The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [35]
At a loss as to how to return to the salient topic, but unwilling to conclude the conversation, the presenter asked what this mysterious propellent substance might look like. Was it a little like toothpaste? Or perhaps more like cake mix? Dr Proudhon fixed her with his grey-green eyes and, answering the query at the level of detail he felt the media deserved, embarked upon a monologue that wandered with archaeological precision through the history and byways of chemistry, disclosing along the way that the paste consisted of ammonium perchlorate (69.6 percent), aluminium (16.0 percent), HTPB polymer (12.04 percent), an epoxy curing agent (1.96 percent) and iron oxide catalyst (0.4 percent).
But Dr Proudhon was not finished with us yet, for he now revealed that the booster rockets constituted only a part, and perhaps not the most important, of the mechanics of propulsion, for the main rocket was in addition equipped with a liquid-hydrogen-and-oxygen engine to help it complete its journey into space. This masterwork of engineering, named Vulcain after the francophone-version of the Roman god of fire and iron, had been thirty years in the making and based its claim to greatness on its ability to keep two highly reactive and pressurised propellants safely separated in adjoining tanks, preventing them from combining prematurely and maintaining them at their different freezing temperatures (minus 251 degrees centigrade for hydrogen and minus 184 for oxygen) even when, just fifty centimetres away, the combustion chamber into which they were being driven by a turbo pump, at a rate of six hundred litres per second, was burning at 1,500 degrees centrigrade. There were a thousand other things about Vulcain which might interest anyone seeking more than a cursory journalistic understanding, Dr Proudhon concluded coldly, but he hoped that we might excuse him: he was due back at his home in Kourou shortly, as he and his wife planned to take their children on a late-afternoon outing to watch the newly hatched baby turtles learning to swim in the Maroni River.
The pyrotechnician appeared imperturbable in the face of his power. He had at his command more force than almost any ruler in history, more – for example – than the eighteenth-century Chinese emperor Qianlong, a paper tiger by comparison, whose armies had viciously subdued both the Uyghurs and the Mongols. But Dr Proudhon’s strength was the opposite of intemperate might, it was the disciplined and sedated authority of the scientist entrusted with the safe management of unfeasible rage. Somewhere inside this white-coated man, there must have remained vestigial urges to dominate, shout, master, blow up and attack, but how carefully such instincts had been contained, by what cautious laboratory rules his urges had been governed, how quiet modern omnipotence could be.
7.
The satellite and its launch vehicle were practical achievements no doubt, but they were also, and perhaps primarily, the products of revolutionary changes in belief systems.
Isaac Newton (whose namesake street was home to Kourou’s only travel agency) was the first to postulate the theories on which the launch itself would be based, when he speculated that if a cannonball could be fired at a tremendous speed from a great height, the top of an implausibly tall mountain, for instance, it would orbit right around the earth, for gravity would pull it downwards at the same rate at which the planet spun away from it. The Englishman’s ideas, along with a raft of other discoveries in chemistry and physics, were the fruits of a