The Future and The Future
May 3rd, 2009
This is about visiting the Indian Deep Space Network this week. The huge white dishes follow the moon every day, East to West. While we were there, a movie was streaming down, live, of the surface of the moon. It took me a while to realise that it was live. I didn’t know what to think of it, how to watch it, take it in. It was on a computer screen, a gradual sweep of the Fore, Aft and Nadir cameras. Very spectacular encounters can happen in the world, but still your brain, my brain, may only think of them as ordinary and incidental.
Everything is brand new and its all working fantastically. The engineers are incredible and completely understated in describing what they have done there, created cutting edge technology for India, built it from scratch, with breathtaking speed. They are generous with their time and explanations, hospitable and friendly. Just a handful of men, speaking Telegu, liking their work.
I want to say something that strikes me about this visit, because the last thirty two metre dish I visited was in Goonhilly in Cornwall, UK. There the engineers were fighting to stop the demolition of the sixty four dishes on the site. In 1962, the first dish was built as a ground station for Telstar and it received the first live transatlantic message. It had been the brand new future then. I wanted to say something about this, but luckily nobody was listening to my foreigner voice. I didn’t really want to say it as a dire prediction, just that I was struck by the timescales of the future and this as a renewal of energy. I suppose I was trying to make a connection where there wasn’t one. I suppose I thought these engineers might be interested in the stories of the retired and redundant engineers in Cornwall, but in the future, histories don’t repeat. I felt really proud of them and pleased that they were making everything themselves and keeping a disconnect with the past. Glad that nobody listened to me, because, what was I thinking, I find it impossible to think about the future. I’m thinking of a time when these men have stories to tell of what it was like in the beginning and why the dishes need to be preserved. I suppose, its not that I’m seeing the future of the Deep Space Network in the Goonhilly Satellite Station, its that I’m seeing the past of the Goonhilly engineers in the wonderful people I met last week at ISTRAC.
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