What is Mark’s shuttle worth?

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 28 APRIL 2002

WERE YOU EXCITED about Mark Shuttleworth going to space? Were you? Really? Good for you. Hold on to that inner child. Dandle it on your knee. Kiss it better when it cries. As for me, I did not much care that Mark Shuttleworth went to space. I kind of lost interest in him when he moved to London.

For all the genuine enthusiasm I could work up on Thursday morning, he was just some rich guy buying a ticket on a really expensive flight. The biggest novelty about it was that the flight lasted longer than most, and the rich guy didn’t fly first class. He didn’t even fly economy class. He was packed away into an overhead baggage compartment; the kind of overhead baggage compartment where the air hostesses don’t even come around and sell you a packet of peanuts. Mark Shuttleworth has just become the world’s most uncomfortable paying passenger – except for people flying Kulula.com, of course. But it was preferable to flying Kulula.com. Whatever other drawbacks the Soyuz TM-34 might have, at least it left on time.

My attitude towards the project was sceptical from the beginning. Frankly, I just didn’t think it was a good deal. You would have to pay me $20 million to get me to squeeze into some clanking 1960s Russian tin-can along with two odd-smelling continentals and trust myself to the technology of a nation that can’t even get its women to match their shoes to their hairnets while they queue to buy half a loaf of bread; all in order to spend several days urinating into a length of second-hand rubber tubing and saying things like: “Gee, look at that view” and “Say, Yuri, wasn’t that my toothbrush you just used?”

But I wanted to be excited, I really did. I had watched Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica when I was young, and I was a dedicated fan of the first three Star Wars movies (it was a defining moment in the life of any young man of my generation when he had to sit down and decide who he would grow up to be: Luke Skywalker or Han Solo. Or Princess Leia, I suppose). Plus, the newspapers were getting so worked up about the launch I figured it had to be special. I haven’t seen the daily press this serious about a news story since the first series of Big Brother.

In the days before the launch, I tuned in to the First African in Space channel (DStv, channel 38). I would not say it drove the adrenalin levels up. It seemed to consist principally of replays of Derek Watts’ Carte Blanche interview, followed by links with NASA TV. NASA TV is a thrill-a-minute educational service offering ways to make science fun. On the night before take-off (or T-1, as they say at NASA) the insomniac space enthusiast could tune in to a youth programme titled Data Analysis and Measurement – Having a Solar Blast!

I hoped that Mark had something more entertaining to watch on his last night on Earth. A history of light industry in the Ukraine, perhaps, or a Russian cooking programme. (“You in ze decadent vest haff ze Naked Chef. Ve haff ze Chef Who Couldn’t Afford a Furry Hat and New Pair of Mittens.”)

There was a moment, the day before, when I began to be stirred by the whole enterprise. The heart could not fail to respond to the footage of the rocket being brought from its hangar to the launch pad. It was slow and solemn, heavy with the weight of a great undertaking. Soyuz was sleek and strong and sexual, an enormous penis with nowhere to go but up. We watched the vast fuel tanks propping up the payload. “There is always the danger of premature ignition,” cautioned the commentator. How true that is.

I began to warm to the occasion. It seemed noble and brave, and Mark Shuttleworth even managed to look a little dashing in his baggy blue cosmonaut overalls. Then again, anything that would get him out of those awful shorts and sandals is heartily to be applauded. The rocket itself was strangely moving. The craft and its supportive housing seemed almost nostalgic – all grey metal and mechanical locks and hand-stencilled flags over rivets and joins. It looked archaic, poignantly low-tech in a digital age. This was the same launch pad from which Yuri Gagarin rode a Vostok rocket into space half a century ago, and you would expect to find his car still parked out back.

But by Thursday morning my enthusiasm had waned. That’s what bad TV coverage will do for you. The viewing audience was treated to an interminable static view from the cosmodrome. The rocket huddled in the lower left-hand corner of the screen while behind it, dwarfing it, the steppes of Kazakhstan stretched far away. Derek Watts described Kazakhstan as looking something like the Karoo, but from the empty grey awfulness of the view it more closely resembled the gigantic tongue of a man who drank too much vodka and smoked too many Pravda Filters last night.

The rocket was tiny against the numb blankness of the land. It looked small and not terribly grand; like something that would have difficulty reaching Vladivostok, let alone outer space and back. There was no countdown when it went. There was a wisp of smoke, a surge of flame, the rocket lifted and hovered a moment, as though the hand pulling the strings was not quite strong enough, then suddenly it vanished upward like a slim arrow aimed at the sky. Minutes later the fire of its afterburners looked from below like a winter sun glimpsed through high mist.

And then it was over.

I am glad Mark Shuttleworth is safe, and I hope he returns that way, but there my involvement ends. Those Russkis just don’t know how to put on a show. Perhaps that’s why they lost.