The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [38]
The rocket rose, and there was a collective gasp, a most naive, amazed Ahh, inarticulate and primordial, as all of us for a moment forgot ourselves – our education, manners and sense of irony – to follow the fine white javelin on its ascent through the southern skies.
There was light, too: the richest orange of the bomb maker’s palette. The rocket became a giant burning bulb in the firmament, letting us see as if by daylight the beach, the town of Kourou, the jungle, the space centre’s buildings and the faces of our stunned fellow spectators.
The launch seemed capable of upholding any number of symbolic readings. Here was a tube carrying an Asian television satellite into orbit, but it was also, depending on one’s inclinations (and there was little in the scene to prevent such thoughts), a spirit, Yahweh, the Holy Trinity, or a reincarnation of Mawari, the omnipotent creator of the Waiwai universe. The scene brought to mind the moments of smoke and fire which the Old Testament prophets had invoked to make their audiences shudder before the majesty of their lord. And yet this modern impression of divinity was being generated by the most secular and pagan of machines. Science had taught us to upstage the gods.
The launcher pierced through a layer of clouds and disappeared, leaving only an untraceable roar which reverberated across the heavens, the earth and the jungle. Then, through a gap in the clouds, it promptly reappeared, higher up than any plane could fly and reduced to a smudge of flame. The satellite I had been in a room with just a few days before was already reaching the upper atmosphere. The rocket boosters had been jettisoned somewhere in between and were on their way down, halfway to Africa by now, swaying from parachutes.
An odd quiet settled over us again. A nature-made wind could be heard through the trees, then the call of a monkey. My mouth was dry. I realised that my left hand was hanging in mid-air, still fixed in the same position it had been in when the commotion began. Nearby, under a tent in which a few rows of chairs had been set up, two people were speaking quietly in French. A young woman with shoulder-length hair and an unaffected sort of beauty was explaining to a friend how the satellite would reach its final orbit. She had on a white cotton skirt adorned with small bluebells, and she was using one of her knees to represent the earth and a long, slender finger to trace the path of the satellite. She was keen to make clear to her companion that the launcher would not, as might have been presumed, deliver the satellite all the way to its destination; instead, its job was to lift it 250 kilometres into the atmosphere, to what was known as the point of injection, from where the satellite would require an additional ten days to travel, by means of its own motors, to its orbiting location, thirty-six thousand kilometres above Japan. It would need to complete a number of lower orbits in a curious elliptical shape (sketched across her skirt) before it achieved sufficient force to describe a perfect circle (around her left knee) – an intricate piece of ballistic science I was unable to follow to its conclusion, for the tensions of the scene grew distracting enough to force me to walk out further into the night.
Command of the rocket now passed from the engineers in Kourou to a series of ground tracking stations which ringed the earth, unbeknownst to the inhabitants of their host countries. The first of these was located in the middle of the Atlantic, on Ascension Island, where a small building was manned by a solitary technician brought over from