Hot on the heels of the recent American and European rover landings on Mars, President George W. Bush's subsequent plans for a future manned Martian-Lunar mission and its own launch of a man into space last year, China announced on April 18 that it had become only the fourth country to put a "micro-satellite" into orbit. Propelled by a Long March 2 rocket (a wondrously kitschy name, if you ask me), the 55-pound "Nanosatellite 1" was joined by the more conventional "Experimental Satellite 1" to form a tandem that marks the Chinese as major players in the ongoing colonization of the near-earth vacuum.
The intentions of these new floating scraps of metal, both stated and symbolic, seem far from celestial, however. As the Xinhua News Agency (the Chinese Communist Party's version of Fox News, apparently) reported, Nanosatellite 1 will be utilized largely for "high-tech experiments" while Experimental Satellite 1 represents "China's first transmission-type small satellite capable of stereo mapping." This latter innovation will be used not to search for alien civilization or map the terrains of far-away worlds but for the far more plebian task of "surveying China's land resources."
And so a nation very literally defines its interior by conquering space far outside its borders. Ah, the post-colonial treatises that could be written! Not to mention the Freudian ones: We are, after all, talking about phallic rockets stubbornly penetrating the atmospheric bounds of the mother planet. Indeed, space exploration is, at its most basic level, all about vigor, and in these early years of the third millennium, vigor as a rallying principle is back on the table.
Satellites, launch pads, rovers, landers: These are the new little blue pills of national potency. Though, come to think of it, Viagra may not be the most timely analogy. Space is Cialis - the weekender, the 36-hour remedy, the marathon alternative. Its power stems from the very fact that, by any objective measure, extra-planetary advances take a preposterous amount of time to achieve. Thus the effect of any national space bug is incredibly long-lasting. So for those of you planning a career manning the military-industrial complex, the government has a rocket in its pocket and, yes, it's happy to see you.
More importantly, space seems to have the knack for engorging the long-term public psyche in a way that, say, a major highway improvement project just can't do. And so Dubya's Moon-Mars program is set to come to fruition right around the time Jenna (or Barbara, but my bet's on Jenna - she's got the spark) should be ascending to the Oval Office as the new head of the Herbert-Walker-Bush-Millie dynasty.
China's own lunar ambitions should take just as long, and the new race will, to borrow Marx's oft-used phrase (this is the Red Planet in play here), probably be as farcical as the Cold War's version was tragic. Imagine the headline from the year 2020: U.S. Beats China to Mars; Outsources Obligatory Rock Collection to India. Lou Dobbs will have a field day.
What's interesting in all this talk of next-generation orbs and modules wrapped in the flag of the God-fearin' U. S. of A., or of China or the European Union, for that matter, is the transitory moment - the impotent moment, some would argue - of space exploration left behind. Implicit in all of China's self-congratulatory press releases and Bush's grandiose schemes, after all, is the gradual abandonment of the International Space Station, a brilliantly designed reminder that when we talk about outer space, we're really speaking of anything but.
Regardless of its scientific virtues, an "international" space station is, post-Sept. 11, post-Iraq, post-Israeli Wall, simply beside the point, because the infinite void of space is ultimately incomprehensible without borders. These borders aren't the same as those on the ground, of course, which are penetrated every day by investment, imports, immigrants and terrorists. The borders of space are ideal ones - the last ones left. The sinister chauvinism of space programs bubbles to the surface only occasionally - cue the "Star Wars" theme, Mr. Reagan - but it's easy to conclude that only the irrational passions of insecure nations would incur the modern costs of space.
Indeed, in an era when micro-satellites can pretty much get the job done, sending bigger and bigger symbols into space seems rather silly. Still, when it comes to the perceived size of the national endowment, big is never big enough.
Jonathan Liu '07 finds unnecessarily long and descriptive bylines to be clearly and gratuitously compensatory. On that note, have a wonderful summer!
