[ccebook.cn]The World in 2010

making running repairs. The shuttle was essentially a hugely expensive freight service, a sort of ups orbiting
the Earth. It launched hollow spheres, covered with mirrors, to measure the density of the atmosphere, and
took up a payload of flags for distribution to the heroes of September 11th. On most missions one or two
astronauts would walk in space, carrying clumpy instruments in huge gloved hands, to tinker with the craft.
Their logs were eloquently mundane:
Godwin & Tani start a space walk to install insulation around the top of the ISS truss structure,
they also made an attempt to secure one of four legs that brace the starboard station array but
were unable to close the latch…they retrieved an errant electrical cover (lost during 2001 April 24
during the STS-100 mission), and positioned two switches to be retrieved and installed during the
upcoming STS-110 mission.
The logs also included near-misses in the clutter of space: old rocket-stages, blankets and foot restraints, all
orbiting past. The work was interrupted to take telephone calls from Ronald Reagan or whichever leader had a
citizen on board. If not quite a day at the office, there was a fair approximation to the muddle of faraway
Earth.
Mundane but miraculous
Yet it was desperately dangerous. The shuttle, at its launch, clung piggy-back on to 4m pounds of explosives.
There was no escape route. Defective o-rings doomed the Challenger flight in 1986, and a chunk of insulating
foam gashed the wing of Columbia on re-entry, in 2002. The dreadful fan-like tumbling of the debris from the
sky was all the worse because Columbia carried a woman teacher and a black astronaut among its crew,
America in miniature.
And this was also, for all its familiarity, a course in amazement. The shuttle enabled its astronauts to see,
every 90 minutes, how the sun ignited a giant rainbow over the morning Earth. It allowed them to observe
the still, fixed colours of the stars; to watch from the outside as lightning forked through a weather front; to
measure the spiders’ webs of cities against the immense blue of ocean and the matt black of far space. Much
of the shuttle’s business—launching the Hubble telescope, putting up satellites, mapping the Earth—could have
been done by unmanned craft, at a fraction of the $174 billion the programme cost. But the shuttle threw
space open as a place where ordinary men and women could not only live, work and fool about, denizens of
the universe, but where they could also routinely slip the bonds of time, be humbled, and be astonished.
Ann Wroe: obituaries editor, The Economist
Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.