The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [37]
At eight in the evening, an hour before launch, under armed guard, we were driven in the darkness to an observation site in the jungle, only three kilometres from where the boosters would be ignited. We took our places on a raised clearing with uninterrupted views onto the launchpad – and said little.
Technologically extreme situations have a habit of whetting the appetite for sentimental safety briefings, which in turn tend to reveal both the scale of the danger involved and the inadequacy of the proposed response to it. A member of the elite Brigade de Sapeurs-Pompiers de Paris – a branch office of which operated in the space centre – came forward to address our group. At this distance, a malfunctioning rocket would be upon us in under a second, the fireman declared, though this hopeless prospect did not prevent him from distributing a set of yellow gas masks and explaining that we should secure them over our heads to activate their breathing tubes, then leave them alone until, and unless, there was an emergency. Despite these instructions, a few minutes later, ever alert to the need to bring science to life, the Hong Kong television presenter removed her cameraman’s mask from its casing and, with it hanging loosely over her face, delivered a muffled soliloquy to the camera, outlining the hazards to which she was exposing herself for her audience – while her own mask remained cocooned inside a tasselled Balenciaga handbag.
A screen had been set up to provide us with a live feed from the control room. At their terminals, a group of thirty were monitoring Ariane’s vital functions. Dr Proudhon, back from the turtles, was at his desk, staring impassively at a bank of screens. In a challenge to the team’s sense of their indispensability, a second identical control centre was up and running a few kilometres further away to the east, harbouring another thirty, identically trained people, standing by to pick up operational command were the launcher to get off to a temperamental start and incinerate their colleagues.
Across the humid night, Ariane stood out on its platform, illuminated by a set of arc lamps around which clouds of tropical insects were dancing frenziedly. Deeper in the jungle, there were peccaries and spider monkeys, giant anteaters and harpy eagles, while in this unlikely outpost of air-conditioned Newtonian civilisation, something was preparing to leave the planet. All shipping and aircraft had been cleared in an arc extending to the West African coast. Ariane’s engines took their last breaths of oxygen through a thick black umbilical cord. Every remaining human had been removed from the area. It was hard not to feel some of the same sadness that might attend the departure of an ocean liner or the lowering of a coffin.
Thirty seconds before lift-off, Dr Proudhon’s voice came over the loudspeakers. The tapir seemed ready to allow the mission to proceed. The work of years was about to condense itself into an instant. Time, which in so many of our mid-afternoons flows by aimlessly and languidly, felt meaningful at last. With ten seconds left, like a prison warder releasing his charge, Dr Proudhon turned a set of keys and initiated the formal count-down. There would now be no way for matters to end peacefully. Dix, neuf, huit, sept, retrait des ombilicaux … It was peculiar to hear a sequence so indelibly associated, via cinema, with Cape Canaveral being enunciated in another language. At cinq, there was a dull sound as if a shell had gone off, and a first puff of smoke rose from the bottom of the launcher. By trois, white billows had enveloped its base, and on the cue of un, et décollage …, the rocket ripped itself off its pad in immaculate silence.
When the noise reached us a second later, we recognised it as the loudest any of us had ever heard, louder of course than thunder, jets and the explosive charges