Bill Clinton with astronaut Cady Coleman on stage in the Sheraton Towers Ballroom during the closing session of this year’s meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City. Floating upside down on the screen to Clinton’s right is astronaut Reid Wiseman Skyping in from the space station as was passing overhead.
After Peter Diamandis left the stage Wednesday, Bill Clinton welcomed his next guests---the two plenary sessions I covered this year felt even more like television talk shows than past sessions. This is not a bad thing. I remember those other sessions as being a little too speachy and preachy. I liked it better this way, more relaxed, less guilt-tripping, although it would explain why after talking so earnestly and with such urgency about the problems his organization, water.org, was working to solve in order to increase the world’s supply of clean water, Matt Damon eased without signs of any mental lurch into a self-deprecating anecdote about a time he guest hosted the Jimmy Kimmel Show and lost track of the time to the point he suddenly found himself running a half hour behind schedule. Damon does an excellent Bill Clinton impression, by the way. Clinton, meanwhile, is a natural in the role of talk show host, so is Hillary Clinton. They have their own individual styles but…
Where was I?
Oh. Right.
After Peter Diamandis left the stage Wednesday, Bill Clinton’s welcome to his next guests included an apology.
“We finished the space station when I was President. I spent a lot of your tax money on it if you’re an American. I hope you’ll forgive me.”
I’m not sure he’s really all that sorry.
May not have been his greatest achievement as President but as it became clear his administrations contributions to space exploration is something he remembers with great fondness and excitement and it tickled him to be talking to the astronauts who were his guests onstage and “onstage.”
United States astronaut Cady Coleman was onstage. Astronaut Reid Wiseman was “onstage” on the big screens around the Sheraton ballroom, Skyping in from the space station as it was passing over New York.
This was the most fun moments of this year’s CGI. It wasn’t one of the most profound or enlightening. Clinton and the astronauts didn’t have the chance to get into a deep discussion before the station moved out of range and the signal cut out about ten minutes later. (Just after Coleman asked Wiseman a question I really wanted to know the answer to, “What was your favorite and least favorite experiment?” and just before Wiseman could begin to reply.) Clinton prompted Coleman and Wiseman to talk generally about the work being done aboard the station by asking “What good is it? What are you doing up there we should care about and be grateful for?” and the short answer, because there wasn’t time for a long answer, was SCIENCE!
“We’ve spent the last few days just going crazy with the science that’s on board,” Wiseman said with a kid on Christmas morning grin and Coleman went into a little detail about how the astronauts have been contributing to the study of osteoporosis---astronauts up in space lose bone mass “ten times faster than it happens to a seventy year old woman down on the ground who has osteoporosis.” Which led to Clinton reminiscing about how when he was President he signed permission for NASA to send up its oldest astronaut, a seventy-seven year old actually making his second space flight, over thirty years after his first. John Glenn. Clinton recalled sending Glenn an email while he was up and this inspired Coleman to take a selfie of her and Clinton and email it to Wiseman right then and there. She was careful to get Wiseman in the shot too.
I guess that #selfie @ #CGI2014 with @astro_reid floating on #ISS & @billclinton is off my Earth#BucketList too! pic.twitter.com/46gTdhhhKu
— Cady Coleman (@Astro_Cady) September 25, 2014Not on its way to getting as many Retweets as the selfie Ellen took at the Oscars, is it? That’s a shame. RT it yourself if you can.
But the point Coleman and Wiseman wanted to make, and which they were there to make, was about the international-ness of the International Space Station. Looking down at the earth from space and seeing the whole planet, Coleman said, “It’s almost hard to feel you’re from any particular country.” Wiseman enthused about the friendships he’s made aboard the station with colleagues from around the world going around the world with him. He introduced German astronaut Alex Gerst and lamented he couldn’t bring on camera the mission commander, Russian cosmonaut Max Suraev, who was busy below sciencing and preparing for the arrival of some replacement crew members (launching from Kazakhstan). There are fifteen countries that took part in the building of the space station and contributing to its maintenance and crewing, ninety nations conducting experiments on board.
