Lughnasa Harvest Moon
“We have been cautious because we’re dealing with one of the most important milestones in the history of exploration,” said Voyager Project Scientist Ed Stone.
This morning while I waded through the raspberry canes, scratching my hands as I plucked red-purple and golden white fruit, putting them in the small basket I use for such work, Voyager 1 sailed on through interstellar space, out beyond the solar wind.
A professor from Iowa University asked reflexively if it was the equivalent of landing on the moon, maybe not he thought, but it’s still ‘Star-Trek’ stuff. No question in my mind. It’s beyond the equivalent; it triumphs. Since those same raspberry picking hands held number 2 lead pencils in the first weeks of elementary school, space has been on my mind.
In 1957 Sputnik pushed us all into the Space Age. And things moved pretty fast. The dog. Yuri Gagarin. John Glenn. Neil Armstrong’s one small step certainly a highlight, an enormous imaginative leap. A man. Up there on the Hiroshima Moon. How about that?
Enough landings that few recall the last person to set foot on the moon. Harrison Schmitt, who followed Eugene Cernan of Apollo 17 off the landing craft. Cernan, by the way, was the last to set foot off the moon. This was in 1972. All that moon walking in three brief years, 1969-1972.
Yet. 5 years later Voyager 1 and 2 launch. Now 33 years later Voyager 1 has reached a point where its messages home take 17 hours to arrive. 17 hours at the speed of light. Three times as far away as Pluto. Remember Pluto? In the cold of space, beyond the barrier where the chill of the universe presses hard enough to push back the solar wind, Voyager 1 now travels. A piece of us. Put together by hands like mine picking raspberries.
Kate’s former brother-in-law, now retired, worked as an engineer on Voyager 1. He had has career, resigned. But his work continued on, becoming in the process a signifier for persistence, for the turtle outpacing the hare. The hare quit in 1972, satisfied with space-going trucking delivering supplies and few passengers to a space station doing, what?
All hail rocket science. A tip of the raspberry bucket to the little spacecraft as it carries human will physically where the mind has gone for so long.