3. Modern Sky
“Distance is an empty word, distance does not exist!”
Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon, 1865
By and large, in discussions of modern life things float free. Amid uniform landscapes conjured from steel and concrete, coordinates of time and space become simultaneously universal and ephemeral. In the last century railroads and rifles appeared to travel the earth with impunity, and such contemporary cousins as television and missiles acknowledge even fewer boundaries. An enduring general assumption—however belied in practice—lingers when discussing modern machines: once sufficiently advanced and properly ordered, they will function in the same manner, no matter where they are. Is not material universality the facile magic of the modern, its most alluring and terrifying promise?
The case at hand involves the realization of natural space beyond the confines of our planet, the literal “outer space” of the Space Age, as well as shifting geometries on the human sphere below. Thus our discussion will revolve around twin meanings of the term space, one physical and the other human. This unavoidable wordplay reveals the historicity inherent in bringing the abstract expanse of the universe alive, recalling that before the launching of the first artificial satellite there was no active outer space to redefine the more immediate active one beneath it—in a sense, no modern sky above a modern ground. Technologies associated with the exploration and commercialization of this “outer” space have significantly transformed experiences of human space on a global scale, exemplified by the redefinition of the equator relative to rockets and satellite orbits. The case of Kourou and the Guiana Space Center both illustrates this point and describes its anthropological significance, serving as a reminder that technologies unfold
Thus we return to classic motions of anthropology, gyrations between situated and general, traditional and modern, natural and cultural. The challenge, however, is to take the modern as seriously as that which it has been positioned against, to respect the present and the past simultaneously, and to cease insisting on the absolute gravity of categories. In this way we can turn to the central question at the edge of modern place: what is our sense of “outer space,” and how did it come to be?
5. A Gate to the Heavens
Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space?
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1882
Exerting himself to look out into space, man did not descry something entirely different and alien; rather, what was held out to him was a cosmic mirror of his own world, of its history and its potential.
Hans Blumenberg, Genesis of the Copernican World, 1975
In 1865, even as the American Civil War wound to a painful, bloody close, a middle-aged Frenchman had a fantastic vision of its aftermath. In a sardonic tone, betrayed only by a fondness for technical elaboration, he described how American masters of artillery, at a loss in retirement, would construct a giant cannon and shoot it at the moon. The man, of course, was Jules Verne, a prolific former stockbroker who helped to establish the popular genre now known as science fiction, producing a remarkable stream of works filled with florid, masculine adventure and the wonders of machinery. From the Earth to the Moon was the third of his Voyages extraordinaire and, in a small, but precise way, proved to be one of the world's more influential books.[1] Beyond the pleasure and wonder it afforded Verne's contemporaries, it would eventually inspire a small group of engineers to more practical dreams of moon flight. Rarely has fiction translated more directly into fact. Like a number of Verne's works, his moon voyage includes remarkably prescient technical elements, from a Florida launch site to an ocean landing. Even more eerily, the tale foreshadows a number of cultural forces at play in reaching the moon, including the importance of excess military expertise, public relations, and human cargo. And Verne, for
Figure 10. Ariane launch, ca. 1988
Over a century later, on Christmas Eve, 1979, a slim white rocket left the ground and slowly climbed skyward. Bearing the flags of a dozen nations and the French name for a figure from Greek myth, it represented
The “final frontier” was not then very old. Even in the middle of the twentieth century, the sky was defined in a single direction; one looked up through it, not down from beyond. The Earth had but a single satellite, the moon, and the man on it was a figure of poetry, not technological triumph. What lay beyond the atmosphere remained the province of astronomic observation and literary speculation, not exploration or commercial development. Yet just as nineteenth-century Western imperial expansion began to unravel, ink drying on the last white areas of the disintegrating maps, a new and final frontier came into being above the emerging political boundaries of first, second, and third worlds. Frequently described in language of colonial conquest (the inexorable “progress of mankind” now carried beyond the confines of a single planet), this frontier reflects both a logical extension of modernist ambition and its limits. “Outer space” describes something undeniably distant from local place, a vastness stretching impossibly far from the familiar globe. To imagine this “beyond” as a frontier is to invite its exploration yet also simultaneously to reposition the surface already known. Once the heavens fill with human activity, the ground below shifts in meaning, drawing together into a globe. Divides and boundaries are recast, some growing obsolete, others deepening. And when the first Ariane headed skyward, its reflection, white and gleaming, headed down.
FROM SPUTNIK TO THE SPACE RACE
Go up a few miles and life as we know it ends. There, we would no longer have an atmospheric blanket to protect us. High temperatures exist but would not be sensed. X rays and cosmic rays would penetrate our
― 116 ―bodies and dissociate our cells. The air pressure would decrease below our blood pressure until our bodily fluids began to boil. Time is always a relative concept. Skyward all is darkness.Erik Bergaust and William Beller, Satellite! 1956
“Today the dreams of the best sons of mankind have come true. The assault on space has begun.”
