Blue Chamber

Like many little boys in the 80's I dreamed of being an astronaut. Star Wars fever no doubt played a huge part in this (Fun fact: my brothers and I had one or more of every SW toy and figure that Kenner released - apart from one very rare bounty hunter, I think...) but television back in those days was very much about promoting futurism; I would sit in front of Tomorrow's World wide eyed with wonder: Newsround, the popular BBC news programme aimed at children, and Blue Peter (back when it still listened to children's opinions) both regularly ran features on real life astronauts and shuttle launches. As a consequence, 'NASA' was a word more holy to me than 'Jesus', as I'm sure my Sunday school teachers learned the hard way, listening to me rabbit on about space battles and lightsabers and how many moons jupiter and saturn possessed and how many light years it took to get to the nearest star after Sol...

I'm happy to report that I grew out of those silly fantasies aged 10...when I became an atheist (ba-doom-ching!).

I even got to stay up late one fabulous night to watch (on TV) the Space shuttle launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. At one point I think I could actually describe, in detail, the precise manoeuvres each orbiter would make during take-off and re-entry, the fearsome extremes of temperature they would encounter and the precise angles of descent that meant the difference between a safe return and a multi-million dollar fireball. I knew the names of each orbiter as well as I knew my own: Columbia, Discovery, Enterprise (yes, named after that one), Atlantis...and Challenger:



Everything was different after Challenger. The explosion, which I remember today as clearly as if it were yesterday, wasn't just the horrible death of a beautiful ship and her intrepid crew, it was the death knell of that whole crazy optimism we all felt about space, the future and our expanding human frontier. A sobering realisation that the party wasn’t just over, maybe it had never existed in the first place. The Western World was never to be the same again, and my dreams took one giant step...backwards, confronted with the brutal reality of a space programme sold as the grandest of human achievements, but sadly, desperately, under-funded and managed, it seems, by a lesser species of monkey than the ones they used to test in their simulators. The collapse of the USSR brought us down the rest of the way.

NASA still exists today, of course, still focused on the enormous universe beyond our planetary boundaries (Man on Mars next - woohoo!). But now there are a plethora of other organisations out there, eager to stretch out their hands and take us out into our solar back yard. We even have the ISS, a gigantic space-station in orbit on a grander scale than either Skylab or Salyut were.

So why the dew-eyed reminiscence? Check out this gift Suzanne brought back for me from her recent trip to the US (she knows me so well!):


Looks like a little lump of moon cheese, doesn't it? Apologies for the blurry camera-work. The DigiCam and I need to have a little chat...

It’s a block of freeze-dried mint choc chip ice-cream, of the type shuttle pilots would tuck into on their missions (and possibly throw at each other during moments of weightless boredom): Space Food!

I’ve been warned that it’s not the nicest thing I’ll ever put in my mouth (insert own joke here) but rather than take it home and give it pride of place next to the deeds to the acre of moon that I own (Yeah, if America and/or China even think of building on MY land they’ve got a shock coming!), I think I’m going to have it today for lunch. If nothing else I’ll get to pretend for those special few moments that I have finally become the thing I ached to be in my youth.

UPDATE: Well, I ate it. While recognisably my favourite ice-cream flavour it had a very weird texture, requiring lots of saliva to turn it into anything approaching real ice-cream. Still, I enjoyed every bite. Go, Space Food! [/ALIGN]