The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [34]
Some of the technical properties of WOWOW TV’s new machine were the result of research done in the early 1980s by a team of scientists from Milan Polytechnic, who, in investigating the use of the upper reaches of the electromagnetic spectrum in communications satellites, had found a way around the interference caused by low cloud and misty rain at microwave frequencies above 10 gigahertz – slow and unheroic work that now, a quarter of a century later, ensured that Japanese viewers would be able to enjoy the uncut version of the anime film Cowboy Bebop even during the worst downpours in Japan’s rainy season.
Though there had certainly been a loss of colour and novelistic detail in the passing of the age of geniuses, there was perhaps something greater and more reassuring in our graduation to a time of collective effort, for it meant that never again would the fate of planetary exploration depend to a hazardous degree on such unpredictable variables as the mood of Johannes Kepler’s wife, Barbara, or the inclinations of his patron Emperor Rudolf II – though the German astronomer, like many of his fellow geniuses, had at least provided Kourou with a name for one of its dispiriting streets, a rectangle of waste ground bordered by a dry cleaner at one end and a burnt-out Internet café at the other, a matter in which the collated proponents of later discoveries would perhaps never be quite so obliging.
6.
Just a short drive away through the jungle, two thirty-metre-high booster rockets were undergoing their penultimate preparations. These delicately tapered structures, decorated with the flags of the European nations which had contributed to their funding, would be responsible for propelling the satellite on the first stage of its journey. They were in truth more bombs than engines, for they had no throttle and once ignited, had to be allowed to expend their full fury, whatever the circumstances, inspiring a particular respect in all those involved in their detonation.
Dr Thierry Proudhon was directing operations. He held a degree in pyrotechnics from the National School of Aeronautical Engineering in Toulouse and had been living in French Guiana with his family for three years. A finely chiselled man in his early forties, he seemed about as reasonable, impersonal and solemn as it is possible for any human to be, given the follies and convulsions to which our race appears prone. Not for him the torments of the insomniac or the agitations of the neurotic. On the day of the launch, he would be responsible for the ignition of 500 tonnes of ammonium perchlorate composite, which would burn for only 130 seconds, but would in that time succeed in firing the fifty-two-metre-high Ariane launcher 150 kilometres into the sky, generating a thrust of 1,100 tonnes and a concomitant boom which would be heard over the border in Brazil. Then, their titanic energies spent, the boosters would detach themselves from the mother ship and drop down into the Atlantic ocean, where a French naval frigate would be standing by to collect them.
Prompted by a question from the Hong Kong television presenter, but chary of the sensationalist tenor of her enquiry, Dr Proudhon paused for a moment to consider what might ‘go wrong’, responding with all the austerity of a chemistry teacher reviewing the risks of the Bunsen burner before an assembly of excitable pupils. He explained that if the propellant paste were incorrectly mixed in such a way that