Swing sets and missiles

The guy on the radio was scary.

“Attention homeowners! Important! Secure all outdoor furniture! Remember: a hurricane can turn a swing set into a missile!”

Turn a swing set into a missile? Hey, if it’s 1961, and you’re four years old, and you live near Melbourne, FL, and your dad works at Cape Canaveral… what could possibly be cooler than that?

So, every morning during hurricane season, my preschooler self would scamper across the terrazzo floor to the sliding glass doors that opened onto our flat, sandy backyard. Eager with anticipation, I’d open the blinds to check—but darn, every time, my swing set would still be a swing set, not the sleek rocketship I’d imagined a sudden storm might somehow have transformed it into overnight.

I got hooked on the idea of space exploration at an early age. So, as you can imagine, the recent hoopla over the 50th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s launching of Sputnik gives reason for some reflection.

(Cue “Telstar,” by the Ventures...)

Space offered the hopes that new frontiers have always offered—the possibility of starting something completely new, of escaping decaying ways of life. But space offered even more outrageous hopes. In the popular media, television series like “Star Trek” and the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” suggested that humanity might survive its internal squabbles and move out into the universe together. In 1968, the Christmas Eve broadcast from Apollo 8, with its iconic homeward-looking photographs of earth, gave us a new way of looking at the planet and at ourselves. In many people, those images fed a dream of a new kind of world—not on some other planet, but on this one—a world whose inhabitants had learned to look beyond their own borders, and to think of the earth as one unified whole.

Of course, other folks looked to the heavens and saw other opportunities. From the beginnings of the space program, military planners have longed to establish control of the highest “high ground” there is. In 1983, Ronald Reagan announced the “Strategic Defense Initiative”—an effort immediately labeled “Star Wars” by just about everyone—and the U.S. Space Command was created in 1985.

And that brings me to the guy I wanted to tell you about: Bruce Gagnon.

In 1992, Bruce, who at the time was the coordinator of the Florida Coalition for Peace & Justice, hooked up with other organizations and individuals concerned about the militarization of space to found the “Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space.” (Its website, space4peace.org, has a rich supply of information, resources and links.) Since then, Bruce has quietly and systematically built up a network of activists in several countries around the world. Each year, his organization sponsors “Keep Space for Peace Week,” which this year stretched from October 4 through 13, and included events not only in the United States but also in Kenya, India, Australia and Europe. (More information, including a full listing of this year’s events, can be found at space4peace.org/actions/ksfpw07.htm ).

The “Star Wars” issue has become particularly hot again in Europe. As you may be aware, the Bush Regime has proposed new radar installations in the Czech Republic and Poland as part of a missile defense system, ostensibly to defend against a potential ballistic missile attack from Iran. This proposal has met with firm opposition from Russia, which sees the effort as an indirect if not direct threat, and raised the specter of a possible return to the arms races of the Cold War.

Some might wonder about how “green” a space program can be. It takes a lot of energy to push stuff out of our gravity well—and the orbital space around our planet is becoming crowded with debris. But there’s no better place from which to monitor the planet’s interconnected ecology on a large scale, and verify compliance with environmental and disarmament agreements. Space exploration still holds the hope of fostering cooperation among nations, and attempts to monopolize space for the benefit of any one country over the rest of humanity must be resisted.

(Back on my Florida swing set, arcing high as I could, I watched the moon rise. If I let go at the right moment, sailing through the air, reaching up just so, I could almost touch it.)