Tony Jackman
Is the rate at which sperm travels in space of interest only to those planning to copulate very slowly in zero-gravity conditions? It must be a tad disconcerting when your partner keeps floating off like a bad joke just when you’re approaching the punchline.
The question is best not asked, as anyone who has been watching Spaceman Mark’s historic venture on DStv’s Channel 38 knows. Like where to hide when nature calls a fellow astronaut. Wash Day must be fun too.
Another space wisdom: one launch is much like another. A bunch of people shuffle their feet on a dais in some godforsaken semi-desert. The camera follows a tumbleweed past a rocket dwarfed by endless landscape and beckoning sky. You hope that the wind doesn’t blow it over. There’s a crackling countdown, in Russian, a cloud of smoke bursts from under it, up she goes, and your eyes are welling and you’re yelling, “Go, bru!” Because the difference between this and any other space launch is that one of our own okes is on board and suddenly it doesn’t matter that he had to pay the national arts budget just to set foot on a Soyuz.
In your mind you’re seven again and your dad is pointing up at a silver dot in a black sky and saying, “That’s Sputnik. That’s Yuri Gagarin. You’ll remember this one day.”
Okay, okay, you pull yourself together, because you’re a cynical journalist. Like Derek Watts. It’s Thursday, post-launch, and here’s our Carte Blanche hero, standing with many Shuttleworths and sounding as though he’d like to sign up for family membership. The image crackles fortuitously and you see range after range of snow-clad mountains, or is that several small countries gliding past?
A voice says you are watching Nasa Television and they keep showing this distorted global map with a lot of irregular lines that you hope are not the orbit pattern. The images are marginally better than the ones you had in your mind back in 1969 in your room with your transistor radio on with Neil Armstrong climbing out of an Apollo spaceship mumbling something about small steps and giant leaps. You thought, even then, that it sounded as if he were reading it from a cue card.
Now it’s Saturday morning on Channel 38 and here’s a programme on a car that drives itself by analysing the white lines in the middle of the road. There’s a man in the car, not driving it. This is a car for drunk people, and you make a mental note to get one and call it James.
Minutes later Mark is in a fuzzy bubble on the screen, preparing for docking. An over-polite German astronaut called Reinholt is explaining that the docking procedure is like “a cosmical ballet”. You hope he didn’t mean comical. We’re waiting for “ingress”, a portentous word for entering, and a cricket innings later there’s Mark, floating through a porthole into the international space station, beaming with wonder, as if he’s arrived at the pearly gates and been waved through.
Important Italian people are shouting “buon giorno” and “tanti saluti!” at Roberto Vittori. A backgrounder on him tells you that he logged 2 000 flying hours in 40 different aircraft before becoming a spaceman. Somebody should have told him that he could have just bought a ticket.
But you’d be inhuman not to be a little green that an ordinary oke from Durbanville, that guy who came into Newspaper House in the mid-Nineties and showed you how to use the Internet, has become a billionaire and a rocket man. Still, there are other ways of surfing the universe. Click, click.