At lunchtime on May 30, my family and I were sitting on the couch watching TV, still sheltering in place. But instead of zonking out in front of cartoons, this time we were all leaning forward in our seats or pacing around the room, counting down the launch of the first US launch to space in nine years.
It was an exciting yet bizarre moment that felt suspended in time, like an incongruous parenthetical aside amid the surrounding context of the escalating national and global demands for racial justice and the continuous, insistent presence of COVID-19. In those few final minutes of the countdown my mind was pulled back and forth in an anxious tug of war between the long-anticipated, future-embracing scientific triumph unfolding on the screen and glances back down at the dystopian, historically-drenched news feed on my phone. I recalled the perennial question NASA has had to address over the last half-century: How can we get behind missions to outer space when our lives are falling apart here at home?
We are big space geeks in our house. Field trips to NASA, space-themed clutter, children’s books about astronauts, model rockets, flight commander costumes - you name it. If it’s about space, we love it. As a literary scholar and humanist, my narrative fascinations have led me again and again to the stars, to the cockpits, to the moon. I teach a writing class at Stanford on The Rhetoric of Space Exploration, the seats in front of me filled with future rocket scientists, astronomers, physicists, flight doctors, filmmakers, writers, historians, and artists enamored with the great beyond - and yes, even a couple of future astronauts. Some of my students have already worked with NASA and SpaceX or belong to the Stanford Space Initiative.
In all my writing and rhetoric classes, I talk to college students about the importance of nuance. We examine issues from as many angles as we can find, looking for voices in each conversation that we might have previously missed. The students in my classroom are there because we share a deep love for space exploration and its possibilities, and we spend a lot of time excitedly discussing them. But that is also why we have to take extra care in those discussions to challenge our rose-colored fascination and look at it through less comfortable lenses.
We learn together not to be afraid that considering other angles, acknowledging other arguments, means relinquishing our own - that it’s the discovery and communication of those nuances that makes our own perspectives stronger. To be sure, we address the reality that not every perspective is legitimate or should be amplified. But we do discuss the idea that listening does not automatically mean endorsing. We are capable of, no, built for feeling competing emotions simultaneously, holding different ideas in our minds and moving between them, acknowledging a variety of experiences other than our own. While this flexibility of mind is always a worthy and essential goal, at this particular moment on Planet Earth it is a particularly exhausting challenge.
For all of us space fans, today wasn’t just history - it was epic. On the screen I watched one of the astronauts jiggle his fingers in the air for several minutes straight, wondering if it was a nervous habit or just a part of preparation, while I anxiously rocked back and forth in my comfortable seat. The images were futuristic, the Falcon 9 rocket and space suits a clear step forward in time and technology. But despite our place in this long dreamed-of future, I couldn’t not feel the presence of the past lurking nearby.
I may not have been old enough to remember watching the Challenger disaster unfold as a schoolgirl, but I was in a newsroom in Central Texas when the Columbia broke apart. We spent the next few days putting together newscasts showing the recovery of debris that spilled down on fields just a short drive away. So on this launch day I was excited, but I was also scared. Scared that my children would sit next to me and watch a disaster that would never again leave their minds.
Fortunately, this time the Crew Dragon safely lifted off into the heavens and the words I heard from my third grader were a repeated refrain of “That was so awesome!” and “I can’t believe it!” He reflected that it was the most exciting thing he had ever witnessed, and a memory he didn’t want to forget. And it was.
I was elated while watching this successful launch. It was glorious, and it was important. As I watched, I thought - as the hosts of the live NASA coverage noted often - about how far we have come since 1969 and the Apollo program. Just a couple of weeks ago my son participated in a free live online class with a black astronaut, Leland Melvin, and I thought about the man who could have been the first black astronaut and wasn’t, Ed Wright. I thought about two of my favorite astronauts, Sally Ride and Mae Jemison. Yesterday at bedtime my toddler and I watched a Storytime from Space, read by Astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor from the ISS. Yes, things have changed. But surrounding this most recent launch, in repeated images everywhere we look, we can see that they have also stayed the same.
You see, our shared experience watching the Crew Dragon lift off was inescapably intertwined with the bleak, dark, horrific storm clouds of a greater collective grief surrounding the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. He joins the devastatingly long, heartrending line of black men and women mowed down by the racism that we have not dealt with or moved forward from, only attempted to periodically ignore since Martin Luther King, Jr. was walking the streets of Selma.
The first steps on the moon in 1969 took place as the struggle for Civil Rights roiled back here on Earth. Spoken-word performer Gil Scott-Heron perhaps captured it best in his piece from 1970, “Whitey On the Moon.”
Scott-Heron’s performance had a prominent cameo in First Man, a recent biopic delving into the fraught personal story of Neil Armstrong during the Apollo missions. “Whitey on the Moon” was an apt choice for a film depicting the era, but today made clear that there is nothing “throwback” about it.
What could be more sad, more infuriating, more senseless, more unacceptable, than to know that in 2020 as we launch a new era of space exploration, we are still fighting the same battles against racism and for equality we were fighting in the first one? That our streets are still roiling with intolerance, with racist violence that destroys the futures, livelihoods, and bodies of men, women and children because of the color of their skin or their place of birth? That today, in the era of unlimited mass communication streaming through satellites orbiting the planet, our social media feeds show us still having arguments about not only how change should happen, but whether it needs to?
We are going to be back on the moon soon, and it will be glorious. We will see the first women and people of color stepping foot on the moon, breaking through the boundaries placed on their skin color and gender. God willing I will be watching that day soon with my children, celebrating our accomplishments in the cosmos, which are necessarily collective.
But right now, and then, I will also mourn. I will mourn for the children who will not grow up to be astronauts, or rocket scientists, or teachers, or pastors, or mechanics, or writers, or athletes, or doctors, or parents, or lovers, or librarians, or anything at all, because their lives will have been cut short, brutally severed by the individual and systemic racism that we have failed so far to eradicate.
So yes, let’s Launch America. Let’s keep looking up at the stars above and dream of exploring the universe. But let’s also open our eyes to what’s happening right now, here on the Earth below, in our city streets and backyards. Let’s learn about and explore the ugly, uncomfortable truths that are lying there in front of us, waiting to be acknowledged, and let’s actively find ways to ensure that all of us are safe to live lives of abandon, ambition, elation, and peace. Only then can we truly say that together, we rise.