A threatening sky
Ensisheim, 7 November 1492, in the morning. Preceded by a terrible explosion, a black rock weighing approximately a 150 km flew across the skies over Alsace, in north east France, eventually landing in a field near the city walls. A young boy, the only pe
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J. Arnould, Icarus' Second Chance © Springer-Verlag/Wien 2011
A threatening sky
6 A threatening sky Ensisheim, 7 November 1492, in the morning. Preceded by a terrible explosion, a black rock weighing approximately a 150 km flew across the skies over Alsace, in north east France, eventually landing in a field near the city walls. A young boy, the only person to have seen the rock hit the ground, guided the curious townsfolk to the point of impact: a crater two metres deep! Not really scared, the crowd eagerly helped themselves to fragments of this “rock fallen from the sky” for good luck. The pillage was luckily stopped by the bailiff, who ordered the rock to be taken to the churchs doorstep. After all, it did come from the heavens. Nineteen days later, the young king Maximilian, heir of the Habsburg family and future emperor of Austria, came to the town of Ensisheim. He asked to see the rock and regarded it as a miracle and a good omen for the war he had to lead against the French. He ordered the rock to be kept in the churchs chancel where it would remain for three centuries. The French like to tell us that their ancestors, the Gauls, were intrepid warriors and only feared one thing: the sky falling on their heads. Were they really the only ones to be frightened by the spectacle of a meteorite shower? I doubt it. Be that as it may, it is important to give the Ensisheim episode a strong symbolic character. On that day, it became clear that the sky was not as stable, fixed and unchanging as many human conceptions, representations and cultures had believed. The sky, like the Earth and mankind, can be changed, damaged and broken. Now seemingly more accessible, the sky also posed more of a threat to humans.
6.1 The cluttered sky? If you were to ask the so often solicited “man in the street” about the ethics of space, he would without doubt begin by admitting his ignorance or try to hide it behind the conspicuously affirmed opinion that space poses no ethical problem; unless he confesses that all these questions go way over his head, both figuratively and literally speaking. However, ask him about space debris and, if he is a regular enough reader of the daily papers, there is a strong chance he will change his discourse and show concerns about all of these objects, now redundant and unusable, hurtling around in the skies above us. Is it a trace, or a rekindling of the fear that the sky will one day fall on us? Why not. After all, not so long ago people were still wondering whether the continued launching of sputniks and satellites 91
Chapter 6
into space by the Soviets and Americans would upset time and the seasons; not to mention the fears that an eclipse with a reasonable amount of media coverage can still create . . . . On a more serious note, back in 1962, joining the protests of astronomers, Bernard Lovell described the US Air Force Westford programme as “ethically wrong”. As mentioned above, 350 million copper needles were sent into space in October 1961 to be followed by more in 1963. Each one constituted a
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