Night Vision (excerpts) by Pippa Goldschmidt

A unexpected quality, at once refined, maverick and committed, is given to the the term polymath in the work of Pippa Goldschmidt. She has written as much about exploration of psychic space in Freud and Lacan as about the astrological and intergalactic type. In her wonderful new book Night Vision she writes about her formation as an astrophysicist, and her description and history of anti-colonial outer space exploration is a reassuringly politicised view of the physical universe, free of the usual Hollywood astro-fantasies.

Excerpts from Night Vision

[from the beginning]

The night skies of my London childhood were drowned in streetlight and when I looked upwards, all I could ever see was the Moon with its features blurred by clouds and pollution. The planets and the stars were neither more nor less than pictures in books; I learnt the constellations from small black and white photos in one of Patrick Moore’sguides to astronomy, the grain of the film still visible on the page. My children’s encyclopædia had an entry for the Universe showing an expanding balloon covered with black dots for galaxies. I had no real idea what ‘Universe’ or ‘galaxies’ meant, but I was drawn to the words themselves. The encyclopædia also told me that the Sun was actually a star and furthermore it was a radio star, and I marvelled at this apparent connection with the metal box that bristled with buttons and dials, and sat on the kitchen counter, its antenna pointing up at the kitchen ceiling. What could the words ‘radio’ and ‘star’ possibly have in common? But I loved the phrase ‘radio star’, and would repeat it to myself, perhaps because it hinted at another sort of reality, a different type of truth encoded in the words. For me, ‘radio star’ was a poem.

When I left London at the age of eighteen and moved to Leeds to study physics and astronomy, I realised that cities did not stretch endlessly to the horizon and that the night sky was not tinted orange. Here, I was taught how to look properly at this sky, to train my eyes to become dark-adapted by turning away from the surrounding buildings and car headlamps, and patiently waiting before I could make out dim stars, the merest twinkles of light.

This process of acclimatisation to the dark generally takes around half an hour, and the mini apprenticeship I underwent each cloudless evening gave me a chance to appreciate the stellar landscape. I learnt to navigate around the sky from the ladle of the Plough to the Pole star. This new-found ability revealed for me not only well-known constellations such as Orion or Cassiopeia, but also the smaller, fainter targets of my academic enquiry. Ever since, I have associated the Hyades stellar cluster with standing on the roof of Leeds University’s physics department, and getting a crick in my neck from staring at this V-shape group of stars located in the constellation of Taurus. After I learnt to find the Hyades I was allowed to look at them through the departmental telescope which separated out the small cluster into individual stars, like looking at a crowd of people and being able to identify their faces.

Using a telescope was not just about learning to see objects in the sky, it involved a whole collection of new sensory experiences such as attempting to turn the focus dial of the eyepiece with hands so cold I could barely feel the ridges on the metal. Not breathing anywhere near the lens because the resulting condensation took minutes to clear. Not getting distracted by the reflection of my own eye regarding me, the magnified eyelashes and iris superimposed on the tiny circle of sky. Swigging from flasks of strong tea and eating peanut butter sandwiches at three o’clock in the morning to try and keep up my flagging energy. Waiting for the sky to clear when the stars were blocked from view by the inevitable clouds.

The night sky soaked into my bone-cold hands and feet, and made my neck hurt from peering through the eye piece or tilting my face upwards. Night seeped into day, made my head ache with tiredness when I returned to my bedroom and tried to get to sleep. It took up residence throughout my body, a sort of ever-present darkness that balanced out the fluorescent-lit days I spent sitting in labs and lecture halls. If those days could be stressful because of the desires and the uncertainties of being a student, the night sky provided a ballast. During this time of measuring the Hyades I started a relationship with a boy, and when I had to say goodbye to him each dusk-filled afternoon in late autumn (the time of the year when the Hyades are at their zenith and easiest to observe) he would sing ‘Starry, starry night’ to me.

To view the constellations night after night is to experience a kaleidoscope of associations. In the northern constellation of Andromeda there is a faint thumb-print of light, one of a very few galaxies that can be seen by the naked eye without a telescope. In Greek mythology, the gods chain Andromeda to rocks as a punishment for the hubris of her mother Cassiopeia, before she is saved from a threatening sea monster by the heroic Perseus who then marries her. The mythical Andromeda is a passive woman, seemingly without any agency over her own life and fate, and the galaxy Andromeda is hurtling towards the Milky Way, nothing can stop the two from colliding in a few billion years. This flickering to and fro between myth and science is a reminder that the sky is not a passive backdrop to our human activities, it is a theatre and a generator of thought.

As I progressed through my degree, I learned that the Sun emitted not just visible light but also radio waves which peaked and troughed in cycles I could plot on a piece of paper and explain with a mathematical equation. ‘Radio star’ became a graph of curved lines and data points as well as a poem.

                Standing on the roof of the physics department and preparing to look at the Hyades, I would sometimes spin round and round and watch the stars rotate the opposite way. The Universe was a giant spinning top and I was at its centre. I learned that this was not true, the Universe had no centre. The boy I had fallen in love with told me he thought he might be attracted to other boys. Or not. He wasn’t sure, but he would still sing to me while he tried to decide. The Universe was expanding, everything moving further away from everything else. The gaps between the galaxies would only grow larger as time flowed from the past through our present, and on into the future.

