The landing of Nasa’s Perseverance rover on Mars was good to watch, by which I mean there was almost nothing to see.
In this drone-swarmed, David Attenborough-narrated era, in which it has become passé to see nature’s rarest and most secret events revealed in ultra-high-definition super-slow-mo, the relative dullness of the space agency’s broadcast — robotically cutting between scientists staring anxiously at screens and a computer-generated image of the lander’s progress — was paradoxically dazzling. When you’re doing something that not even the all-seeing eye of modern cameras can show, you’re doing something very special indeed.
For me, it provided marvellous respite from the stuff that’s usually on my screen. In space, no-one can hear you scream, but the benefit of this is that you also can’t hear local politics: when your mind’s eye is 200 million kilometres away, Ace Magashule and Carl Niehaus become infinitesimally tiny and gloriously insignificant.
Which is not to say Perseverance was apolitical. Space nationalism is having a moment, with China vowing to put astronauts on the moon in the next few years. Given that they’ll get there about 50 years after the Americans stopped going because they just couldn’t be bothered any more, this is a bit like vowing to develop a heavier-than-air monoplane that can fly from London to Paris without having to refuel.
Of course, I understand the propaganda value of these things, and landing on the moon second or even third is still an extraordinary feat. Most athletes would be ecstatic to win a silver or bronze medal at the Olympics. But it does start to look a tad awkward when you both finished the race two months after the gold medallist and the stadium is already being converted into a community centre.
Still, many millions of people around the world would have watched last week’s landing with a certain patriotic twinge, wondering when their countries would be rich and powerful enough to litter the cosmos with tiny gadgets.
I felt none of that space envy. Firstly, if I want to watch brave, determined South Africans take their first cautious steps across the dusty surface of a distant, airless world that is extremely hostile to all life forms, I could just go to my nearest home affairs branch.
If I want to watch brave, determined South Africans take their first cautious steps across the dusty surface of a distant, airless world that is extremely hostile to all life forms, I could just go to my nearest home affairs branch.
But mostly I don’t pine for a local Nasa because I’m not sure I could stand seeing our brightest and best scientists get slowly shunted aside by deployed cadres, or slowly realise they are working for a type of intergalactic SOE which would spend R100-trillion planning a mission to identify the hollow husks now orbiting Jacob Zuma, then fail to launch because the coal got wet.
I admit that’s not a very compelling argument for limiting space exploration, but there are slightly better ones, such as the one that insists, fairly sensibly, that humans shouldn’t be trying to colonise other planets until we’ve fixed this one.
Certainly, the world’s space agencies are spending an awful lot of money — about $70bn (about R1-trillion) a year. But while I don’t want to diminish the good intentions of the Earth First lobby, and while I believe some of the interplanetary schemes being mooted by billionaires are just what happens when you don’t get enough hugs, I do think it’s worth pointing out that humanity now spends $130bn a year at McDonalds. I mean, I also think we need to save the planet, but if I’m going to criticise the splinter in Nasa’s eye, I should probably first remove the quarter-pounder with cheese from my mouth.
Then there’s the fact that this isn’t a zero-sum game. We don’t have to choose between the Earth and Mars: there is enough money and skill here to try to save the former while figuring out if the latter can be turned into a life raft that might save our species should we ever cross paths with a particularly bad-tempered comet.
And that, I think, was what I found most satisfying about last week’s landing: seeing extraordinary people who have been working for years, and who will keep working, no matter what Twitter thinks. When Perseverance landed they whooped with relief, but where I switched off the TV and went back to my life, they will start again. And next time they’ll go slightly further.
Mars, a vaccine less than a year after a new coronavirus appears, perhaps a cure for cancer and a way to trap carbon. We will debate and denounce, cook up fresh conspiracy theories, and then, as we always do with this type of magic, claim them as banal everyday realities.
But the scientists, the great explorers of our age, will simply take a breath, sit back down in their chairs and go back to the maths that pulls us inexorably, marvellously, into the future.
