here comes the sun

It’s spread across the internet, and was on the front page of yesterday’s Times. What is it? It’s a photograph of the space shuttle in front of the sun. It’s a powerful and exciting image, but I find it unsettling.

The shuttle is tiny against a quadrant of the huge yellow star behind it. A filter has removed all solar flare, so the sun looks more like a planet. The optical trick played by relative sizes and distances makes the image look like countless establishing shots in science fiction films and programmes of a space craft in orbit around a planet where crew members have landed, though normally the spacecraft would appear larger.

Our familiarity with such shots means that it’s easy to misinterpret the image. The shuttle is not near the sun at all. We are not close to travelling to other planets. The headline in the Times, “Set your controls for the heart of the sun” is not meant to be a suggestion that the shuttle will travel to the sun. It refers to a track by Pink Floyd on the 1968 album, ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’, written at the time of the Apollo rockets and shortly before the first moon landing.

Perhaps all the recent discussion of space tourism, including Richard Branson’s talk of space flights for £10,000 within ten years, together with NASA’s desire to resume manned flights, contributes to an excited feeling that we are on the verge of a new era. Yet if air travel is a major cause of environmental damage, why are we even contemplating extending it with completely unnecessary leisure flights to the edge of the atmosphere?

But that feels like a curmudgeonly attitude. When I was growing up, like many others, I wanted to be an astronaut, and believed that space travel would soon be commonplace. Why should we voluntarily give up that dream, just because it might cause harm to our planet?

There is no claim that the photograph of the shuttle in front of the sun is art, but my troubled response to it makes me willing to consider it so.

Tags: shuttle