In space, nobody can hear you call a situation update meeting

It's Steve manning the editorial desk this month, your Uncle Geoff taking a little time off to catch up with writing his own fiction, not to mention going through the growing pile of manuscripts submitted to the Crowsnest's book publishing imprint.

While pondering my TV watching habits of the last few weeks, I have come to realise that apart from repeats from the past - classics like Trek, BattleStar Galactica and the X-Files, there's not a lot of SF/F passing through the box.

And even less original material.

I have made up for this, though, by watching the fascinating documentaries that British television seems to turn out with such regularity. You might have seen them yourself if you too inhabit Cool Britannia.

One was about the problems mankind will face sending the first human mission to Mars … which NASA plans to do around 2030. The second was about the tragic loss of the Challenger Space Shuttle and her crew, late in the last century (doesn't it sound odd writing that … the last century).

What both underlined for me was the complete frailty of human life in space, and how far we still are away from the gleaming, spacious, antiseptic corridors of a Voyager, Enterprise or Defiant.

Seeing footage of the crews of the Mir space station and NASA Shuttle missions, life on the three year trip to Mars started looked more like spending three years swimming around the inside of a camper van with heavily exposed plumbing.

Stir crazy doesn't even cover what humans would experience getting to Mars. Then there's the problem of the fact that by the time our brave explorers reach Mars, even with a state-of-the-art exercise regime and rotational gravity system, their bones would have atrophied to the degree they'd be hard pushed to walk again … ever.

Even more scary was astronauts describing how they'd go to sleep in orbit, then suddenly wake up seeing fireworks streaking across their closed eyelids … turns out particle storms can get really vicious & visible without six miles of atmosphere to protect you.

Getting sick isn't something you want to do either. Three years away from hospital, the standard practice in space is to amputate - no matter what the severity of the problem (no bugs to cause gangrene, you see).

And the other documentary?

The one on the Challenger disaster made me realise that the massive organisation called NASA is, really, little different from the screwed up corporations many of us work for.

Politics, idiots in command, mountains of meaningless paperwork and procedures, and the reflex response to any problem being the calling of a meeting, or setting up of a committee.

Of course, when the muppets who run things in your firm &^%$ up, a wave of lay-offs and a drop in share price is normally the result. For NASA, unfortunately, it was a group of PR-conscious middle management - in a Dilbert contractor company, apparently - ignoring the engineers' reports that they were about twenty degrees underneath the shuttle's safe launch temperature.

They did this because the launch had been put off too many times already, and was carrying a media-friendly teacher, in the first launch of a US civilian into space.

The managers' response was to send a couple of janitors with brooms to knock ice off the shuttle rockets before launch. It would have been hysterically funny, if the consequences of their 'launch or bust' attitude hadn't been the loss of such a brave group of astronauts.

It seems that for a while longer, the likes of holodecks and onboard cafes like Ten Forward will remain more the stuff of fantasy than science fiction.

If there's one silver lining from all this, it sure does make you appreciate the beauty of the cold winter days down here on Earth all the more.

Maybe even long enough to forget the fact that we're all clinging onto a tiny mote of rock, sling-shotting through a universe that's more akin to a cosmic shooting gallery than a peaceful & silent void.

But that's a BBC documentary called Universe, and another tale.

Your fellow traveller through space and time Steve H. .

Steve H.

Hologram Tales e-mail: gfwillmetts@REMOVE.FOR.SPAMhotmail.com
terrestrial address:
74 Gloucester Road,
BRIDGWATER, Somerset TA6 6EA, UK.
SAEs (International Rates: include at least 2 IRCs or enough to cover return of manuscripts if sending in material) will always get replies.

Geoff Willmetts

The latest Science Fiction Books