sizable fellowship hall, a cavernous sanctuary, and the requisite slew of bathrooms and multipurpose midsize classrooms. If we we a community of 150-200, it might seem like an asset.

But mostly, over the course of my six years in the ministry here, it's seemed like a) a constant distraction and/or b) a serious pain in the [tushie]. The old roof that leaked had to be replaced in the first three years I was there. The insanely expensive cedar ceilings that had been made to order for the pastor who built the church proved unusually tasty for termites, and many sections of the subroofing were structurally unsound. The AC system that failed every other week needed to be replaced. Energies that desperately needed to be put into the mission of the church were slurped up by the facilities. The endowment that stands as the only reason this ministry continues was tapped, again and again, to keep the building from falling in on itself. It's a common story in struggling institutional churches, but even knowing that doesn't allow you to escape a building's gravitational pull.

This last Wednesday, our cleaning person informed me that the sanctuary stank of sulphur, a sign that either a flatulent Lucifer was paying us a visit or we had a natural gas leak. I went down into the boiler room, where the stench was overpowering. The boiler itself was struggling to light with deep thrumming gasps, as flames belched out around the sides, flickered, died, and belched out again. Emergency calls were made. Emergency kill switches were thrown. Repairs were attempted late into the evening, and a patch put into place.

This last Friday, with a bonafide blizzard bearing down on the city, the temporary patch job on the boiler failed. Again, the stench of gas. Emergency kills switches were again thrown. But though repair efforts went into the early evening, the system couldn't be safely reactivated. So with a week of freezing temperatures ahead of us, the building was without heat. Every portable heater the church owned was given to the preschool/nursery that uses our space, so that the little ones wouldn't freeze before their parents arrived to pick them up.

As we roll into this important week in the life of the church, I find myself wondering about the necessity of buildings and edifices and facilities. Most of what is important about the faith..fellowship/worship/mission/study/service...could be accomplished without a big ol' honkin' building. A collective of little house ministries could manage to get that done, with resources being poured not into building, but into mission.

Sure, a physical church makes some things easier, like hosting events or opening up space for service to the community. Food pantries and clothing closets and mentoring/support ministries really do benefit from having a facility.

Still and all, on those days when the building seems like an all-consuming vortex, I feel a teeny yearning to be the organizing pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Nowhere.