When I was about five years old, I remember reading a book in the school library called You Will Go To The Moon. This was the 1960s, when the Space Race was being run, and everyone was space crazy (well, by ‘everyone’, I mean five-year-old boys in South London). I still remember slogging to Woolworth’s with 5/11- saved from pocket money (those old pennies were HUGE) to buy my Airfix Lunar Module, and my scale model Saturn V rocket dominated my bedroom.
That was then – the Space Race has since fizzled out. Nobody has visited the Moon since 1972. To put this into perspective, that was the year that a young, hip group called Deep Purple released their Machine Head album, containing the anthemic Smoke On The Water – loathed by assistants in music shops everywhere – as well as a nod to the contemporary obsession, Space Truckin’. The participants are all still alive, but have turned from young hipsters to old farts, mostly of pensionable age. One of them has actually retired. Imagine that a rock musician could live long enough to do that?
But I digress.
Optimism about space continued into my teens, when I read a book by Patrick Moore called The Next 50 Years in Space, which envisaged a lunar base in 2020. That’s something that might still happen … but I wouldn’t put money on it. Despite much talk of our space stations being used as jumping-off points for manned space exploration, they are still LibDems among spacecraft: high of hope, they remain low of orbit, riven with compromise and uncertain of purpose. People still haven’t worked out what they’re for. Notwithstanding inasmuch as which, unmanned space exploration has come on by leaps and bounds. All the major bodies in the Solar System have been visited by robot probes, some several times, and our telescopes have revealed the existence of hundreds of extrasolar planets, the tally increasing daily.
What, then, is to be done? Happily the space age has received an influx of new young hipsters, rich from teh interwebz and keen to do something with their money and expertise. Hence the arrival of private, commercial space enterprises such as SpaceX, subject of this fascinating feature. SpaceX has already built, tested and launched its Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon orbiter, which it will use to resupply the Space Station now that the Space Shuttle fleet has, like Deep Purple’s original keyboard player, retired. The $1.6bn contract is for a minimum of twelve supply flights, with an option to order additional missions up to $3.1bn. But only if they can get a skip. Clearly, thar’s brass to be made from space.
Not that the Dragon orbiter has yet carried a human passenger. The first test subject wasn’t a dog, or even a hamster – but a round of Gruyere cheese. Why? A tribute, apparently, by SpaceX boss Elon Musk (who made his pile with PayPal), to Monty Python’s Cheese Shop sketch. Mr Musk is, apparently, something of a fan of all things Pythonesque, particularly that excellent motion picture, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Although he might well say ‘Nih!’ and demand a shrubbery, Mr Musk appears to be Wise In The Ways of Science, and knows the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow. But would that be an African or European Swallow? Time will tell.
The airspeed of an African Swallow is well known.
The real reason I became a scientist was so that I could hope up a test tube and flatly state: “I JUST don’t know, even I JUST don’t know!”
Wow. You’ve checked Airfix models, Machine Head, and Monty Python all in one blogpost. Three of my favourite things.
It is very sad that Jon Lord has retired. Perhaps they’d like to hire you instead?
In the meantime, I wonder what has happened to the shuttle-replacement project that NASA was kind-of working on? I think I recall that funding might have stopped but I’m too lazy to look it up at the moment. Private sector support would seem to be the way to go, given the insane amounts of public funds otherwise required to support space exploration.
Jon Lord left some years ago to concentrate on his classical music. His replacement is Don Airey, who sounds more like Lord than Lord himself. The last studio album ‘Rapture Of The Deep’ (2005) is phenomenal.
I’m sadly not available, particularly as my old friend Florence has offered me a truly astonishing musical opportunity which, if I told you more about it, I’d have to kill you.
… and yes, Obama cancelled the Constellation project, which was to have succeeded the shuttle.
Ah thanks for that, I’d forgotten what it was called.
Don Airey you say? I recall him from a Jethro Tull album or two, where he was definitely more of the “over-wrought synthesizer twiddles” school than the “screamin’ overdriven B3″ kind of thing. Good to hear he’s reformed.
Ah, well, Airey is a true sessioneer and therefore something of a musical chameleon. Jon Lord’s legacy is in safe hands.
Ah… further research reveals that I “probably” saw Airey playing live on the Crest of a Knave tour, circa 1987-1988. I was confusing him with both Martin Allcock and Peter-John Vettese, who *did* play on albums (Airey did not AFAIK). Vettese is the inveterate synth-twiddler I was thinking of.
That said, a couple of albums he played on are among my favourites, ever.
I do hope they did some proper tests on the cheese afterwards. You never know!
All I know is that it splashed down in the Pacific – if they tested the Gruyere, they are silent. I wonder if Gruyere that’s been sent into space makes better fondues than Gruyere that hasn’t? There – a worthwhile experiment for the Space Station, at last!
I think the key experiment will be to make the fondue *in* space, to determine whether the (near-) zero-G environment is helpful, or not.
Then I suggest moving on to soufflés as the logical next step.
Souffles are much harder to make than fondues, even on Earth. This would require more $$$, so I don’t think President Obama would fund it.
Just think of the potential risk though… What if – perish the thought – the cheese suffered some strange, exotic transformation during its travels?
A classic B-movie might ensue: “The Souffle That Ate Los Angeles”…..?
Just kidding…