One small step for man… one giant leap, for mankind.
★★★
Take us away, Sulu.
★★★
Houston, we have a problem.
★★★
Most popular depictions of space exploration are of fancy, expensive-looking craft, removed and distant because of reflective face masks and literal distance. The people in the suits become aliens in a literal sense, and while once upon a time you had good odds of any given child saying they wanted to grow up to be an astronaut, now they’re more likely to say YouTuber (anecdotally, anyway, from my dad who works in K-12 schools). Astronauts have become more than just a bygone dream, though—in shows like Dr Who, books from Star Wars, and countless movies and art projects, they are actually a source of horror, a creature in a mask that looks human without the obligation to be human. Of course, they are humanized in some horror video games (Lethal Company, Among Us), so maybe it’s more about the inherent terror of the unknown that space represents—this isn’t a media analysis essay. I want to write something that maybe makes you think of space exploration as nearer at hand than Hollywood blockbuster remakes or grainy archival footage. How human the people who do space exploration are. I won’t call it a love letter, but you might not be wrong to.
If I’m going to write about how people these humans are, I first need to establish some baseline reasons why it’s easy to see them as removed from being regular people. The first and most obvious one is how few of us have or ever will wear a spacesuit. They’re expensive, there aren’t many, and it would probably be hard to transport them around. Plus, one would imagine they are somewhat personal for astronauts. I wouldn’t want people I don’t know wearing my work clothes either, even if it is just a mass-printed t-shirt, much less a highly specialized piece of equipment worth millions of dollars.
Even more obvious, few of us will ever be extraterrestrial, for even a little while. A bit shy of 700 people have been to space as of this writing—the world population being estimated at 8.2 billion. There are very good reasons for this, of course: There’s not a lot of money allocated to space flight, and rocket fuel is expensive; it’s a very specific job description and, in the words of retired NASA astronaut Tony England, “you have … to invest years in becoming enough of an expert that when the opportunities come along, you’re qualified”; only 16 countries maintain a space agency with launch capabilities; et cetera.
Side note, while looking at pictures of spacesuits (particularly the SpaceX suit used for the Polaris Dawn spacewalk, pictured below) one of my roommates made a comparison to EVE from Wall-E. Comparison below. Left: Astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams just before rocket launch, June 5, 2024.
However, these are not insurmountable hurdles to relating to people. For starters, the expertise fallacy is well known for what it does to the self (makes one’s own knowledge seem trivial) but less well known for the backhand (making the knowledge of others seem more impressive by comparison). If you really stop to think about the skills you have acquired, break down the classes you’ve taken, the jobs you’ve worked, the hobbies you’ve enjoyed, you probably know quite a bit about quite a few things. Likely not the right set of things to qualify you for entry into the special category of alien human life form, but quite a few things nevertheless.
It even affects people who actually work for NASA alongside other NASA experts! Ollie Paulus, MEng in Space Engineering and a Console Operator for the toolbox at ISS mission control in Huntsville, has expressed feeling in awe of the ISS medical consultant, whose job is to know how to give the astronauts instructions on how to perform emergency surgery should it become necessary. She expressed this by way of John Mulaney reference, to which I of course improvised this meme (right) in microsoft Paint. For her own part, Ollie knows the ins and outs of between 500 and 4000 pages of technical manual, depending on how you count them, and can index hundreds if not thousands more to find mission-critical information on the fly. A doctor and a literal rocket scientist meet at a work event—it sounds like the setup to a bad joke, but when you couple expertise with titles it can become your average Thursday.
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