The Orbital Perspective by Astronaut Ron Garan

Author:Astronaut Ron Garan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2015-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

PART III

LOOKING FORWARD

CHAPTER SEVEN

Camp Hope

On a late starlit evening in September 2010, NASA psychologist Al Holland and his colleagues, exhausted and lost in their thoughts, were traveling in a van along dirt and gravel roads through the high-elevation Atacama Desert en route to the Chilean town of Copiapó. The group had just left the feverish activity of the dusty Campo Esperanza (Camp Hope), where hundreds of workers were laboring to free thirty-three miners trapped below 2,300 feet of hard rock. Holland had the hectic image of Campo Esperanza still fresh in his mind. The scene reminded him of something out of the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind—a little valley sheltering huge lights that pointed at a single spot, with activity going on around the clock. That day, like every day since Holland and his group had arrived in Chile, had been insanely busy and filled with intense emotion.

As the van picked its way along the dirt roads, someone in the group noticed a couple of planets visible in the night sky and suggested they stop to take a look. As Holland and his colleagues piled out of the van and into the driest desert on Earth (also known as “the window to the universe,” for its clear night skies), the contrast between the feverish intensity of Camp Hope and the grandeur of the new scene unfolding before them was palpable. “The Milky Way was just painted over the top of low black hills at night,” Holland said. “It stretched in a great arc from a set of silhouetted hills behind us all the way across the sky to the hills in front of us. It was incredibly cool and quiet, dead quiet. This has been happening for millennia. For billions of years you’ve had this same coolness.”

Compared to that cool, ageless, eternal, unchanging process, the fervent human activity in the nearby valley seemed like a flash in the pan. “It’s like all the humans are focused on this tiny spot with such intensity, and in the big scheme of things [the mine] almost doesn’t exist.” In that moment, Holland stood in the continuum between the worm’s eye view and the orbital perspective.

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