This “One Earth” camaraderie gave Clinton an idea.
“You’ve convinced me that the answer to the political gridlock we have here in America is to send the Congress to meet in the space station.”
Coleman reminded him the trips are usually round trips. “You want it that way or do you want the one–way?”
Clinton said he was happy for it to be a two-way trip because obviously being up there has a positive influence.
And that was about it. The station continued on its path and the signal cut out.
Coleman wrapped up with a call to space. Bill Clinton added a few final words about how we humans have always needed to know what’s out there “wherever there is” and how the world’s great searchers have not been territorialists, forgetting for the moment, I guess, Christopher Columbus or making a distinction between explorers and treasure hunters, then then he turned the show over to Hillary Clinton who began her portion of the session by something that confused me for a second.
“That was very exciting, especially for someone who wanted to be an astronaut.”
And who was that? I asked her in my head.
Then I remembered.
It was Hillary Clinton.
When she was a young teenager in the early 1960s, Hillary Rodham wanted to become an astronaut and she wrote to NASA asking how she could go about it. Someone from the space agency wrote her back to tell her girls didn’t get to be astronauts.
That one still gets to me.
Gets to Hillary too, I’m sure.
Every kid wanted to be an astronaut back then and I can’t imagine what would possess an adult to tell any of them, Give it up, kid, find another dream.
And Hillary Rodham wasn’t the only young woman who wanted to be an astronaut and got a letter like that telling her to give up her dream. Apparently someone made a policy of sending out letters like that.
At the time, all American astronauts were male. They were all something else too. Pilots. Test pilots and former fighter pilots. But it wasn’t the plan for that always to be the case. The plan was that in the not too distant future we’d be sending scientists and engineers into space. Sexist as the times were, women scientists and engineers weren’t uncommon. There weren’t many. (Still aren’t, relatively.) But their numbers were growing. And space stations and lunar and Martian colonies were going to include women and children. This was featured in the concept art used to sell taxpayers on the space program.
Whoever wrote those letters was denying a future NASA itself envisioned.
All the astronauts had something else in common. They were not that young. The seven Mercury astronauts were in their mid- to late thirties. And that was not likely to change with future astronauts. The time to get the education, build the resume, and undergo the training required to become an astronaut would (and still does) take would-be astronauts into their thirties. So whoever wrote Hillary was assuming that nothing would have changed for women and girls twenty to twenty-five years from then.
But the change was underway and in fact twenty years would be about how long it would take. (In the United States. Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to go into space in 1962.) Sally Ride went up on the space shuttle in 1983. She was thirty-two at the time. Four years younger than Hillary Clinton.
I don’t know what the writer of that letter to Hillary Rodham thought he was doing besides being mean. Maybe he thought he was just being honest. But some people like being honest because it lets them be mean. He might just have been obtuse and unable to imagine a future different from the present, a strange quality in someone working to put human beings on the moon. Maybe he saw the future coming and it scared him, again something you wouldn’t expect in someone engaged, even if only bureaucratically, in the exploration of outer space. But human is human. Some people are afraid of the future because it’s a great unknown. We can see it coming but only in glimpses. Some people, though, many people, in fact, are afraid of the future because they can see what’s coming and they don’t like what they see. What they see are things taken from them that make their place in the present agreeable: Their authority, their status, their money, their youth. They see the future as a thief and a marauder and they want to stop it.
That’s William F. Buckley’s definition of conservative, isn’t it? Someone who stands athwart history yelling stop!
The future can only be seen in glimpses but it’s coming at us and the best way to see more of it is to head out to meet it. And it was very exciting for someone who wanted to be an astronaut---and I mean me, not Hillary Clinton, although I don’t remember writing my own letter to NASA. If I had I probably would have gotten a response very different from the one she got and that I’m sure I’d have kept. I did write a twenty page research paper in sixth grade that included my own hand-drawn illustrations on what it took to become an astronaut. One thing it took, I disappointed myself in finding out, was better than 20-20 vision. Astronauts couldn’t need glasses and I had just gotten my first pair.---to see some people on their way out to meet it on behalf of all of us back down here on our one earth.
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