NASA is trying one of its oldest tricks today, combining high-tech gadgets with big burn rocketry to tempt us to look skyward once again. If all goes well, this evening they’ll launch the Kepler space telescope. Draped in solar panels, Kepler looks like a sci-fi salt shaker, but it’s fifteen feet tall and carries a fifty-five inch, silver-coated reflecting mirror that would make the gaudiest fashionista very, very happy. But that mirror will be aimed at the inky, glittery depths of space.
For the next few years, Kepler will keep track of 100,000 stars, noting the most minute changes in the light each one sends our way. Random changes might be caused by sunspots, but when the light dims just a little on a regular basis, that will mean a planet is orbiting across the face of its sun. Other measurements will tell us more about the planet is, and before you know it, we’ll have a new estimate of how many watery, hospitable, earth-like places there might be in our galaxy. As usual with NASA, there is a heart of poetry lurking behind the pocket protectors and the slide rules and the really excellent explosives.
If you grew up during the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, you already know about the poetry. In the very early days, people found it remarkable that man-made objects were orbiting above us, and the local paper printed the times each night you could go outside and see our rudimentary satellites pass overhead. At the age of 9 and 10 I would beg permission to stay up late. I’d throw on a jacket and climb up to the carport’s flat roof. On a clear night, even in the suburbs, the main stars made a big impression, but then, as my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, the Milky Way came forward for inspection. It was so grand and alien, yet so precise, as if this swath of stars was both a thousand and a million million miles away.
Then, like clockwork, something man-made would appear in the west, not blinking like an airplane, and taking its time in a great sweep all the way across the sky. No shortage of poetry there, even years later when I read about those early satellites, the mylar balloons called Echo I and Echo II, thirty yards wide and with so little gear that just about all they could do for us down below was shine. They reflected telephone and radio signals, and they broadcast a little tracking noise. But on those cool summery nights in the dark among the rooftops, whatever I thought and felt about our place in the universe those satellites amplified and echoed and sent bouncing back clearer and sharper and filled with a different poetry than we ever heard about in the paper or on the cold war evening news.
A year or two later, on certain lucky mornings, my family would rise early to watch a Gemini launch from Cape Canaveral with two astronauts aboard. I remember one bitter day in fifth or sixth grade when the flight was delayed and my brother and I had to trot off to school before the liftoff. These were among the notable adventures of our young lives, so missing the launch like that was just not fair. Not that our kids today would understand. There is more technology in an iPod Shuffle than in the first satellites, and nobody gets up early or stays up late for such things any more. After all, the texture of one generation’s life is the tedium of the next. But NASA, at least, keeps plugging away, hoping for a big announcement once the Kepler space telescope starts churning out data. Are there many thousands of planets like ours in the galaxy? That’s poetry. Or is there just the one? That’s poetry, too. Either way, when the batteries run down and Kepler becomes another pricey chunk of space debris, we’ll have the science and the stardust to think on in the evening as the sky turns dark and overhead the Milky Way presents its ecstatic and enigmatic self.