3.
Some Thoughts on the Death of Neil Armstrong
Like many people of my
age, I was brought up with an awareness of the Apollo Space Program.
Some of my earliest memories are of my mother coming upstairs in the
middle of the night and bringing my down to the den where my parents
and I would watch, on our black and white TV, some essential
manoeuvre prior to the actual moon shot—a trial run of the lunar
lander in earth orbit, a there-and-back again trip to orbit the moon
itself. I'm told that at the age of two I could describe, in basic
terms, the workings of a Saturn V rocket, and I remember quite
clearly not only most of the lift-offs and splash downs from the
Apollo age, but also the live broadcast of Commander Armstrong's
historic first steps on another world. In fact, this is one of the
first memories to which I can fix an exact time.
These memories were
formative, as they were for many other children of my generation and
slightly older, but I do not intend here to plunge into nostalgia.
Rather, I'd like to think about the memories themselves—the
images—and the ways in which I thought about them then as opposed
to the ways in which I have since come to consider them. As a kid,
when I looked at a rocket, I saw a space ship, and when I looked at
an astronaut, I saw what I wanted to be: a person who flew in space
ships. The two were distinct entities: one was a human being, and the
other was really cool stuff. I think this is still the general
perception, but it becomes incomplete the moment we wonder where the
identity “astronaut” actually resides.
Even taking out the
rocket for the moment and just looking at the image below, taken by
Buzz Aldrin with a movie camera from the hatch of the lunar module,
the problems in fixing a location to an identity become clear. The
image shows Armstrong in his space suit, walking on the moon's
surface, into the shadow of the lander. But it would be inaccurate to
say that the figure walking on the moon exclusively Armstrong as,
without the suit providing him with oxygen and preventing him from
exploding in the vacuum, it would not be possible to walk there. That
is, the identity “astronaut” only makes sense in this case if the
suit is included in the understanding of the term. Armstrong is, to
use a term coined by Clynes and Kline and cited int he first entry of
this blog, a “self sustaining man-machine system,” or in other
words a cyborg.
Photo: Mail
Online, Sept. 7, 2012: (URL provided below*)
This is not to take away
from the achievements of any person who has participated in any space
programme. The skill, training, intelligence, and courage needed to
get to where Armstrong stands in this image were exemplary and demand
respect. Nor do I mean to make the figure seem alien to the rest of
humanity: if offered a chance to travel into space, my first and
unconditional response would hopefully be “Borg me up.” I do not
think I'd be alone in such a reaction. It is worth considering,
however, that the identities we enact do not reside exclusively in
our biological selves.
The question of the
identity “astronaut” is further complicated when we pull back a
little and realize that the actual system that made these particular
enactments possible consisted of the lunar lander itself, and two
astronaut-cyborgs, each composed of one human body and one space
suit, in neither of which this identity could be said to reside in
isolation. Orbiting above the moon's surface was the command module,
also integral to the system, piloted by yet another astronaut-cyborg,
in this case Michael Collins.
So now we have at least
three basic components to the identity in question: ship, suit, and
human being, each insufficient in itself. Yet in order to function,
the command module-Collins unit had to rely on its radio link to
mission control in Houston, and the room full of computers and
technicians that operated constantly for the duration of the mission.
Without all of these components, there would be no boot prints on the
moon. And if we broaden the context a little more, we see the makers
of the equipment itself—the scientists and technicians who designed
the ICBMs on which the Saturn V and all other launch vehicles are
based, the computer programmers, the dietary experts, and the
trainers, the teachers, and professors who taught not just the
astronauts but also everyone else who played a responsible role. In
short, we see virtually the entire social structure of the United
States. So the question arises: who, exactly, went to the moon?
The easy answer is
Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins. This is not a bad answer as far as it
goes as it has the obvious virtue of being clearly and demonstrably
true. Another possibility, though, lies in the popular usage in the
U.S., that “we” went to the Moon. From a cyborg point of view,
this position is not mere nationalism or jingoism, but is in fact
quite accurate. The space programme in the Apollo age marked a pinnacle of American national achievement, and in this sense, the
footprints in the lunar dust really are the prints of an entire
culture—a single, though often troubled, identity, of which the
three men in the capsule were simply the leading edge.
