Remembering
Ancient Memorials for Modern Space Explorers, SpaceRef
“A week prior to my departure I got a call from June Scobee Rogers, the widow of Challenger’s commander Dick Scobee. She was thrilled with what we were doing and asked if we’d like to place a few mementos in the inukshuk. She then described what she was sending. A day or so later a package arrived. As I opened it I told my wife, with a bit of a tear in my eye, “this is history”. I had been sent one of the few items Dick Scobee had left in his briefcase when he took off for his last mission: a business card and a mission lapel pin. I am certain that his family has so little in the way of such items. As such I was really honored that the family had chosen this inukshuk we planned to build on Devon Island, as the place where such precious items would rest.”
Larger image
Scott Parazynski: Still on Cloud 10 (on the summit of Mt. Everest), SpaceRef
“I tied off a pair of flags I’d made to honor astronauts and cosmonauts who had perished in the line of duty (Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia, Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11), as I could think of no finer place on Earth to hang them. In the coming days, weeks, months and years, like their Tibetan prayer flag counterparts, they will weather under the wind, sun and snow, and slowly lift back up into the heavens.”
Arctic Memorials and Starship Yearnings, SpaceRef
“Given the sheer mass of the structure, and the slow manner with which things change here, this inukshuk may well be standing 500 years from now. That should be long enough. Maybe someone serving on a starship will think to visit it.”
Columbia: Thinking Back – Looking Ahead, Excerpt from “New Moon Rising”, by Frank Sietzen, Jr. and Keith Cowing
“At the end of the event, Rona Ramon, Ilan’s widow, spoke last. Steeling her emotions with grace and clarity, she spoke elegantly and briefly. She thanked all for coming. And then she talked of her husband, and the flight of the lost shuttle. “Our mission in space is not over” she told the hushed audience. “He was the first Israeli in space — that means there will be more.”
I always re-read these pieces when you publish them each year.
A beautiful tribute Keith, and a timely reminder that we always remember and honour those who paid the ultimate price.
Yes, a great post. Something that should be considered when we return to the Moon is a memorial to all the space travellers who died in the quest to take humanity beyond Earth. I know that the Apollo 11 mission honored those that died before it, but I am thinking of something more substantial that will last a billion years.
Agree. The Apollo 15 crew placed a memorial but it offered no specific words to account for any beyond those named on the plaque. Would it not be nice, once emplaced, to have a continuous video feed available back to Earth?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
A billion years is a very long time. I’m fairly comfortable with Keith’s 500-year estimate for a monument on Devon Island, but a billion years? Even on the Moon? Actually, even orbiting in deep space? Maybe we should just try for “ten thousand years.”
Let’s compromise and say a million years ? But that is an interesting question, just how long would cravings in lunar rocks last before micrometeorites would wipe them out.
I guess the “ten thousand years” part was a joke that didn’t work. It’s an expression in Chinese which, as I understand it, is a figure of speech for something like “a very long time” or “almost forever.” (Although I don’t speak Chinese, so I may be a little off on that.)
Anyway, the closest number I could find on durability of surfaces on the Moon is from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The measured micrometeorite impact rate was higher than previously estimated and a press release said the Apollo astronauts’ footprints would be eroded away in tens of thousands of years. The size frequency distribution of impactors is a strong power law, so larger and/or deeper markings would last significantly longer. You could also play tricks with having the inscription inside some sort of structure. And craving in rock or inscribing in metal would be more resistant than footprints in the regolith. Between those things, you might be able to get a million years out of large letters (perhaps inch tall or, I think, 72 point) and under some shelter.
Actually when I used the term billion years I was thinking about the classic Robert Silverberg novel, “Across a Billion Years” about archeology in space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
If micrometeorites are impacting the Moon at that rate they will also wear down spacecraft in open space at a similar rate. You wonder what will be left of Voyager 1 in 40,000 years when is passes near Gilese 445. Yes, it is amazing just how fast human artifacts disappear even in space, and shows how hard it will be to find evidence of earlier advanced civilizations on Earth let alone the galaxy as the article below discusses.
https://www.airspacemag.com…
“In a new paper, Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Adam Frank from the University of Rochester ask a provocative question: Could there have been an industrial civilization on Earth millions of years ago? And if so, what evidence of it would we be able to find today?”
The long gap between the formation of the Earth, with life emerging fairly quickly it seems, and the Cambrian explosion of complex life a mere 550 million years ago, has always interested me in terms of the impact it would have on the Drake Equation. If it takes billions of years of planetary stability for complex life to form on the surface of a planet it will be very, very rare. But is it doesn’t take that long for complex life to emerge where was it during the first 4 billion years of Earth?
Returning to the topic of this thread, maybe when humans have a more advanced lunar industrial infrastructure we could think about building some really huge structure on the Moon, like Cheop’s Pyramid, not only as a memorial to those who have died pioneering space, but to also show we were here…
A book by Jack McDevitt posits a lovely sculpture on Iapetus, placed by an unknown star-traveling race and at an unknown time. It’s a haunting image, independent of race, marking the respect felt for brave and lost souls.
Me too.
The Explorers
Souls departing Earthbound life
Rise to heaven’s plane
Soldier, sailor, priest, or king
The destiny’s the same
But in an even higher realm
With stars always in view
Meet those lost in exploration
Remembering how they flew
Komarov toasts to Grissom
And Resnik talks with Clark
Ramon and Chalwa share a tale
As they look beyond the dark
Adams shares his glory days
With Husband and McNair
And always they watch
And urge us on
To rise above the air.
Honor Mother Earth, they say,
But reach out to the stars
God gave us the vision
To cross the celestial bar
We gave our lives
(we don’t regret)
To push back the frontier
Remember us by pressing on
To hopes above your fears
Patseyev, Onizuka
Anderson and Brown
Salute each new endeavor
That lifts us from the ground
To every new thrust into space
They raise their glasses high
And remind us we were always meant
To reach beyond the sky.
– Matt Bille, space historian, 2014
I especially admired the Challenger Inukshuk that you helped build, Keith. The design motif could have gone in any one of many directions, including a sort of techno-modern.
But the Inukshuk connected our immutable yearning to explore with steadfast respect for the land and native peoples. Perfect.