Sergey Korolev,[2]1957, quoted inJames Oberg, Red Star in Orbit, 1981
The dawn of the Space Age came in the fall of 1957, in the form of a faintly beeping metal ball. The Soviet satellite Sputnik 1, though modest in size and capability, cast a long political shadow, one stretching through debates about science, technology, and education far beyond the immediate purview of outer space.[3] To understand the significance of the event and its representation, we must replay a small portion of context surrounding this launch and the subsequent history of the Space Race and satellite technology, sweeping quickly enough to blur general patterns into view, yet finely enough to collect telling details. The new configuration of technology and society described by the expression “Space Age” comes most clearly into focus when viewed through extremes: a sudden break, an evolutionary leap, the cut in Kubrick's film 2001 between bone tool and spaceship. In writing about it one traffics between precision and expansive myth. To focus on only one or the other loses the essence of their combination: a union of exact instrumentality and abstract ends that opened the sky.
Let us first demystify the event. Although the launch of Sputnik was a public surprise, it was far from unpredictable, or even unpredicted among those paying attention to the possibilities of spaceflight. The span of 1957–1958 had been designated the “International Geophysical Year,” and both the United States and the Soviet Union broadly hinted that a satellite launch would be an appropriate way to mark the occasion. What better way to contemplate the Earth, after all, than from beyond it? Both goliaths of the Cold War were engaged in experiments with nuclear warheads and working on another end of rocketry, the missile. The basic technology for space launches had been available for some time. And interest in the future and futuristic technology was running high in certain quarters: science fiction boomed after World War II, as it had after World War I. Thus while the launch of Sputnik
The tie to science fiction merits further stress, for it is a point to which we will return: not only were most of the major and minor figures of space technology deeply influenced by strains of futuristic literature, but the future that would transpire around them had been remarkably well envisioned beforehand. The case of Verne is in this sense exemplary more than exceptional. Well before the technical simulation of the Space Age we have another mode of anticipation: fantasies of the future. Dreams are made exact, legitimate, and even useful. Moreover, at certain points they are taken seriously. Thus it should come as no surprise that elaborate visions and mythic allusions wove deeply into outer space, for they ran through the very technologies that open it, as well as the cultural frame of the sky.[5]
The technical story of the rocket itself is appropriately global in scope. A device first made recognizable some thousand years ago in China traveled to Europe, where it remained a tool for signals and celebrations until enjoying brief popularity as a weapon of war in the early nineteenth century. Following improvements in artillery it fell again into obscurity, lingering marginally in the minds of Russian, German, and American enthusiasts of spaceflight until its dramatic return in World War II. The German device known as A-4, developed in secret and manufactured with forced labor, first flew successfully in October of 1942. Rechristened V-2, the missile began to rain from the skies only at the very end of the conflict. Nevertheless, it helped set the tone for much of the ensuing Cold War, for German scientists had dreamt grandiose plans around the A-4, including an orbiting space station. In the waning days of the Third Reich, a curious race occurred across Europe, one that foreshadowed the political standoff of coming decades, as American and Soviet agents both worked frantically to reach German V-2 sites and capture rockets, documents, and engineers. These trophies were then hauled away from Europe to the west and to the east, for testing and improvement on other continents. Technology born from the ashes of fascism would later rise phoenixlike amid a strategic and symbolic struggle between state capitalism and state socialism, in the form of both long-range nuclear missiles and space launch vehicles.[6]
Yet while there was much talk, research, and design throughout the 1950s, only after the launch of Sputnik did the Space Age come undeniably into view. Space became news. Space became strategy. Space
AMERICAN INFLUENCE AND FRENCH IMAGINATION
Amid the fireworks of American and Soviet competition for supremacy, the old center of Europe faded into the background. Although German engineers continued to play a role (particularly in the American program), they did so at a distance, and rockets rose from the empty edges of other continents—American marshland and Asian steppe—not the former heart of empires. Yet it would be a mistake to lose sight of Europe completely. The British and French did their best to acquire the remnants of the V-2 and develop something from it. The British played an important role in early satellite technology, and the French eventually became the third most significant space power, after the United States and the Soviet Union, and the driving force behind joint European ventures. This interest on their part was only natural. Beyond strong traditions of aeronautics and space enthusiasm, Britain had borne the brunt of early Nazi experiments in rocketry, and the first V-2 had left the ground aimed at Paris.[8]
An independent French presence in space fit within larger policies of technical modernization and diplomatic autonomy. The land of Verne focused on steering a separate course between the Eastern Bloc and the rest of its Western allies, as French governments of the Fifth Republic, under the firm hands of Charles de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou,
Yet for all their independence, the French remained simultaneously committed to cooperation. The Asterix launch had been racing against a second French satellite poised on a NASA rocket, while negotiations for a joint European rocket program were completed at the same time as the founding of CNES, inspired in part by the earlier creation of the European physics consortium, CERN. On March 29, 1962, a convention for an organization known as the European Launcher Development Organization (ELDO) was signed, with France, Britain, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Australia as full members and Denmark and Switzerland as observers. ELDO would be matched by another cooperative institution, the European Space Research Organization (ESRO) to design experiments and satellites. The plan for the launcher was an ingenious bit of improvisation: the main stage would be comprised of Britain's Blue Streak rocket, an obsolete missile design redeployed for civilian ends, while France would build a second stage known as Coralie, and Germany would build a third stage, Astris. The completed ensemble would be known as “Europa.” Australia's inclusion in the rocket program stemmed from its contribution of a desert launch site at Woomera, chosen by the British to test their captured V-2s on Commonwealth soil.[10]
The Europa program, however, went far less smoothly than French solo efforts. Although the Blue Streak base performed adequately, it was too modest to lift satellites into high orbit, and supplementary second and third stages fared less well. As the American and Soviet race continued, space technology advanced beyond the Europa design. The United States did not favor the European project and lent no aid. Funding was sparse and cost overruns endemic. But design changes (strongly promoted by the French) resulted in plans for Europa II, a
ARTIFICIAL SATELLITES AND THE NEW EQUATOR
The truth, of course, will be far stranger.
Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968
Even as Allied forces raced for the V-2, a young English astronomer and future science fiction luminary was struck by accounts of German aerospace ambitions and toyed with the possibilities of communications using relay stations in space. Published in 1945, Arthur C. Clarke's article “Extra-Terrestrial Relays” combined bold proposals for applied rocket “astronautics” with a pragmatic observation that German developments moved them into the realm of possibility. Addressing the problem of atmospheric and topographic limits to long-distance communication, which would make comprehensive television transmission across even a small European country an expensive and technically complicated affair, Clarke proposed a set of three satellite stations in space to cover the entire globe. Prophetically he proclaimed that “a true broadcast service, giving constant field strength across the whole globe would be invaluable, not to say indispensable, in a world society.”[11]
A decade would pass before Sputnik woke the world to the realities of the Space Age. However, Clarke's original title for his article, “The Future of World Communications,” was soon to prove the better one. What he had grasped was the significance of a geosynchronous orbit, where the rotation of the body in question would coincide with that of the Earth. Rather than rise and set in the sky, such a body would remain constant relative to a chosen area of the globe and thus be in a position to provide it with continuous communication support. Signals could be sent from one location within that area and then transmitted to another. With a carefully positioned set of such space platforms, signals could even be relayed between them and thus from one side of the world to another. While initial outlays might be large, the overall expense of such a system would ultimately prove reasonable, given the
What appeared a brash pronouncement at the end of World War II was taken quite seriously only fifteen years later. The beginning of the 1960s saw many significant milestones in space, including missions carrying humans beyond the atmosphere, beginning with Yuri Gagarin's 1961 flight. Yet while the Soviet Union won the symbolic races, sending up the first animal, man, and woman and landing pioneering probes on the moon, on Venus, and the like, it was the United States that began to put in place the basic practical infrastructure of space, launching the first weather satellite, the first navigational satellite, the first spy satellite, and—with a glorified balloon known as Echo I—the first communications satellite. The first active communications satellite, Telstar, was followed by the first in geosynchronous orbit, Syncom II, used to broadcast the Olympic Games in 1964.[13] Even more crucially, the United States created the Communication Satellite Corporation (COMSAT) to establish a worldwide system of communications satellites. This strange hybrid, partly state and partly corporate, prophetically identified the utility of outer space, opening it to commercial activity. The International Telecommunications Satellite Consortium (INTELSAT), largely controlled by COMSAT and American interests, began to establish the framework of space communications. Britain and France, dependent on American launchers, were forced to accept unequal roles within the organization. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, went its own way, claiming technical victory while in effect yielding much higher ground to the Western allies.[14]
In 1965 an orbiting bundle of mirrors and circuits named Early Bird became the first commercial realization of Clarke's proposal. Over the ensuing twenty years, satellite communications developed into both an industry standard and the primary focus of commercial activity in space. The artificial satellite became a naturalized part of the sky, greatly increasing both rate and volume of regular long-distance exchanges. The process of achieving geosynchronous orbit, however, redefined geography with a new practical physics. The period of any orbit is a function of altitude and velocity. At a velocity of approximately seventeen thousand miles (twenty-eight thousand kilometers) per hour an object can break free from the surface of the Earth; at an altitude of some twenty-two thousand miles (thirty-six thousand kilometers) it has a period of twenty-four hours and matches the rotation
Although communications satellites dominated the commercial space market, they hardly exhausted its possibilities, let alone the practical aspects of artificial satellites. The very medium of space, let us not forget, offers an ideal field for scientific experimentation, a vast vacuum free of gravity. Moreover, a perch in space allows for constant and sweeping observations, both out to the stars and down on the Earth. If one focuses from sufficient distance, the movements of the world fit into a single frame. Global phenomena such as weather patterns, ocean levels, and even the shape of the Earth itself can be tracked and monitored in a systematic and continuous way. Remote-sensing—by broad definition “measurement from a distance”—comes most clearly into its own in the production of visual data: satellite photos that redefine maps, espionage, and all other forms of surveillance. The marketing of such images represents the development of a second significant commercial arena in space, begun with the American Landsat and continued in the French SPOT and other programs.[16]
With the exception of weather satellites that use a high, geosynchronous orbit over the equator to maintain contact with a particular region below, Earth observation satellites generally occupy low positions (six hundred to twelve hundred miles, or one thousand to two thousand kilometers) in near-polar orbits. By traveling across the rotation of the Earth rather than with it, and maintaining an orbital period of about one hundred minutes rather than twenty-four hours, their instruments can thus repeatedly sweep over the globe rather than fix on a particular region. By further following an orbit synchronized to the sun rather than to the Earth they can consistently monitor points on the globe at the same local time of day. Thus by the end of the 1960s we have two general groups of useful satellites, one engaged in communication and the other in observation, and two common and significant orbital paths,
The widespread adoption of the artificial satellite presents us with an active, distinctly “modern” sky. The reorientation of the Earth in the Space Age is not solely a matter of cosmic contemplation or symbolic rivalry: there are significant technical consequences as well, for science, politics, and economics. The natural vacuum promises new scientific standards, a laboratory beyond the atmosphere. To a properly equipped eye in orbit, both stars above and land below grow sharper; earth, sky, and weather can all be monitored with lofty intimacy. Points on the globe need no longer be connected directly to each other but can instead acquire new significance through their relation to the zone above the atmosphere. In a sense, what has been a geometry of two dimensions becomes three, as connections are no longer restricted to the surface sphere of the planet. A platform in space offers both an imperial vantage point across continents and a potential beacon between them, circumventing geographical markers on the ground or altering their meaning. The world becomes more actively whole, open to inspection and connection from above, allowing a degree of uniformity never before possible.
