Larry and Galileo

This is not one of those urban legends. I checked and this, indeed, happened in 1982 and a friend of mine even heard it himself on the news when he was doing graduate school in New York. It is about Larry, a man who wanted to realize his ultimate dream of flight: launch into and float in airspace relaxing on his armchair while drinking beer. Larry, apparently frustrated that he would not qualify for military service for some physical reasons, decided to prove to everyone that the US military was, indeed, foregoing a real catch of a genius of flight. So he devised a "space vehicle" (his lawn chair) to propel him to the skies by attaching some rockets he made out of materials from the local hardware. On the appointed day, with invited friends to applaud him and to help tie sandwiches and a six-pack around his lawn chair, he, indeed, launched into airspace, in fact way beyond his planned altitude of several hundred feet and way beyond the capacity of his landing devices (to land, he had a BB gun to shoot the balloons that enabled him to stay aloft after the rockets launched him) that at a couple of thousand feet, a passenger airline spotted him in the airspace of a state, other than the one he launched from, where the airline pilots probably had to take turns over the radio to control tower because they were laughing so hard and also had try all sorts of radio code name for "lawn chair."

My brother, as a little boy, embarked on so many nerve-wrecking (for my mother) attempts to make himself or other creatures and inanimate objects fly. In parks, I saw dads with their boys launch toy rockets where if it were not for size, you could not tell who was the adult and the boy as far as their expressions of excitement were concerned. Alan Lightman, a professor at MIT who holds what to me is the most enviable job of heading the Humanities Department of a leading science and technology learning institution, and who also wrote Einstein’s Dreams, the best-selling, highly acclaimed novel translated into more than 20 languages, started his latest book A Sense of the Mysterious. Science and the Human Spirit (Pantheon Books: NY 2005) with a story of his childhood fascination with making his own rockets. I have always been fascinated with the idea of flight, especially into the brink of space, as anyone, but I never had lawn chair Larry’s chutzpah or the engineering skills of my brother or Lightman to flesh it out even as play. I used to hear kids of my generation (those born in the late 60s) wanting to become "space-o-nuts," but I hardly hear it from kids now whose imagination seem to be all glued to computers. That is why I found it so delightfully ironic that a resurfacing of this childhood fantasy is being cast in reality by the very same giants of the computer-tech industry.

Microsoft, PayPal, Amazon, Doom and Quake. What do all these computer-associated companies now have in common? Their founders and creators are now behind the first-ever private space initiatives. Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, personally funded SpaceShip One, the first privately owned manned rocket that bagged the $10-million Ansari X Prize competition last year. SpaceShip One was the first ever spaceship that reached 70 miles up, just reaching that band that is the margin of outerspace, that was not funded by any government. Elon Musk of PayPal has rocket company SpaceX; Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com owns space company Blue Origin that will develop 165,000 acres of land in Texas for space launching operations. Even computer game gurus like John Carmack (creator of Doom and Quake, apparently a real hit of a computer game) has a space company named Armadillo Aerospace.

A June 14 NY Times article by John Schwartz called these new-generation space childhood-dream-and-reality consummates the new "thrillionaire-space capitalists." Yup, in order to build real rockets privately, you have got to have an enterprise that could earn you $20 million "while you floss," as Schwartz described the financial "readiness" for space enterprise of Microsoft’s Paul Allen. And if you scale down your fantasy a bit and just settle to be a paying passenger to one of those planned launches, you still have to be able to foot a space-launch bill of a couple of millions of dollars.

Before you get any ideas of what this trip 70 miles up entails, you may want to know that it is NOT an orbital flight. It will only launch you 70 miles up and you will probably stay there a couple of minutes (two minutes when I last read up on it) and hopefully, safely return aided by more than Larry’s BB guns. To do an orbital flight, meaning to reach that height far enough to launch you outside the Earth but still close enough to it that you are attracted by it to go into orbit, so far requires more than the private funds and engineers can muster up so far. So in case you are dreaming "cabin classes," "beverages of all kinds," and "high-tech toilets," think again. There won’t be time for first-class service, beverages, or nature calls so facilities for those are not exactly priority. A two-minute stay on the brink of space will capture your senses and imagination as quickly as it has drawn your millions of dollars of shuttle-fare. But those two minutes I bet will be timeless.

An all-too familiar argument against any space launch is that we have more than enough problems on Earth to discover solutions for, so why don’t we just devote our time and resources to our Earth-bound problems. But ever since Aristotle and other Greek natural philosophers wondered whether heavenly bodies moved in circles, as when Kepler proved them wrong when he pointed out a more sensible geometry for the movement of the heavens, as when Galileo devised an instrument to make the stars "speak" to human intelligence, being on Earth alone has ceased to be the only option for our imagination and our sense of being alive.

But I hope that for every rivet screwed on to anymore SpaceShip Two or Three or Four, I hope these thrillionaires in space will also give equally to free technology to make the wonders of this very planet accessible to those who have not even been to the next island, those who have never experienced a season other than the ones they have been born in. When I look at public school children in very poor and remote places such as the ones in our country, I mentally calculate the odds against them ever really learning by experiencing what it is like to be fully alive in this planet – of for instance, knowing what it is like to be in Antarctica and watch solitary polar bears blend into the infinite whiteness of ice and snow, to be on a beach strewn with more sea lions than people, to be in the biological mecca that is the Galapagos and meet a tropical penguin underwater, to oh so many more, as there are grains of sand in all the shores in the world. While there is no substitute for real travel, I hope that free technology will be available to the poorest of us to whet our appetites for life by giving us a virtual experience of all kinds of life spaces in this planet. I can imagine a helmet kids can wear which will sensorily take them to different seasons with different creatures. If violence can be made so that they appear so real in computer games, I am certain this kind of virtual reality is no mean feat for our tech wizards. The great tech wizardry of all these thrillionaires have enlarged our imagination into realms that Galileo probably did not even dream of in his time. I hope that visions of space will not blind these current "star travelers" and make them forget noblesse oblige here at home, in the planet that their spaceships leave behind for every trip it makes into the "cusp" of space.

Galileo was the defining science and tech genius of the 17th century. J. Bronowski, in his book The Ascent of Man, called Galileo the "Starry Messenger" and quoted Galileo’s 1636 reflection on his own blindness against the backdrop of his own great scientific contribution: "Alas, (I) have been for a month totally and incurably blind; so that this heaven, this earth, this universe, which by my remarkable observations and clear demonstrations I have enlarged a hundred, nay, a thousand fold beyond the limits universally accepted by the learned men of all previous ages, are now shriveled up for me into such a narrow compass as is filled by my own bodily sensations." Galileo’s visions of outerspace have, in the end, been scoped into sensations within his own inner bodily space. Even our great Starry Messenger, in the end, still came home.

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