The Awkwardness of Calling Space

Even now, calls to and from space are awkward propositions. The elegant video call in 2001 is about as realistic as the space stations in 2001. The beautiful spinning ones we were supposed to have by now, with the sounds of Strauss in the background.

I was reminded of this last weekend on a visit to the latest mission of NASA’s Extreme Environment Mission Operations, or NEEMO. This was a two-week excursion by a handful of astronauts to a near Earth asteroid – simulated, of course, in a little sealab called Aquarius, just off the Florida coast. It included, somewhere amidst the ample underwater playtime, exercises in walking across an asteroid covered in little aliens (the ocean floor, plus fish), and in communicating with mission control (a big NASA tractor-trailer in a parking lot in Key Largo). The latter mission was in some ways the more challenging one, mainly because of the delay: on this practice mission, managers set the delay for 50 seconds, a somewhat realistic slice of time for communicating with an asteroid from Earth using not the old Tracking and Data Relay Satellite but the so-called Deep Space Network.

I didn’t have time to try the delayed communication thing during my conversation with NEEMO’s astronaut-aquanauts (which I made slightly awkward by asking them about toilets; more on that later). But I did see some of the delayed video and voice calls during NASA’s exercises. it is a beautiful kind of communication, intimate because visual but, with its spacey pauses, estranged and uncanny. These moments of waiting, sheer waiting, allow not just deeper (hopefully) contemplation of the words that are hanging in the air; they practically demand that you choose your words wisely, so they needn’t be repeated (and so they sound good during that moment when they’re hanging in the air). It is during the pause when you get to study the other person, waiting for your signal, before they do the same back to you. If most connections are like breakdancing in the subway, these space calls are an amateur underwater ballet, a spacey, anti-gravitational conversation.

It is also, probably, deeply annoying to wait 50 seconds for your message to go through and vice versa (see the delayed-reaction interview between Space.com and scientist Steve Squyres). “We’ve learned how much more valuable text messages can be in these situations,” explained Bill Todd, Program Manager for Exploration Analogs at NASA.

But a text message can hardly replace the thrill of face-to-face contact by video phone. And little seems capable of changing their strangeness. Even now, space calls at NASA are wooden affairs that stretch into long minutes on Youtube, and are made boring by the dry questions of us reporters and the formulaic answers and formalities of their orbiting conversants.

But in China, which is just getting into the swing of its own manned space program, awkwardness is worn like a mission patch. This video call between the Tiangong-1 space module and President Hu Jintao at mission control in Beijing on Wednesday, two days before the taikonauts returned to Earth, comes with the usual state-sanctioned ingredients: a synchronized salute, the joint wave, and the patriotic script – read by a robotic narrator in a near whisper. There is not an iota of surprise here (aside of course from the sheer fact of a video conversation between Earth and space). Everything is fine. “All experiments and tests are carried out according to the plan.”

Technological accomplishments aside, China’s space program still lacks the flair that might appeal not only to Western audiences or to nationalist agendas, but also to kids who could someday become taikonauts, landing on the the moon and occupying the place. And especially if it plans to be making public phone calls from there. For now, its orbital communications make late night chats between the space station and the Pope sound kind of exciting.

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