Of course, the foregoing sketch abbreviates many stories. European conceptions of time and space shifted dramatically between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as witnessed by artistic movements under various banners of “modernism,” while the establishment of universal time zones, news services, photography, telephones, and radio and television networks, not to mention aircraft, radically altered the rate and topography of everyday life.[18] Yet in order to evoke the meaning of the “Space Age,” with all its powerful technological and representational possibilities, a certain degree of abstract distance is necessary. Although the airplane opened the sky and moved through it at dramatic elevations, and the radio tower filled the air with waves, bypassing ground connections, neither made the limits of the Earth entirely visible or transparent. Space technology closed the sky again, bounded it from above and sealed it whole. Only then could the sky become fully modern in an active, technological sense, and only then could what lay beyond it become meaningful as space, a vast sea of darkness surrounding a blue and green point of human place. At last the world was one.
The development of the artificial satellite represents the most realized transformation of the Space Age, as well as one of the best illustrations
HEAVEN'S GATE
A redefinition of the equator as a modern marker of the sky had technological consequences on the ground. After all, in order to have satellites in orbit, one must first get them there. While a large number of nations currently use satellite technology, relatively few possess the technology to launch payloads into space. By virtue of other factors of economic history, the industrial centers of the world, including the original giant twins of the Space Race, are located high in the Northern Hemisphere. In terms of achieving geosynchronous orbit, this position is less than ideal, because the further one is from the equator, the more fuel must be expended to place a satellite above the equator. The primary launch sites established by the United States and the former Soviet Union are both well north, the former (Cape Canaveral) at 28° latitude and the latter (Baikonur) at 45° latitude. The location of these sites was driven by other considerations than those of proximity to the equator, such as the need for sparsely populated land to increase military security and decrease the risk of accidental civilian death. The rockets and missiles of the Cold War could thus fall mistakenly without mishap, in preparation for their eventual planned trajectories. In the case of Cape Canaveral, eastward access to the ocean gave the added benefit of permitting a flight path over open water in the direction of the Earth's rotation, allowing rockets to use the planet's momentum to help reach escape velocity. An ideal launch site for communications and other geosynchronous satellites would combine such positive attributes found at Canaveral (a coastline with a large body of water and an open eastern horizon) with a location as near as possible to the equator. An open horizon toward the poles would add the additional benefit of facilitating launches of satellites into low orbit.
In more recent decades these facts of Space Age geography have not escaped the notice of certain states located deep in the tropics, and several of them (such as India, Brazil, and Papua New Guinea) have
A MARGIN OF UTILITY
Courroux passe / colère finit / quand on oeuvre (Wrath passes / anger ends / when one works)
Coat of arms for the city of Kourou, Anonymous, Kourou: Ville en devenir, 1987
At the moment of the French space agency's creation in 1962, the French army was using a rocket testing site named Hammaguir in the Saharan desert of Algeria. The Evian accords, however, signed on March 18 of that year—even as CNES came into being—committed France to seek another rocket range starting July 1967. Thus a search for a new launch site was on from the very inception of the French space program. Preferably, that site would equal or surpass Algeria in terms of location and availability of open land. Those responsible for the choice thought of French Guiana immediately, but they worried about the logistical difficulties (and potential political uncertainties) of establishing an operation at such a distance from the Metropole. Therefore the search continued in 1963 along two tracks, one focusing on possibilities within mainland France and the other concentrating on equatorial sites around the globe.[20]
Let us follow the equatorial search, via its summary analysis of sites. The following criteria were considered:
- polar and equatorial launching possibility
- proximity of the equator
- sufficient physical dimensions to ensure the security of launches
- existence of a deepwater port
- existence of an adequate airfield (with a runway of three thousand meters)
- shortest possible distance between the launch base and Europe
- stable political situation in order that the base's availability “is not linked to a change of local political regime”[21]
After numerous possibilities were dismissed out of hand, the report concentrated on a list of fourteen potential sites. The description and official evaluation of each ran as follows:
The archipelago of the Seychelles (4°37′ South): not retained because of its restrictive dimensions, its tortured topography, and the impossibility of building a runway of sufficient length
The island of Trinidad (British West Indies, 10°05′ to 10°50′ North): a suitable site, but not retained because launching to the north is impossible and the political stability of the island is not guaranteed
The island of Nuku-Hiva (archipelago of Marquesas, French Polynesia, 8°55′ South): a favorable site, but not retained because of the impossibility of building a runway of sufficient length
The archipelago of Tuamotu (French Polynesia, 15° South to 18°26′ South): a favorable site, but not retained because of its distance from Europe (twenty thousand kilometers [twelve thousand miles]), the existence of cyclones, and the absence of fresh water
The island of Désirade (French West Indies, 16°20′ North): a possible site, but not retained because of its hurricanes, insufficient dimensions, and absence of a port or airfield
The island of Marie-Galante (French West Indies, 15°33′ North): not retained because of the impossibility of launching to the north (Guadeloupe being only forty kilometers [twenty-four miles] away) as well as the danger of hurricanes and the absence of a port and airport
