Space Travel for Beginners
is now available from Amazon and CreateSpace. Click here for the dedicated CreateSpace page and here for the Amazon.com page. It will also shortly be available from specialist bookstores in the US and Europe via Amazon’s new distribution system. Below is an image of the cover and the text of chapter one, which explains its mission.
one
salimos a medianoche / we depart at midnight
I’LL CONFESS from the outset that I cheated. While other cosmonauts leave from the sandy orange groves of Cape Canaveral, the steamy grasslands of French Guiana or the arid Kazakh steppes of the Baikonur Cosmodrome, I stole a full half-mile start by leaving from a mountaintop in southern Spain. The Serranía de Ronda, to be precise, a series of mountain ranges equidistant between Granada and Sevilla in western Andalucía. Two generations ago, these mountains were still bandit country, a primeval wilderness where desperate men lay in wait for unwary travellers. Some were simple highwaymen or contrabandistas, smugglers; others ‘Reds’, Republican soldiers fleeing the vengeance of the Fascist militias of General Francisco Franco Bahamonde after the Civil War. Life for the bandits was one of foraging, bartering or simply stealing a subsistence—you could hardly call it a living—in a landscape more suited to the wolf and the eagle, the snake and the wild boar.
These brown, green and white mountains have been here for millions of years, although their limestone flanks are carelessly littered with evidence that this wasn’t always the case. Ammonites, belemnites and trilobites, the fossilized shells of prehistoric marine animals, glint on their highest peaks, recording the fact that these mountains, some of them more than a mile high, were once under water in the pre-Cambrian era. Much of western Andalucía, including this town, Alcala de la Sierra, my launch pad, began life at the bottom of what would become the Mediterranean Sea. Around twenty million years ago, this sea was slowly enclosed, blocking all but a trickle of the Black Sea and narrowing the Straits of Gibraltar to form the Mediterranean basin. In the intervening aeons, the Earth’s mantle buckled and heaved, hoisting these submarine plateaux into the sky.
In fact Andalucía, like the rest of Spain—the most mountainous country in Europe, more so even than Switzerland—is still on the move. Along a diagonal fissure running from the south-west to the north-east, the top half of Andalucía is heading north-east, while the bottom half is on its way south-west, although both at speeds that should not alarm visitors. While the Earth hurtles around the Sun at thousands of miles an hour, the solar system around the galaxy at even greater velocity and the galaxies hurtle through the universe at speeds that would make your head spin, Andalucía’s two lumbering dancers are waltzing apart at speeds approaching a centimetre every millennium. However, as the rare earth tremor shows, sometimes you can feel them move. It’s happening everywhere: Greece is sinking into the sea, Scotland is scooting up out of it and southern England is heading for a dunking. This planet we’re standing on is proof that metaphors involving safety and rocks should be avoided.
I chose Alcala de la Sierra for a long list of reasons, some of which even I now forget. After forty-odd years living in London, life and work seemed to offer the chance of escaping my postcode of the past twenty years. Advances in communications technology made it possible to work in a radically different postcode to SE13 7TW, under warmer skies, certainly in a more convivial culture. We also wanted to get away from the present government, away from the view of the Millennium Dome from our back garden, away from streets where you could get murdered because of the colour of your skin or your sexual orientation. Away, it goes without saying, from all that weather.
Greece and her islands had been a strong favourite for a decade and a half, although they were ultimately rejected, largely because much of Greece goes into hibernation between October and May. A suntan someone brought back from Mallorca one January in the mid-1990s shifted our sights to Spain. A few summers’ research drew our focus to the mountains of the Serranía de Ronda, named after its ‘capital’, the handsome cobbled mediaeval town forty-five kilometres from the Costa del Sol. Ronda may only be forty-five kilometres from the Costa del Sol, but the distance could also be measured by the same number of years. Digital television and Class A drug addiction have both arrived in Alcala and its surrounding pueblos blancos, the ‘white villages’ of Andalucía, but it is still light years distant from the burger culture that has swept along Andalucía’s Mediterranean littoral in recent decades. In Alcala de la Sierra, and the other pueblos blancos, it seemed possible to move to Spain without finding yourself in some sunny outpost of Essex with Norman Tebbit for your neighbour.
This was no back-to-nature lark, no mid-life-crisis flight from adulthood. We wanted out, we had the wherewithal, but we also needed our technology. I couldn’t better the three-sheep-and-a-dog adventures of at least two other writers, Alastair Boyd and Chris Stewart, who have woven great tales of tending huertas, smallholdings, in the mountains of Andalucía, and I certainly don’t have their cultural knowledge of the region. But this wasn’t to be a bucolic adventure among quaint rural folk standing in front of picturesque backdrops. We wanted to escape a London where November can last nine months, but we wanted to take our toys with us.
Consequently, we arrived in these mountains with four Apple Macintosh computers (two desktop, two laptop, for work, not play), two printers, three stereos, one synthesizer, two modems, ISDN phone lines, Internet and sundry other connections, a website to maintain, a satellite dish just this side of Jodrell Bank, and a digital television slightly smaller than the screen at the Odeon Leicester Square. Cleft sticks were out.
The point of the exercise, apart from fleeing SE13 7TW, was to pursue our lives in a more amenable setting. The mortgage was paid, and we had both reached a point in our careers where our work could continue, with a few alterations to habits, wherever we could plug in a modem and reach an airport in a few hours. So we sold up and high-tailed it out of unlovable south London (I write as a lifelong south Londoner, the adopted son of Cockney parents). A nice young couple paid far more than we had originally expected for our large Victorian home, and we headed for southern Spain to spend some of this on a new home under the sun. Not before, however, we were burgled in the middle of moving our belongings out of the house. While traumatic—I spent an afternoon set aside for packing telephoning police and credit card companies—this seems in hindsight to be entirely fitting. We were getting out, and Lewisham managed to express its feelings about this with an eloquence verging on the chilling.
Nevertheless, we did it: we achieved escape velocity. Lewisham could (and still can) go fuck itself.
The point of the exercise at hand, however, is rather more ambitious. It is to plumb the deepest reaches of space, visiting moons, planets, star systems, galaxies, clusters, nebulae and gas fields, using technology accessible to anyone with a modest income, and from the comfort of one’s home. It intends to travel distances unimaginable to most astronautas, and at speeds that would make Stephen Hawking blanch. It intends to visit quanta and Planck measures, the smallest objects in the known universe. It also intends to visit some of the biggest objects in the known universe, such as the ‘missing’ dark matter that makes up most of the universe, the big bang itself, which is still reverberating out there thirteen billion years after it first went pop, and objects such as black holes, those catastrophic failures of gravity where the rules of space, time, matter and light go haywire.
As with most space missions, we will of course be carrying out certain experiments on our journey. Perhaps the most dramatic will be to attempt something that Stephen Hawking concluded, probably with a computer-generated sigh, is impossible: nothing less than time travel.
We’ve a half-mile start, and we leave at midnight.