High flight
For Saint David’s Day, our Canadian astronaut, Chris Hadfield, twitters from space: “A perfect pass coming up on Cardiff.” Were it only not, alas, for the clouds over Wales. I discovered his Twitter page this morning, thanks to BBC. The man is an obsessive space photographer, & some magnificent pictures from high over Scotland were re-splashed through the Beeb. In one, the Isle of Skye is depicted, with the late February snows on her peaks — “mist & mountains, a stirring landscape,” our astronaut observes. The islands Canna, Rum, Eigg, Muck, are below her; the Scottish coast to her right, from Loch Torridon down to Loch Nevis. The relief is crisp, from the acute angle: one could almost use it for a walking map. Well, it brought tears nearly to my eyes.
Some Scotsman tweets back: “I live on the island bottom left, here’s a photo I took of you last week,” showing the light streak of the International Space Station crossing the night sky.
Yesterday, the Pope’s resignation, Commander Hadfield clicked remarkable shots looking down the throat of Mount Etna, which is currently quite active. His finale for the day was the huge cyclone, swirling clockwise off the Australian coast. His captions gleam with geographical precision, & the unquenched boyish delight in his adventure. And, too, with unconcealed Canadian patriotism, as he flags an announcement from our space agency with, “Canadian know-how on its way to see what asteroids are made of.” Or, assures the launchers of the latest package for the space station that his Canadarm is ready-aye-ready to catch it in space. But there are friendly words, too, for a Japanese robot.
My uncle Bob (H. Robert Warren) was something to the Canadian space programme, & on secondment to the British, from their earliest days; his name is written in the annals of our Alouette, & with our teams to Houston. Octogenarian now, enfeebled by age, he was once the dreaming child of a very modest farm cottage in Clarkson, Ontario — inspired by his elder brother who went off to fly Spitfires in the last World War. How he longed to fly, himself. He was just too young to follow. But he never looked down, climbing height to height, from aero to astro. In old photos, still, he is my papa’s earnest & adoring little brother; & through the huge family he begatted in his turn, I have long since taken our space effort personally. Whatever tiny part of my taxes go to support that effort, I pay with uncontained enthusiasm. (It is only about 86 percent of current Dominion expenditures that I find morally abhorent; down a couple of points from the previous administration.)
For astronaut breakfast this morning, in the space station, how perfectly Lenten: “Granola with dried blueberries, dehydrated vegetable quiche, instant pineapple juice, instant black coffee. Suit you too?” (There is nothing so Canadian as a blueberry, even dried.) In a video link with His Excellency, our Governor-General, Cmdr Hadfield shows Canadian schoolchildren how to wash their hands in zero gravity.
There are moments like these when all the stars align, & I feel as if I were at home in our world of high technology. And these are the moments when the technology falls away, & I glimpse the entranced faces of the schoolchildren, & the snow on the ancient mountains, & the serenity of the heavens.
“Oh I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,” my uncle recited at my father’s funeral, “& danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings. …”
And while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space —
Put out my hand & touched the face of God.
Lest there be any misunderstanding, from the item above, let me be clear that I was not named for Saint David of Wales, nor directly for the Psalmist, but for King David of Scotland, born as I was in the 800th anniversary of his death.
“And these are the moments when the technology falls away, & I glimpse the entranced faces of the schoolchildren, & the snow on the ancient mountains, & the serenity of the heavens.”
Doggone David. This is a profound observation — I wish our politicians and our fellow citizens would evidence such realization. This is similar to what I felt after many weeks on the Pacific in a small boat, Panama to Tahiti. My inner self was in fine condition. I felt that our vessel was in fact passing into the halls of heaven; the mists ahead, the clouds gathering, the sea birds — perfect, athletic creatures, birds who only visit land briefly to mate — around us, diving and darting. Whales swam toward us on occasion, curious as to what we were. And what are we?
We are, in this case, all of us, temporary guests of the Pacific Ocean and its creator. During the voyage, I expected to encounter Poseidon or his queen Amphitrite at any minute, for they, too, are God’s creation. I felt our mast with its horizontal spreader was a cross, pointing toward heaven, we crew huddling below. Any minute it seemed the gates of heaven would open to gather us up; in fact, each day they did. This was my glimpse of the entry hall and the serenity of the heavens. So thanks for acknowledging what is not so obvious in our day-to-day lives, or at least what is not commonly admitted.
Sure glad we avoided that potential misunderstanding, Mr Speaker. My “D” is for David too, but I was named after my Dad, who I am pretty sure was named after a certain sling-shot artist who lasted longer than the oddsmakers thought he would.
Semper Fidelis.
My dad too (J.H. Meek), was involved in the Alouette space program. I remember sometime after the launch, they had a family day, and we all went to the Shirley’s Bay facilities DRB. The engineering model of Alouette was there, and also equipment that received Alouette’s signal. On computers (called calculators today!) one of the operators calculated the amount of food I would eat throughout my life time, and gave me a paper printout of the amount — just the thing a kid would be interested in.
I was just 10 years old and the place made an impression on me. I went back to that place in the 1990s for a small ceremony — My Mom receiving a plaque for My Dad, as he had already passed away. Being there again was like stepping back in time — a time that still existed. Canada was a much better place back then.
David, my father, Isaac Lubbock, (known to some as “Engineer Lubbock”) was engaged in liquid oxygen rocketry on behalf of the British Government for a good many years before the events you celebrate. I seem to remember his first remarks to me on the subject came in late 1939 or 1940.
He wasn’t highly romantic on the subject — he was, after all, more concerned with such matters as specific impulse or the autocatalytic decomposition of nasty substances such as hydrazine and 100% hydrogen peroxide. Not much romance there over the family dinner table.
But I do recall when I was quite small that he came into my bedroom in a state of great excitement after his first meeting with Wing Commander Frank Whittle in 1937 or so. “They’re going to put engines on the Queen Mary and fly her though the skies!” he told me.
Perhaps that day he and Whittle had enjoyed one or two toasts to their future successes. For the most part, though, he lived up to his unromantic moniker of Chief Engineer Lubbock and spent much of his time burning off his very noisy creations on the testing grounds of British Thompson Houston near Rugby. At that time he led what later came to be known as a “Skunk Works” for the Asiatic Petroleum Company. Not much romance there, but that’s a whole other story.