Djibouti (French Somaliland [now independent], 11°35′ North): a very favorable site, but not retained because of almost insoluble problems of security
Australia: Darwin (12°28′ South) and Broome (17°57′ South): attractive sites, but not retained because of their relative distance from the equator, their extreme distance from Europe, and the existence of cyclones
Trincomalee (Ceylon [now Sri Lanka], 8°35′ North): a possible site, but not retained because of its distance from Europe, the existence of cyclones, the size of its population, and the uncertain political regime
― 127 ―Fort Dolphin (Malagasy Republic [Madagascar], 25°02′ South): a very suitable site, but not retained because of its distance from the equator, lack of a deepwater port, and need for airport improvements
Mogadishu (Republic of Somalia, 2°02′ North): a site with an excellent situation with respect to the equator, but not retained because of great political instability
Port Etienne ([Nouâdhibou] Islamic Republic of Mauritania, 20°55′ North): a very attractive site, but not retained because of its high latitude, the continuous presence of wind, and the difficulty in finding potable water
Belem (Brazil, Amazon delta, 1°27′ South): a very suitable site, but not retained because of a bad weather report, delicate security, linguistic difficulties created by the usage of Portuguese, and the risk of political instability
Cayenne (French Guiana, 4°50′ North): a very favorable site, whose sole important disadvantage is the weak capacity of the port of Cayenne, which could easily be circumvented by unloading on the Iles du Salut, approximately fifty kilometers [thirty miles] away, or by improving the port installations; ambient humidity necessitates serious precautions for the conservation of equipment but is not considered a major disadvantage
The terms of the presentation reveal a mixture of logics: an application of the desired geographical criteria (physical and social), as well as a bias against any political landscape threatening movement, and a preference for sites within the French sphere of influence, former colonies and continuing territories. The scope of the places under consideration parallels the list of potential penal colonies a century earlier; once again the search is for openings on the globe, margins to house an experiment.[22]
In February, 1964, the report was completed, establishing a classification by points “in function of selection criteria retained.” The final ranking went as follows:
| French Guiana | 118 |
| Australia | 96 |
| Brazil | 90 |
| Tuamotu | 80 |
| Trinidad | 79 |
In the end, it was decided that French Guiana did indeed represent the best of possible worlds beyond the hexagon of France itself. At the same time, a comparison with the best European French site available (Languedoc-Roussillon) highlighted additional advantages, for despite the greater expense involved in building adequate facilities, French Guiana offered a better location, posed fewer social concerns, and promised greater potential “evolution.” On March 21, 1964, General de Gaulle made an official visit to French Guiana and announced, in rather elliptical fashion, a coming “great work.” On April 14, Georges Pompidou, the modernizing prime minister, personally decided in favor of building the base in Guyane.[23]
Within French Guiana the decision to locate the center at Kourou followed quickly, given the town's small population and its favorable geographical characteristics and location with respect to Cayenne and the airport (close enough for convenience, yet far enough for security). The space agency initially claimed land along the coast between Kourou and the neighboring town to the northwest, Sinnamary, some thirty kilometers by ten kilometers (nineteen by six miles) of savanna encompassing a smattering of agricultural sites and a hamlet known as Malmanoury. The social landscape was quiet and rural, and the number of people involved was quite small; in 1961 Kourou registered a population of 659, and Sinnamary had a population of 1,796, mostly Creole. On a Metropolitan scale the appropriation seemed a minor affair. Local opinion was more varied but less influential, and the transfer of authority was soon complete.[24]
BUILDING THE SPACE CENTER
For those persons coming to French Guiana for the first time, we call attention to the fact that it is a country where they cannot expect to find an infrastructure of services and facilities resembling those of the Metropole. And yet, if they only show interest and a certain comprehension for Guyanais life and its difficulties during this period of all-out evolution, they will be welcomed with graciousness and amiability.
CNES brochure, 1970
Kourou's bucolic feel would not last long. Locating the launch site in French Guiana necessitated much work, both on the new center itself
The rapid construction of the base and its attendant structures spurred an influx of workers from outside French Guiana, largely from Metropolitan France and neighboring areas of South America and the Caribbean. In 1966 CNES contracted Colombians to provide manual labor; they were supplemented by workers from elsewhere, particularly Brazil and Suriname. It should be stressed that the composition of this labor force of several thousand differed significantly from the smaller one that would operate the completed installation. The door of opportunity for those without specialized training swung open briefly and then shut.[27]
The first launch, that of a test rocket named Véronique, took place on April 9, 1968. Two years later the first French rocket of import, a Diamant, lifted off with a German satellite named Wika. But the initial optimism of the project dimmed even as the first wave of construction ended. Far from throwing wide the gates to space, the overall technical record of the first phase of the European space center was relatively meager. Although CSG could claim 354 “launches” between 1968 and 1978, 288 of these were test rockets, and another 57 were balloons; the total includes only nine satellite launch vehicles, eight Diamants, and a single Europa. The failure of the Europa II—which crashed into the sea after only two and a half minutes of flight—was an ominous sign, inspiring criticism of not only the rocket but also the organization that
THE SPACE CENTER AND DEVELOPMENT
Kourou is a city of the future.
