There can be few people on earth unaffected by the events of Sept. 11 and their terrible aftermath. But three men, two Russians and an American, have remained above all the horrors that the events unleashed, simply because they were not on earth when the outrages happened. They are the crewmembers of the International Space Station who are orbiting for four months 250 miles above the earth.
A frequently used plot of science fiction novels has involved something very like their experience — astronauts who travel far into deep space and return to a world that has been fatally changed, if it continues to exist at all. It is not just fiction. We know of the spacecraft crew who returned from their space odyssey to discover that the country they had taken off from - the Soviet Union — was no longer in existence.
Last week, while American ordnance was raining down on Kabul and the Taleban were hanging the former Mujahedeen commander, Abdul Haq, three visitors arrived at the ISS, two Russian cosmonauts and a French woman. They came in a Soyuz rocket for a ten-day stay. They brought with them a further Soyuz craft which would be used as an escape pod in the event of a disaster aboard the ISS. While Israeli troops shot down their latest 40 Palestinian victims, the visiting Soyuz craft edged gently toward its docking bay on the ISS, secured itself to the mother ship and the airtight hatches between them were opened. While the anthrax campaign against US targets reached a new height of horror, the visitors scrambled through the hatchway to be greeted warmly by the ISS crew. Below them the earth turned on its axis in space. Did they wonder to themselves or did they perhaps compare to each other, the ordered, meticulously structured peace of their own little world with the terrible chaos that had broken out back home?
It is hard at this moment to focus on the ISS and the concerns of those five spacemen and the hundreds of watching technicians back at ground control, but perhaps amid all the violence and injustice we are currently witnessing, we should think about them and what the ISS represents. Even though it looks like an American operation, the space station is an international venture. It represents many countries of the world, working together in harmony, to confront and conquer the immense physical and technical challenges of space exploration. What is learned from the ISS will inform the creation of bases on the moon and probably within 30 years on Mars as well. At the moment it is the technology that is being perfected.
But, in time, attention must turn to the way in which men of different cultures and backgrounds will be able to work together successfully, in a hugely hostile environment. The peaceable exploration and exploitation of space will only be achieved by a world that shares a common purpose and common standards. No country will be able to do it alone. We will all have to work together.
Thus in some ways, though the crew of the ISS may have flown above the terrible events of the last six weeks, they are nurturing on board their spaceship the seeds of a future in which men can respect each other’s differences, but work together for a common good.
