Space Walk

I think the image of Bruce McCandless II taking an untethered space walk on 7 February 1984 is one of the most astounding photos ever taken. I haven’t included it here for copyright reasons, but, well, here it is in (bad) ASCII art:

Surface           
of Earth           #  <-- Bruce McCandless II
   |                              
   V  
-------------------------------------------

Einstein’s theory of relativity tells us that there is no privileged viewpoint of the universe. The camera, however, because it has a clearly designed top, creates an objectivity to the views of the universe it captures. Each photo has an implicit instruction to it saying, “This way up.” Thus, although this, and other photos on NASA’s website, show the first human to fly in space without an umbilical cord connecting him to his spacecraft, could have been photographed in any juxtaposition with his home planet, the only way to see this photo is with Bruce McCandless II above the planet. Feminists would surely have a field-day, if indeed they haven’t already, in the quarter of a century since the photo was taken. There he sits, godlike in his throne above the clouds, master of all he surveys, watching us poor sinners down below.

The staggering bravery required to venture out into the most inhospitable environment humankind has ever encountered with no physical connection to your only means of transportation back to the environment that sustains you surely borders on insanity. In space there is no friction or air resistance; one slip on a thruster and you could be shot off into space with nothing to slow you down. A human can survive in space without a space suit for perhaps as long as a minute according to the Scientific American. It need hardly be said that space is not an environment that can sustain human life. I wonder how long Bruce McCandless II could have survived in space in his space suit.

The photo captures an instant in time, but its persistence makes that moment timeless. This is one lie the camera tells. This photo helps us believe that humans can survive in space, that they can exist apart from their home planet. They can, sort of. Valeri Polyakov stayed on the Mir space station for over a year. There’s another lie the camera tells, however: it draws a border around the image. Valeri Polyakov survived on the Mir space station because of regular supplies from the ground — he won’t have farmed his own food in the space station! Similarly that picture of Bruce McCandless II doesn’t show the support network that got him there and brought him home: the ground crew, pilots, mission planners, engineers, medics, and so on. For that matter, it doesn’t show the bacteria in his gut, or the viruses that trained his immune system.

Even though the photo shows the space man surrounded by the emptiness of space, it is a kind of levitation illusion. Like the wires holding the assistant in place while the magician performs the trick, the connections between Bruce McCandless II and the world are invisible to the audience, but not non-existent. Without denying the truth of what happened, or detracting from the extraordinariness of the achievement, the photo is a lie insofar as it creates the impression in the viewer that humans are something separated from their home planet. Rather, we are intricately interconnected with it, and unravelling all those links so that we can build a machine that can sustainably replicate what the Earth does for us is a massive, and very expensive, challenge.