Anonymous, Kourou, 1987
Effects of the establishment of the space center rippled through French Guiana, well beyond the immediate confines of Kourou. The spate of construction associated with the project, the substantial improvements in the general infrastructure of the department, and the sudden wave of migrant labor attracted to the area altered the local landscape. Even as Kourou transformed dramatically, French Guiana shifted around it, adjusting to the new conditions. And while the space center was not the only modernizing influence in French Guiana—the area's formal incorporation into the French state in 1946–1947 established much of the economic framework—it quickly came to represent everything, good or bad, that emerged alongside it.
The initial promises about the potential benefits in store for French Guiana from its involvement in the space program varied. De Gaulle had alluded to a “great work,” the engineer in charge of the initial mission spoke of an “era of prosperity for Kourou, Cayenne and French Guiana as a whole,” and one of the conservative political papers of the time predicted full-time employment for all. Opinion in French Guiana, however, was quite divided over the installation of a space base. Even before the official announcement was made, rumors circulated about what this new project might bring, and political debates already extant began to revolve around this new center of official gravity. Even as those in favor of assimilation welcomed the project, the local branch of the Socialist Party and other left groups opposed it, raising concerns about Cold War politics and the launch site's potential role in nuclear conflict. Further, they were irritated by the “implantation” of the space center, pointing out that local officials had not been consulted and warning that the creation of such an artificial island in an underdeveloped
In a press conference held in October 1964, the delegates of CNES maintained a measure of studied caution, albeit laced with progressive enthusiasm. Stressing that this was a purely civil affair, with no links to either the military or atomic testing, they explained the logic behind the selection of French Guiana to the assembled audience of local officials, suggesting that if the space project went forward successfully, this would be the only extant equatorial rocket base and hence “would certainly be the greatest launch site in the world.”[30] France, they emphasized, had chosen to bypass the cheaper option of an installation at Roussillon, and this should be taken as a sign of commitment to its overseas department: “The government thinks that the supplementary cost will have, at least, the beneficial side effect of creating considerable activity in French Guiana, while Roussillon has other possibilities.” For all that the primary motivation of building a space base was national and French, the technological development of the nation would here assist in the modernization of its outlying parts.
The stated goals were both strikingly egalitarian and relatively concrete:
Perhaps you would now like to know what sort of human development we envisage with respect to this launch site? Well, we think that almost five hundred people will be necessary for it to function. To the extent to which you are able to provide us with half that figure, we would be happy to recruit them, either among those who live here or among those children of this land who have left and would like to return. In fact we can give 250 jobs easily enough to local people. The people arriving from the Metropole will be rocket technicians, space research technicians. We plan to establish similar conditions for everyone, those from Guiana as well as those who will come from the Metropole, in the region of des Roches or Kourou.
Space, then, was to be a cooperative affair, employment split fifty-fifty and equality guaranteed for all. French Guiana would provide land and muscle; France would provide a rocket and expertise. Together they would forge the future, while living in a model town. Yet the very sentence underlining the technical nature of the future Metropolitan immigrants, meant to reassure, also reveals the original tension of the project: unlike those already living there, these space technicians would be arriving in French Guiana with a purpose in mind. They would not be competing with local residents for labor positions because they were skilled, and yet their very skills would also set them apart. Egalitarian
At a later point during a question and answer period, the issue of local effects came up again. A member of the city administration of Cayenne asked the president of CNES to elaborate on what the citizens of French Guiana might expect from the space project. After dwelling on images of direct flights between Paris and the new airport, the president returned to the issue of employment, suggesting a potential improvement in the “technical level” of Guyanais youth. Finally he considered what would happen if the project really took off and attracted the attention of other countries:
That would have an absolutely major effect on the development of French Guiana, by bringing a lot of people, increasing the consumption of vegetables, food crops, and so forth …. Naturally this development, as all development, has to be considered carefully not to be harmful, for I think that you are all for the development of your country, but that you also wish it to be harmonious, preserving those characteristics you like. In this you can absolutely count on our cooperation, since it is one of the questions that preoccupies us. We do not want this development to be disorderly, or to produce shantytowns instead of cities, because what is necessary is that French Guiana profit as much as possible.
At once guarded and optimistic, the agenda is laid forth: unlike past ventures in French Guiana, this will be no pie-in-the-sky affair, but concrete, real, and carefully planned. The benefits beyond the initial promise of jobs begin to be detailed, including accurate prophecies about increased air traffic and a direct link to Paris and rosy hopes for future phalanxes of Guyanais engineers. But a mask of naiveté about development is shed; not all modernization leads to progress, we are warned, there are dangers of inequality, social chaos, and cultural discord.
