The Smithsonian Institution posted a video on their Air & Space website, showing the time-lapse journey of the Discovery from the Orbiter Processing Facility to the launch pad, which I’ve embedded to the right. I have to admit an ongoing emotional flush punctuated every time I see the process of spaceflight — from the NASA archival footage of the Saturn V rockets sending humans to the moon, to the amazingly matter-of-fact interviews of shuttle astronauts in orbit. This video is different from most of those, in that it shows the tip of the iceberg in the painstaking effort to prepare a vehicle for spaceflight. Most of the time, we’re jumpcutting to the good parts, and we don’t see any of the scurrying masses of humans darting around the slow and gigantic wheels inexorably rolling forward.
In science fiction, we have the luxury of treating spaceflight like driving — you just hop in, press a button, back out, and speed away. Of course it’s not that easy today. But rather than dwell on the technical and practical heavy lift of spaceflight, I’m more concerned about the political future of spaceflight. With our space shuttle fleet retiring and no program in place to immediately follow it, we put our own future in jeopardy. While many forward-thinking people such as astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and Doom co-creator John Carmack have publicly articulated the need to our species to begin to move into space, our short-term interests continue to anchor us in banal debates. Given our geometric consumption of this world’s resources, our need to expand will become apparent seemingly all of a sudden. We need to keep laying the groundwork from now, so we’re not caught without a plan in place. The practical work in this video must continue. Think of it as our collective 401K plan.
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