Space
18 June 2016Space. Mankind still hasn’t conquered it. That’s fine. There’s still an element of danger inherent in the process, but it’s a risk acceptable to everyone who participates in each and every mission.
Mankind has been visiting space for decades now, the protocols, the terminology, all of it well-understood: the countdown, lift-off, orbits, de-orbit burn, re-entry, touchdown - all should be commonplace in the viewer and broadcaster vocabulary.
The human aspect of space is also pretty obvious; people go up, experience zero-gravity, and come back to earth with decreased muscle mass. And then there’s hope; that, one day, the schoolboy and schoolgirl watching wide-eyed could, perhaps, maybe, go up there too.
So why is space and man’s achievements there viewed so negatively or at least by adopting a blasé approach?
Commonplace. Meh. Pretty pictures of our planet.
BBC One switched from a news broadcast, a good proportion of which concentrated on Tim’s mission, to a cooking programme.
What‽
Not 15 minutes before the Soyuz capsule carrying Tim Peake was due to land, the BBC turns it off. An historic event worthy of a very real national pride, and the BBC can’t be arsed.
Yeah, sure I could have watched elsewhere, even to Auntie Beeb’s News channel. I’d naively expected the news programme to carry on for a bit and reschedule later stuff accordingly. So I switched channels.
The BBC does not get Baz’s seal of approval.
Ah well.
It got me thinking.
Where, these days, is the sense of wonder, of hope, of looking forward rather than back, of aspiration, of…
Where are we going?