However, the press conference would not close on such a doubtful note. Near the end of the affair the departmental director of the Service for Radio and Telephones asked whether or not the president of CNES thought the average American was proud of what was taking place at Cape Canaveral. Yes, was the reply. The exchange continued: would not the Guyanais also one day be proud of their launch site? “Well, Sir,” the president replied, somewhat elliptically, “I think that we are proud enough of what we do, perhaps we are wrong, but after all when one does something well one is very proud.” Hanging in the air was the prospect of technical assimilation: if the citizens of French Guiana
Such affirmations of technological pride notwithstanding, hostility to the space center continued in certain quarters. Even in the mid-1960s, opposition papers described the project as a “cancer,” a “diabolical plan,” that would produce a “white city” by chasing Guyanais from their land and redistributing it to Europeans. A more general survey of Creoles living in Kourou, the most affected segment of the population, indicated that in 1971 fewer than half of them considered the changes brought about by the base to have been positive.[31] A sample of remarks collected at the time reveals two poles of reaction: appreciation of material improvements in everyday life, countered by distress over social tension, heightened cost of living, and perceptions of racism. On the one hand, space brings practical comforts, symbols of progress, and increased possibilities of wage labor:
“Before, there was nothing in Kourou. Now you can find anything you want to buy.”
“The base has brought us modernism [le modernisme]: I am for modernism. We have light all day long, drinkable water from the tap. With the fridge, everything preserves, and there's no more need to salt things …. Before, for entertainment, it was necessary to go to Cayenne. Now we have the movie theater and TV.”
“By making their base in Kourou, the Whites have brought us evolution. The time of farming is past. It's necessary to be modern.”
“The base has brought many people and a lot of work. We're no longer condemned to the abattis [agricultural plots]. You can choose the work you want to do, and when it doesn't pan out, you can always change.”
On the other hand, the bonanza of the space base bears the blame for market fluctuations and a more rigid accounting of time, as well as a heightened sense of racial inequity over work prospects and distinctions in pay scales:
“I had a good job, but the company went away, and up till now, I haven't found anything else.”
“Before, food for us was practically free[;] … now, you have to buy everything, and it is so expensive that you never have enough money to eat as well as before.”
“The least of white workers earns three time as much as a Guyanais worker. He has allowances, advantages, solely because he's white.”
“When I was on my habitation [agricultural site], I was free and happy with my farming and my breeding! I worked to my liking: I wasn't a prisoner of fixed schedules …. Now, I'm a slave of money, a slave of work!”[32]
Here, then, we have a split vote; an image of the Janus face of modern good and modern bad, with references to capitalism, slavery, inflation, and refrigerators, all encapsulated in the space center.
Like these personal views, the abstracted estimates of the space program's economic effects were mixed. The space center represented over half of all investment in French Guiana at the time.[33] In concrete terms the airport and port facilities found dramatic improvement, as did the road between Kourou and Cayenne. In terms of jobs the picture remained less clear, for while some 19,500 people throughout the department were officially listed as working in 1974 (as opposed to 12,000 in 1962), the level of employment relative to both the total population and the working population actually shrank slightly. Over the decade between 1965 and 1975, Kourou went from representing 1.75 percent of French Guiana's total population to 8.5 percent, even as that population grew from some forty thousand to close to sixty thousand. An earlier trend toward population loss was thus now effectively countered; out-migration of young Guyanais Creoles to France was balanced by in-migration of foreigners into Guyane. Yet in this very solution to the long-standing demographic dilemma lay the seeds of new and growing discord: French Guiana was becoming a more varied and decidedly multiethnic society. All in all, at least some twenty-four hundred non-French foreigners (Brazilians, Surinamese, and Colombians) participated in the construction of CSG.[34] Out of the thousand or so people employed at the functioning space center, approximately 60 percent were “detached” from the Metropole. Following official estimates of indirect effects, the functioning space program perhaps accounted for some 15 percent of the employed workforce. But significant elements of that workforce—at both top and bottom ends—were not Creole. Metro technicians and immigrant laborers played increasingly prominent roles.
Furthermore, the sudden bonanza of the space center and the visions of manna it inspired proved relatively fleeting. After the initial phase of construction was complete the need for unskilled labor fell drastically. The collapse of the Europa program and the consequent growing lull in space activity between 1972 and 1976 struck Kourou hard. Writing in 1975, the head of the local government warned that any further reductions would decimate not only the population of that town but also the economy of the department as a whole. These reductions highlighted inherent difficulties in Kourou's role as a peculiar sort of company town: “the support city of the European space effort,” as a planning report
THE CITY OF SPACE:
A TOUR OF KOUROU'S NEW TOWN
But what was the urban space created around the space center? How does the physical layout of Kourou fit with its descriptions? In the enthusiastic memoirs of a former prefect, a political figure strongly in favor of closer ties with France, the early story of space can be summarized as follows:
From a modest village of some hundred residents, Kourou has become a stylish city of five thousand souls, with a supermarket, a hospital, … two great hotels, a magnificent pool, where the Guyanais come to pass the weekend with their families or elegant company. Evidently researchers of CNES have the tendency to live in isolation, sticking with each other. But nevertheless they are consumers of remarkable purchasing power who affect the Guyanais market, and a number of new shops have been created in Cayenne to satisfy them. All Guyanais youth devoted to physics, mathematics, data-processing, and mechanics have been recruited by CNES. True, they are not numerous; most orient themselves toward letters, law, or medicine. But CNES has offered them other opportunities in their own department, and that they appreciate greatly. For jobs of lesser scale, a training center devoted to the various techniques of space has been opened in Kourou. Thus, as was easy to anticipate, the creation of CNES has been particularly beneficial to French Guiana. That has not, however, prevented the political situation from evolving in a different direction than it was logically permitted to hope.[36]
But such an outline allows no fine resolution; it provides only the most general of maps and vaguest of reservations (“evolving in a different direction than it was logically permitted to hope”). The French social scientist Marie-José Jolivet presents us with a more detailed, biting tour of the newly constructed Kourou, circa 1971. In Kourou, she suggests, “socio-professional hierarchy is found to be exactly inscribed on the ground.” This thesis, simultaneously descriptive and analytic, merits extended attention.[37]
Beginning the inventory by the Pointe des Roches, the granite promontory situated at the mouth of the river where one can still see “Dreyfus' Tower,”
- The “des Roches” quarter—Clearly at a distance from the rest of the town, this is the finest residential neighborhood. One finds there first of all a hundred-room luxury hotel, with bar, restaurant, and pool. Just beside it is a private club. Further on, by the sea, the two villas of the respective directors of CSG and ELDO, as well as six other houses reserved for their immediate deputies.
