Essays. Catscan Columns

CATSCAN 14 "Memories of the Space Age"

Back in the heyday of the twentieth century, you couldn't keep a space hero out of network television or off the glossy pages of LIFE and LOOK. Nowadays LIFE and LOOK are as dead as Yuri Gagarin. Even the TV networks are assuming a rather sickly post-digital hue.

Space news out of the USSR -- a defunct entity itself looking very true to LIFE -- no longer kicks up nine-day Sputnik wonders, no longer appears in major monthlies. It's to be found instead in the workaday pages of IEEE SPECTRUM, a specialized magazine for electronics engineers.

In March 1995, longtime cosmonaut-watcher and NASA engineer James Oberg engaged in an extensive first-hand tour of the formerly Soviet launch sites and space complexes. Oberg is a recognized Soviet Space expert, somtime NOVA host on PBS, special consultant to the Sotheby's auction house for Soviet space memorabilia, and the author of the definitive tome RED STAR IN ORBIT (Random House 1981). His article appeared in the December 1995 issue of SPECTRUM.

For decades during the Cold War and Space Race, Oberg basically used the techniques of other career Kremlinologists -- rumors, defectors, body counts, overheard radio telemetry, May Day parade stands, and informed speculation.

But with the USSR defunct, Oberg simply breezed into the legendary Baikonur cosmodrome with camera, videocam and notebook in hand -- and what a story Oberg has to tell.

The Russian space centers haven't quite caught on to the unromantic fact that the century has left Khrushschev and Gagarin behind. The space facilities still boast a plethora of hammers and sickles, with the names and profiles of Lenin, Kalinin and other Old Bolsheviks. A certain nostalgia is only to be expected, as the space worker corps is littered with deadwood. Most of Russia's current top space experts are men in their 60s and 70s, a Brezhnev-style gerontocracy of rocket-science.

Many of these veteran space workers have simply outlived the Space Age. They first took up their sacred calling in the 50s and 60s, during the super-secret Sputnik and Vostok days, when technical knowledge was strictly compartmentalized and doled out on a need-to-know basis. Institutional senility is creeping in, as Oberg demonstrates with an anecdote. Last April the Mir space station cosmonauts began showing odd bits and pieces of lost hardware to ground control, asking what these gadgets were. Nobody on the ground had a clue; they couldn't recognize the gear or even guess its purpose. The machines were still in orbit, but the paper trail was gone.

The Mir space station itself is ten years old. It has had at least one fire on board. No one has any idea how to "de-orbit" the decaying station safely, but the Russians hope that American money and American technology will keep the station running through the turn of the century. The Soviet tracking ships, which once kept a global communication net running for the sake of space exploration, have been sold, scrapped, or have ended up rotting in the harbors of the breakaway Ukraine. The Mir station can only speak to Russian ground control in ten- to-fifteen minute bursts, broken by up to ten hours of enforced silence as it flies over areas of the globe where Russia no longer has radio presence.

The USSR had two major launch centers, Baikonur Cosmodrome (aka Tyuratam) and the ultra-secret Plesetsk site. Official fraud claimed that Baikonur existed some 250 kilometers away from the actual site of launches; the launches from Plesetsk were denied entirely and officially proclaimed to be UFOs.

Like a lot of Russian government military and paramilitary sites, Plesetsk hasn't been paying its power bills lately, and has sometimes had its power shut off. But Plesetsk is a thriving haven compared to Baikonur, because Plesetsk is at least within the physical territory of the Russian Federation. Baikonur/Tyuratam isn't so lucky. The launch site of Soviet manned space missions is now entirely within the independent state of Kazakhstan.

The site, according to Oberg (and his many fine color photos strongly back him up) is in a state of advanced decay. The water is no longer safe to drink, and runs only intermittently. Fires, explosions, and toxic leaks are common. Tumbleweeds (an Asian species) roll unimpeded through the launchpads. Many civilian workers were left unpaid for months on end, and they simply fled. Drafted militia sent in to maintain order broke into rioting and looting through the abandoned, windowless apartment blocks. There haven't been any new-hires taken on to the space enterprise in at least five years.

With the near-collapse of security, thousands of Kazakh squatters have moved in to the launch center. They're still there, defying eviction by Russian and Kazakh military cops and armied militias. The cosmic capital's thickly-strewn junk-piles, broken fencing and abandoned industrial warehousing made it a positive boon for the Kazakh refugees, peasants fleeing the ecological disaster of the poisoned Aral Sea. The streets of Baikonur are choked with blowing dust from the distant Aral salt flats. The pesticide-thickened runoff from dammed rivers cannot keep the sea from dwindling.

Amazingly, the veteran Russian space workers, on average well over 50 years old, are still launching rockets from Tyuratam. Their work has been cut back by 90 percent or so, and they're begging passers-by for canned food and pencils, but the cosmic enterprise staggers on. The fading glamour of space-flight has become one Russia's few foreign cash-cows.

The Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center ("Starry Town," northeast of Moscow) now sells space-cadet dude-ranch tours to passing Europeans and Yankees, for a thousand dollars a week. European Space Agency "guest cosmonauts," shot into orbit to man the Mir station, have brought the Russians about $85 million. The Chileans, Finns, and Greeks refused the lure of purchasing a home- grown space hero, but the cash-flush South Koreans might send up a TV reporter soon. And NASA has forked over some $400 million to keep its erstwhile rival active in "International Space Station" activities.

Western auction houses sell-off Soviet space vehicles and former top-secret documents for cash. Moscow still has 24 operational geostationary spacecraft, but three- fourths of them are beyond their design lifetime. The cosmonaut corps has had massive layoffs, many of them 40- to-50 year-old space heros who have been training for decades but will never have a chance to fly.

One could go on. One could, for instance, recommend the US Federal document "US-Russian Cooperation in Space" from the Office of Technology Assessment -- if the OTA itself had not been recently axed by the US Congress. The late twentieth-century US Congress is deeply unimpressed by shrieks of "Eureka" and "Excelsior" from the US scientific community -- what they want to hear are cries of "paydirt" and "competitive advantage." The Endless Frontier is out -- the Almighty Market is in.

It takes two to do a dramatic, awe-inspiring, cosmic tango. Sense of Wonder As a Foreign Policy no longer cuts any ice in Moscow or Washington. With the collapse of centrally-directed economics as a viable alternative to markets, the entire tenor of civil enterprise has changed, around the planet. It's no longer Free World Versus Communism, but McWorld Versus Jihad. Even the "Information Superhighway," the Clinton/Gore Administration's CyberSpace Race, seems to have no coherent role for any government to play. Bits of the old rhetoric are ritually deployed in Atari Democrat guise, but there is no Cyberspace NASA, no single national goal of landing in the virtual moon, nothing much for Clinton or Gore to do but gosh-wow and deplore the pornography.

There's no one to defeat. It's not surprising to see NASA and its military-industrial allies trying to pump billions in financial energy into the flaccid corpse of the Russian space effort. Without rival knights of the spaceways, what exactly is the point of a manned space program of any kind? How long can Canaveral survive the death of Tyuratam? Do Apollo gantries rust any less completely than the dead Buran space shuttle?

The twentieth century is almost over now. Hindsight is increasingly possible. We can now recognize a certain kind of rhetoric as being intrinsically "twentieth- century." It sounds like this:

"A War to End All Wars. Wings Over the World. A Thousand-Year Reign. Science, the Endless Frontier. Energy Too Cheap To Meter. Miracle Drugs. Sexual Revolution. A Great Leap Forward. Storming the Cosmos."

The slogans seemed to emanate from every corner of the ideological compass at the time, but in retrospect they can be recognized as notes in a single piece of period music, a brassy modernist rant. The Soviet Union was born in the twentieth century and died in the twentieth century. It had the worst case of this syndrome ever known, maybe even the worst that will ever be possible. The USSR -- scientific, centralized, revolutionary, technocratic, blind to historical continuity, contemptuous of humanity, impossibly enthusiastic -- fell headlong for every 20th-century sucker's game imaginable: Marxism, aviation, electrification, mass industrialism, total warfare, atomic power, space flight.

The USSR longed for transcendance-through-machinery with a deeply religious, unquestioned and formally unquestionable fervor. Other twentieth-century societies shared this cast of mind, but it was the USSR which paid the worst, the most sordid, and the most degrading price for these aspirations. Toward their miserable end, the Soviets were even gasping for the chance to get up to speed on personal computers -- even as Chernobyl detonated. The consequences of that terrible act, like so many other 20th century enthusiasms, will easily outlast the 21st century.

It's "hubris clobbered by Nemesis," as Brian Aldiss likes to say. Science fiction was also born in the twentieth century, clutching a rocketship and wailing for the stars.

If we needed one shining example of a truly prescient 20th century science fiction writer -- our one stubborn dissident, denied his tithe of chrome Hugos, yet stubbornly clinging, despite all odds, to the light of reality -- then we need look no farther than J. G. Ballard. This great artist of our genre, with his uncanny surrealist insight, has made all the chest- pounding, slide-rule-waving, 60s go-go dancers of the Old Wave look like fossils. His science fiction is still entirely relevant, while theirs has become nostalgic gimmickry to be auctioned-off at Sotheby's as household 60s kitsch. I can't imagine Ballard taking much pleasure in this vindication, or even bothering to notice; but surely he deserves some formal recognition for being so entirely right at the wrong time.

J. G. Ballard, author of "Memories of the Space Age," could have written James Oberg's article for him. In fact, he did. Repeatedly. Oberg's nonfiction article in an engineering magazine is the single most Ballardian piece of text never written by J G Ballard.

What this means to the rest of us will probably be decided by the first generation to come of age in the next century. Is there still real life in science fiction, or is the aging cadre of veterans merely going through the motions, hoping for miracles? What exactly is the role of "wonder" in a society where cosmic exploration is a matter of cash on the barrelhead? If there's hope, it surely lies in the young. Not much hope seems evident. But then again, where else has there ever been hope?