These gaps that we see between stars and galaxies are not easily explained. In principle, an infinitely large, infinitely old Universe should be as least as bright in every single direction as the surface of the Sun and wherever you look at night-time you should see light from one of the infinite number of stars. But this is not the case because the sky appears to be dark at night; individual stars are surrounded by apparently empty space. The boy left, then he came back to me. Why were we surrounded by so much darkness? Such an apparently obvious question is problematic to answer. For my degree I wrote an essay about the many possible explanations of this paradox of the dark sky. I wrote about the genius required to identify what is uncanny about the most obvious observation anyone can make of the night. Based on other people’s more coherently expressed arguments, I wrote that this only appears to be a paradox because of our apparently reasonable assumptions, and in fact the Universe cannot be both infinitely large and old. Something has to give. According to the Big Bang theory, the Universe began in an explosion 13.7 billion years ago and has been expanding ever since; in this scenario there has not been enough time for the light from the most distant stars to reach us on Earth and that is one of the reasons for the darkness of the night sky. We will never be able to see all there is to see before it is carried away from us.

[excerpt 2 from later on]

The French space agency CNES decided to situate its space centre and launchpad at Kourou in French Guiana because that country lies on the equator, and rockets launched from there benefit from the relatively fast speed of the Earth’s rotation, meaning they can reach outer space with less fuel than those launched from other sites. There is also less likelihood of damage caused by rockets malfunctioning on launch, the subsequent debris will hit the sea or unpopulated areas on land, and the population density of French Guiana is one of the lowest in South America. And rockets do malfunction, the maiden voyage of the Ariane 5 rocket in 1996 went dramatically wrong, exploding forty seconds after its launch and showering the ground with debris. CNES has an ongoing agreement with ESA to launch the latter’s satellites from here, and it’s one of the largest and busiest launch sites in the world.

But French Guiana is not an independent country capable of making its own choices about what sort of infrastructure to build or space activities to carry out. It’s not even an autonomous or overseas territory, but rather a département of France whose inhabitants are technically French citizens. Many French Guianese are descendants of slaves forced to work on sugar plantations. France funds French Guiana, but much of this money goes to supporting the space centre and doesn’t benefit the local people. In April 2017 the space centre was occupied for three weeks by Guianese people protesting their poor quality of life, the high cost of food and lack of roads, schools and medical facilities. They drew attention to the huge contrast between the crumbling infrastructure outside the perimeter fence of CNES and the well-funded rocket launching site within it. Ten thousand people gathered outside this fence, and when a handful were invited inside to negotiate, they refused to leave and managed to delay the planned launch of an Ariane rocket for a month.

Photos of the CNES space centre at Kourou show rockets, gantries, large hangars, the flags of the twenty-five European states that contribute to ESA, the control centre, and satellite dishes pointing at the sky. Wide-field shots show an anonymous, anywhere-land, with nothing to indicate which country, or even continent, we’re looking at. Just eleven kilometres away from the rockets lies Devil’s Island, a penal colony used by the French until it was shut down in 1951, at which time prisoners who could not pay their own passage back home were stranded in French Guiana.

The spaceport in French Guiana was first established in 1964, after an earlier one in Algeria was now no longer available for use (by the French) because of that country’s successful fight for independence.

In its reliance on distant France, a country most of its citizens have never visited, French Guiana is a rehearsal for a future space colony. Kourou is 7000 kilometres from Paris, many times further than the International Space Station from the surface of Earth. French Guiana is a territory that is simultaneously situated in the colonial slave-owning past as well as the space-hopping future, a place where formerly transported prisoners walked the same streets as rocket engineers. It’s a country that’s abundantly rich in natural resources, and yet the majority of whose citizens earn less than half of the annual income of people in France itself. And if French Guiana is an Earth-bound space colony then its Devil’s Island is doubly so. Its most famous inmate Captain Alfred Dreyfus spent five years in solitary confinement, much of this time chained to his bed, after being falsely accused of treason (by antisemites) and subsequently convicted.

It’s possible to escape from the surface of our planet, simply by using enough fuel. But we have not yet worked out how to escape our past. Outer space is apparently waiting for us to visit, but is in fact already populated with the ghosts of people who had no choice about their own space on the surface of the Earth, no rights to it, who were exploited and forced to move from one place to another.

Is there a different way of doing space exploration? A way that avoids colonial capitalism? In 1964, just as the Apollo programme was getting underway, the ‘Zambian National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy’ was founded by Edward Makuka Nkoloso, whose ostensible aims to send people to the Moon and Mars were greeted by ridicule in the western media; how could anyone seriously train to be an astronaut by rolling down a hillside in an oil drum? But this low-tech training wasn’t completely different from that developed by the other, better known, space programs. The Soviets’ equipment didn’t look much more sophisticated, and yet it clearly worked, and the Americans might have had more advanced technology but they were still doing many of the essential calculations by hand.

The dissonance between the Outer Space Treaty and the military associations of Apollo and Soyuz is exposed by the very existence of the Zambian Space Academy; Nkoloso stated that while he wanted to send Zambians to Mars, he didn’t want to impose nation states on the indigenous Martians.

1964 was the same year that Zambia gained its independence from Britain (and two years after Algeria gained independence from France). Nkoloso took part in the fight for liberation against the colonial UK Government in what was then Northern Rhodesia, and perhaps that is why this afronaut training program resembles those designed for freedom fighters in the colonized countries of Africa: Angola, Mozambique, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Algeria, Kenya, and elsewhere. Perhaps that is one reason the anti-colonial ambitions of Zambian Space Academy still resonate today as the Outer Space Treaty’s ideals get chipped away by private companies planning to launch missions to mine precious metals from asteroids and the Moon.

Night Vision is available from Broken Sleep Books