The Internet of Animals: discovering the collective intelligence of life on Earth by Martin Wikelski

Author:Martin Wikelski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: NAT001000, SCI070060, TEC010000, SCI070000, SCI088000, SCI076000, SCI102000, NAT011000, NAT046000, NAT045000, SCI043000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2024-04-30T00:00:00+00:00

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Fox by the ISS launchpad

14 Finally, We Have Liftoff

ON OUR NEXT VISIT TO BAIKONUR, we were part of the official delegation from the German space agency participating in the launch of a Soyuz 2-1A rocket on February 13, 2018. There were no seats on the regular flights to Baikonur, so from Moscow we had to rent our own small plane and do it the VIP way. This time, we were not treated like part of the team of local engineers, but like foreigners who needed to be checked and watched carefully—or maybe the airport staff just wanted to show off and prove to everyone how efficient they were.

Instead of being put up in accommodations at the Baikonur space village, we were bused to a typical Soviet-era “space hotel.” It was a place that got completely booked when cosmonaut launches happened, but on this occasion we were the only visitors—our group of sixteen in a hotel built to accommodate four hundred guests. It felt like we were in a horror movie. Only one short hallway was heated and lit. The rest of the hotel was dark and cold, and the staff was there only for us.

We had a couple of days before the launch and we filled our time seeing the tourist sights in Baikonur: going to the space museum, visiting the local market, checking out the street where all the cosmonauts since Gagarin had planted a tree, which was actually a very impressive collection of names and trees of different sizes going back fifty years. This visit was particularly moving for two of our space engineers who had grown up in former East Germany. They had been part of the Eastern Bloc of the Soviet Union at the time, and some of the early East German cosmonauts had also planted trees here. It was a weird reminder how entrenched political divides can be, yet how quickly things that seem to be set in stone can change.

While we were in the space museum, we came upon a reference to the U.S. moon landing in 1969. Our Russian counterpart, one of the head engineers on our project, asked how much of the story was true. Did the U.S. astronauts really land on the moon? Were parts of the story fabricated or was it all a lie? He openly questioned some technical aspects he found unbelievable. This got us thinking about how the moon landing had been reported in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, but also wondering whether we in the West should have asked more questions at the time.

Finally, the decisive morning arrived. We got up at four in the morning to watch the rocket being moved out of the hangar along the tracks that led to the launchpad. Communication was a little poor at this point and we didn’t understand which launchpad was going to be used. But it was impressive to see everybody tuned in to getting the rocket moving slowly in the right direction—whatever direction that was.

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