After Idyllic Splashdown . . .Did Astronauts Return To A Truly Improving World?
Because of the two astronauts stuck above us since early last June, news stories reported the damage expected to the human body from prolonged time living in nearly weightless, isolated space. Not something that any of our ancestors over the millennia had ever been in a position to experience.
The astronauts were being closely monitored since their return to our blue-and-green planet on March 18, the day after St. Patrick’s Day, he who taught the uncatechized, curious pagans of his own time.
(The planet is “ours” because it’s on loan, not on a deed.)
Spacemanship is more complicated than just living on an isolated Pacific island, which would exert the same earthly pulls of gravity and breaths of the atmosphere.
And the astronauts were less than a day’s time from descending from orbit until splashdown. What if Mother Earth were 5 years, or 10 years, or 100 away from the explorers? Earth would be something their children or grandchildren only heard about. Would they feel any loyalty to it, or be ready as colonists elsewhere to start a freedom rebellion?
Less prominent in news coverage was attention to the effect of the encompassing views seen by the astronauts up there — not a physical force but a mental one — and how they affect the viewer.
To be above our planet, at the edge of infinity. Does that make one swagger? Or brag? Or, rather, gasp? Make a person proud? Or very humble?
Probably it’s like living daily literally on the edge of the Grand Canyon, but more intense. We see plenty of photos of sunrise and sunset at the Grand Canyon. But what about the perspective up above where the sky turns pink, orange, or red?
Up there above our blue sky, look in one direction and it’s the unending blackness of space, dotted with stars relatively small, or huge, but so far away.
Look in another direction and it’s the entire earth, maybe seen a piece at a time, with the International Space Station (ISS) taking just over 90 minutes to complete the circle about 16 times a day at about 17,500 mph.
Seen from space, the velocity of the movement over our planet doesn’t seem all that enormous. If you were strapped to a rocket sled on rails at ground level, however, the rapidity of the passing earthly surface at 17,500 mph would be awesome.
Looking up at the stars, I used to make myself particularly aware that I was on the very surface of a planet, with space starting not far above my head. We take our earthly position for granted because we see it every day. But what if we ordinarily were kept in caves and were allowed to step out onto the surface, say, just once every 10 years?
Remember that if some visitor from space were looking down on our planet, the tops of our heads moving over the terrain would be the first thing seen, not subterranean subway cars with passengers in New York, or submarine crews beneath the waves.
We look at Martian planetary surfaces, plains and mountains, as seen from cameras mounted on rovers. What if space creatures sent out their own drones to inspect us? What if some of today’s drones are theirs?
I once worked with a woman who had spent a summer season toiling at a restaurant on the Grand Canyon South Rim. It’s not like some other earthly job environment, and Donna was grateful to have been at the special place.
Depending on the route, that’s about 230 miles north of Phoenix, roughly a 3-hour, 30-minute drive. Once you’re past the Phoenix metropolitan area, the largest city would be the college town of Flagstaff, Ariz., around 76,000 people. In other words, not a heavily populated part of the world.
It might not be as lonely as space, but, still, it’s someplace where you might have time to reflect more carefully on life.
I once flew from Phoenix to Las Vegas for The Wanderer early in the morning to cover the 2010 debate in Nevada’s Harry Reid-Sharron Angle U.S. Senate race. Our plane didn’t simply fly to the northwest, as I’d expected, but first north, then west. From an altitude of maybe 20,000 or more feet, I could see the rise in the lonely, dry land toward the Grand Canyon’s rim.
(Phoenix is only 1,100 feet elevation, while the South Rim of the Canyon is around 7,000 feet high.)
I saw a very small town south of the Canyon where, I figured, kids would be getting up for school and parents for work. I wondered where they’d be going. And for how long the sun had risen before there were any people there at all, even tribal ones.
As for the astronauts in 2025, their splashdown probably couldn’t have been better: a sunny, mild afternoon with a gentle, rolling gulf and a pod of dolphins to greet them. Is this a scene from fiction or what?
Here’s a body of water that knows monster hurricanes, but the water off the Florida panhandle on March 18 might have been in a swimming pool fit for floating on your back.
Was it symbolic of better times ahead, with the horrors of the far-left, bad-Catholic Biden days buried at sea? With the bad days’ shroud weighted with iron? Because bad things can arise even from the beautiful blue sea, definitely including sharks.
Although the name Gulf of America was a surprise when President Trump raised it — it certainly didn’t sound like a campaign issue, and he hadn’t used it before election day — it actually turned out to be fairer than the preceding title.
It wasn’t named for Mexico anymore, nor for the United States of America, but for all the Americas opposite Europe and Africa on the Atlantic Ocean.
Astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore ended up with worldwide publicity they probably never expected and — pending their health evaluations — ended in triumph, not the sort of sad outcome that concluded some space missions.
Among online coverage I watched was that of major English-language Indian newspapers, The Times of India, The Indian Express, and The Hindu (and maybe using better grammar than some U.S. papers).
Each of them included news of celebrations at Williams’ ancestral village upon her safe return, apparently received by flat-screen. At least one man in a photo wore a turban.
Such are our times, rituals perhaps at least centuries old prompted by a safe return of a daughter of India who, along with Wilmore, had “circled Earth 4,576 times and traveled 121 million miles (195 million kilometers) by the time of splashdown,” according to Associated Press numbers.
Meanwhile, President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin from their respective countries were working to bring a halting peace to a European war zone, Ukraine’s — a war started by Putin.
Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to have allowed Putin, a former intelligence officer of the crippled Soviet Union’s secret police, to ascend to Russian leadership. Nothing comparable occurred when rebuilding and de-Nazifying the conquered Nazi Germany, but Communists often seemed to do better when under the wing of Western “liberals.”
Despite such a Russian official, at least Russians and Americans could enjoy a friendship never possible under such Soviet villains as Josef Stalin.
If there’s someone who doesn’t seem to like Russians, it’s said Western “liberals,” whose daddies had yearned for a “convergence” between Soviet Communism and the U.S., but are as adverse to Russians and their churches as U.S. conservatives had been to atheist Communists.
Trump and Putin on the side were thinking of hockey matches between top U.S. and Russian players. That sort of face-off used to occur as the old Soviet Union sought to show off and to seek legitimacy.
These are different days, however, and Russian cosmonauts and U.S. astronauts can share space on the ISS, or on the same planet, without the threat of atheism being imposed.
At least, not imposed by Russia. Some Western left-wingers might be tempted to give it a try, if only they could put the pesky religious fanatics — you know, people who pray every day for repentance, conversion, and salvation — in their place.
