The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [33]
4.
However, once inside the heavily fortified gates of the space centre itself, the situation was transformed. Immaculate buildings were dedicated to the assembly of satellites, the preparation of Ariane boosters and the storage of propellants. These were scattered across hectares of marsh and jungle, generating bewildering contrasts for visitors who might walk out of a rocket-nozzle-actuator building and a moment later find themselves in a section of rain forest sheltering round-eared bats and white-eyed parakeets, before arriving at a propulsion facility whose corridors were lined with Evian dispensers.
Early on our first morning in the country, we were driven to a hangar not much smaller than Reims cathedral where we caught our first glimpse of the satellite, resting on a central platform, bathed in a powerful white light, being ministered to by a congregation of engineers in gowns, hairnets and slippers. They were filling the satellite’s tanks, charging its batteries and testing its transponders. Given the cost of carrying matter into space, it was surprisingly modest in size, a box measuring just four metres high by two wide, flanked by a pair of fourteen-metre long solar panels topped by a reflecting dish. Its inner works consisted of an electric motor, some thrusters to help counteract the effects of solar wind and twelve 130-watt broadcast channels with which to beam down an electronic footprint of WOWOW TV’s programming.
To be allowed into the satellite’s presence, we were requested to undertake purification rituals akin to those required for admittance to an operating theatre, for the machine was a curious synthesis of robustness and hypersensitivity. At the speed it would soon be travelling – 3.07 kilometres per second – a stray human hair inside one of its transponders could create a disastrous force field of electromagnetic energy or a single oily fingerprint could fissure its solar panels. The satellite was like a frontline soldier who could be reduced to tears by reading a children’s book, though in fairness, its vulnerability obtained only under the eccentric conditions of outer space, where powerful ultraviolet rays and clusters of oxygen atoms were capable of exploiting any weakness in an electrical system, and where extreme variations in temperature, from 200 degrees centigrade in the sun to minus 200 in the earth’s shadow, could crack any part of the machine which had not been immaculately cleaned and wrapped in a protective carapace of gold-tinted polyimide film.
Raised up on its dais – its surfaces seeming to emit a pinky-red glow, its compartments opened to reveal dense wiring, the whole assembled out of such unfamiliar components as pyromellitic acid – the satellite looked like one of the most unnatural objects imaginable. Yet in truth it contained nothing which had not been present on the earth in the earliest days of creation, nor anything which had not (in its basic form, at least) originally been lodged in the chemical structures of the seas and mountains. It was the cogitations of the human mind which had cooked and recombined the planet’s raw materials into this most unlikely offering to the heavens.
5.
The sight of different groups of hairnetted engineers helping to prepare the satellite suggested what restraint, what effacement of the individual ego, a life in science now entailed. There were no opportunities for individual glory here, no prospect of biographies or street names to be remembered by. This was a collective project or which no one person, not even any single commercial or academic organisation, could take the commanding credit.
Gone were the days of geniuses in their observatories and workshops, single-handedly rerouting scientific history. We had entered the sober era of the collaborative laboratory, where astrophysicists and aeronautical engineers banded themselves together