Wake up from the dream and we will walk on Mars

Over the decades, we've being reading the chronicles or we've been lucky enough to witness incredible aerospace achievements. In cold-war, launches of the first artificial satellites climbed up the sky with their load of human enthusiasm and fear for the military consequences, and suggested people around the world to desire their nation to have the capacity to do likewise. That alone ignited the space race. Then came the first satellites flying towards the Moon, the landing of a human being on our natural satellite, the interplanetary missions with their load of charm and testimony from alien places (who's not staring in awesome in front of Viking probes' photos from Mars?), the disappointment at the inconclusiveness of the search for life on the ground of the rusty planet, the vision of Jupiter's great red spot from orbit, the crossing of the rings of Saturn and the weird noise they left in the recordings while small particles scratched the surface of the probes. And what about the Huygens probe that came down on Titan after a flight of 4 million kilometers just thanks to mathematics and a lot of human ingenuity? During this fantastic gallop, most of the missions became an international effort; the opposing blocks left room for collaborations just unimaginable back in the 50s. Since the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission, the World in orbit has changed in ways that unfortunately did not reflect on what has remained on the ground.

Sometimes these enterprises emotionally engaged those who do not have a constant interest in astronautics; nonetheless every mission following Apollo 11 has barely generated mild interest, if not an entirely marginal one like the level of interest one feels for something happening elsewhere and annotated on a side column in the morning news. The Apollo 13 mission itself, had not went into life-threathening troubles, was set to be a sidenote in the news lacking the same attractiveness of its former sisters. Passion for such a great showing of human intelligence and courage quickly had transformed into routine and routine is the fireman of engagement.

Yet something changed yesterday.

Yesterday Elon Musk's SpaceX made another successful launch from the Cape. Not just any launch but quite a special one in the economy of astronautics: taking off from pad 39A was the most powerful missile currently in operation worldwide, the only one capable of sending into orbit the equivalent of a Boeing 737 full of passengers and their luggage, or fit to send out a cargo with a mass comparable to the paired control module and LM that brought men onto the Moon. This is a remarkable result but in itself it does not justify the level of enthusiasm that we are seeing around.

Yet it was a very special launch! We stared at this monster made of three rockets joint together, squeeze them up to the maximum performance and then leave them free to return to ground not by dumbly free falling down and burning into the atmosphere! No, they reignited and came down gracefully to a rest exactly at the established landing points. The images of two of these rockets landing in unison next to each other is worthy of the best science fiction film sequences. Yet we had already seen it: all Falcon rockets have returned to the ground in the same way (sometimes not exactly as expected rather by ending their life in a giant ball of fire) and after the first time the operation has become routine: it is expected to work and unexpected pyrotechnics are the exception.

It was a special launch also because it brought a cargo set to be sent into "wide" Martian orbit (let's say an orbit "with" Mars more than "around" Mars in the way decades of space missions have shown us). I suppose this is thrilling but nonetheless we returned into Martian orbit just over two years ago to begin a series of missions meant to test and enhance the technologies needed to land a man-driven mission on the planet. None of these missions raised the same enthusiasm and yet they share the same goal (maybe there's a mixed mood here in Italy as we're still quite disappointed by the crash of a probe with lot of Italian technology aboard).

So why is the launch of Falcon Heavy so fascinating and exciting?

Because it shatters the general apathy we're living into. I mean, dealing with the general apathy of a mankind no longer capable of getting surprised by anything, any other recent missions carried along a fascination for "minus habens"; we read or watch on TV about any missions and feel a temporary pride because we like to prise up the intelligence of engineers and scientists who have conceived it as if it were a collective intelligence, an intelligence of species and therefore our own intelligence, too. We confuse competence and intelligence, dedication and obtuseness and in the value of the former we reflect the negativity of the latter to gain self-consolation. Enthusiasm lasts little, just the time to give a lick to our Homo Sapiens ego, and then it slips into oblivion because the specialized purposes of the missions are alien to us, often incomprehensible by nature and just as often unclear about long-term objectives,. We live in the now, "hic et nunc" without asking too many questions or giving us generational goals. 

On the contrary, the launch of Falcon Heavy makes life easier for us because it brings on stage a clear, simple, shareable and thus shared perspective: the dream of flying to Mars to settle. It is the dream of Elon Musk and the reason why he founded SpaceX. It's also my dream and probably the dream of half of the inhabitants of our planet. In my case it kept being a dream; maybe I have perceived it as something not within my reach, perhaps I do not have the attitude to grasp the poetry of a dream and redefine it into the articulated and long path - quite often punctuated by disappointments - which leads to reality. The fact is that dream has permeated all my vision and work but at most it has strained into my life in a collateral way; in my two decades long research activity in the field of virtual reality and augmented reality any conceptual prototypes I realized borrowed this dream to allow users to "live" virtually on Mars, orbit around it, have the illusion of being there. I kept dreaming, just making the dream more vivid but staying still regarding its realisation. Instead, Elon Musk invested his entire adult life so far to make the dream an objective reality. He didn't just dream of it but he put in place everything that was necessary to materialize the dream just out of nowhere. By dreaming you only dream but it is by waking up that you can create.

His enthusiasm is contagious; looking at him starting from scratch and building the necessary technology makes the enterprise not only plausible but true. Seeing him not stopping when failures occurred and keep going beyond delays always doing every effort conceivable to achieve what he declares makes him credible, and above all makes everyone know for sure that what we can't yet do will certainly be done just because we aimed at it. It is no longer just an abstract problem rather a problem that we are facing, and nothing can stop us when we are determined to blast off an obstacle lying between us and our purposes. It is consolatory and inspiring at the same time.

What's flying enroute to Mars is not a complicated satellite with obscure yet very useful scientific instruments but a Tesla Roadster (not just any Tesla but Elon Musk' personal one!), led by a puppet astronaut/pilot in a bravado posture (look at that arm out of the window!), its car radio playing Space Oddity by the White Duke, and fully crammed with cameras broadcasting live images of the Earth reflected on the bonnet. That GPS navigation system saying "Don't panic" tells us that this is not anymore the dream of of a billionaire; it is the dream of a boy who is imbued with our own popular culture, someone who shares the same non-academic cultural references. One you might meet at the bar in the morning while dipping the croissant into a cappuccino and complaining about the last basketball match results. He's one of us. Better: we are that guy.

Yesterday Falcon Heavy launch wasn't about Elon Musk sending a four-wheeled bullet to Mars; it was about us being part of that, as common people it's our dream becoming a little bit true: we will walk on Mars someday. A day I'm now sure I'll live enough to see.