![]() ![]() What Ballard stated then is now manifest: there are still space-bound endeavors, of course (such as the International Space Station or the Galileo positioning system), but they are prosaic big-industry-funded scientific research and routine comsat maintenance programs, quite different from the transcendent dreams of Golden Age sf. As he declared in 1977, “ven before the Space Age had begun I had a hunch it would be short-lived-basically because NASA and the Russians had left the imagination out of space, one mistake the S-f writers never made” (“Foreword”). 1 Probably the reaction of a vast majority of viewers was one of “been there, seen that.” At the same time, the Columbia disaster was much less startlingly vivid, and public interest in its aftermath considerably shorter-lived, than the 1986 Challenger explosion, due in part to the post-9/11 mood, to larger events looming around the world (the oncoming sequel to the Gulf War first and foremost), and to the sad fact that, in the contemporary mediascape, repetita non juvant. Concern for the victims and their families was displaced by a geometry of technologized death that called to mind the overproduction of hypotheses and the orgy of visual and technical details following another highly Ballardian event (already foreshadowed in Crash), the 1997 accident that killed Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales. Communication networks offered a disturbing collage of technological details, ballistics, Texas landscape, and anatomical parts, like something out of The Atrocity Exhibition. There is no doubt that the Februdisaster of the Columbia space shuttle had a distinctly Ballardian flavor. ![]() Umberto Rossi A Little Something About Dead Astronautsīack to the Future. ![]()
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