- The “executive” quarter—Further west, but always close to the sea, come then some one hundred identical villas set in rows, which principally house engineers and administrative personnel of the base.
- The city center—Italianate in style, its apartment blocks frame an internal plaza of sorts, prohibited to automobiles, adorned with flower beds and ornamental pools, and surrounded by arcades that open into shops. It is there that we find the supermarket … and the industrial bakery …. The residential buildings have two or three floors and include more than two hundred apartments, occupied by technicians, staff, and shopkeepers.
- The “Calypso” quarter—This consists of a group of three hundred prefabricated chalets, situated on the eastern side of the central plaza. These were the first lodgings built, originally to house the people who came for the installation of CSG, and later turned over to personnel of the construction companies. In 1971 their occupancy is more varied but still for the most part Metropolitan.
- The lower-income district—These low-rise, multiple-family dwellings stretch to the south and westward of the city center. In some 250 apartments Metropolitans and Creoles mix, mostly semiskilled workers, some teachers, and young civil service volunteers.
- The very low income district—This consists of high-rise blocks, built last at the entrance to town. This quarter includes two hundred apartments for the Creole workforce.
Such is the town of Kourou proper. Differentiation, one sees, comprises the primary element of its conception. But this phenomenon does not stop there: units forming the suburbs of the city only emphasize it. These are:
- The “Cité Stade,” or housing for the relocated—At the edge of town, this district was built to shelter those whose land was expropriated by the base. The structures are low-rise concrete blocks, the most economic possible, comprising sixty or so apartments that, in 1971, have already acquired a dilapidated look.
- The Maroon village—Well hidden behind the stadium and the empty lots that separate the housing for the relocated from the old town center, this village was built around a water standpipe by Saramakas and Bonis, with the help of recycled materials (old planks, beams) that were “generously” provided for them. In fact there are two distinct sections: Saramakas and
― 137 ―Bonis [Aluku] do not mix. As a whole it is composed of rows of rudimentary shacks that, far from resembling the charming villages along the Maroni, form nothing but a sad shantytown, despite the undeniable efforts by its residents to make the place more attractive.
- The Indian village—The Galibi [Kaliña] have changed location several times. Their villages were first formed of traditional huts: “carbets,” entirely open [wood and] dried-leaf shelters. In 1971, they have just settled in a new village built in accordance with their wishes. This last is situated at the entrance to the town but near the edge of the sea and far back from the road. It is comprised of enclosed huts in Creole style, forms now preferred by those concerned themselves, who are weary of being the object (private life included) of tourist curiosity.
- The “Old Town”—Starting from the dock of the old ferryboat, the old town stretches along a main street perpendicular to the river. Formerly the national road, this street has become a cul-de-sac since the construction of the bridge spanning the Kourou River some kilometers upstream and the subsequent displacement of the road. Some houses in concrete have appeared here and there. But as an ensemble, with its old wooden houses, its quaint town hall, and its little church, the old town preserves the flavor of a rural Guyanese Creole settlement.
Having provided us with the elements, Jolivet then sums up the resulting social constellation:
For the Boni or Saramaka laborer: salvaged boards and a well-camouflaged shantytown (the landscape must not be disfigured!). For the relocated cultivator: cramped accommodations in a reserved housing development. For the Creole worker: a low-income apartment in a public housing project located at the entry of the city. For the skilled worker: an apartment in a standard public housing complex at the edge of the town's center, the only place where it is imagined that Creoles and White could mix. And then, the White town, with its hierarchical gradations also scrupulously respected. Such is the conception of the new city of Kourou! Can one have dreamed up a more vivid demonstration of the expertise of Whites to orchestrate the countless hierarchical encounters that allow them to maintain the ideological bases of their domination?
While Jolivet's tour is hardly dispassionate—relentless anger pressing between every line—it remains careful and spatially exact. The built environment, entrenched as is, lends empirical clarity to her claims: people in buildings are easy to locate, easy to count. Both the power and the weakness of a fortress, after all, lie in its fixed position and visibility.[38] The new town of Kourou, so exposed in its French Guiana setting, cannot hide the starkness of its form. In replacing the vernacular
Figure 11. Villas, Kourou, 1993
Figure 12. Apartments, Kourou, 1993
Figure 13. Shack, Kourou, 1993
What we have in Kourou is a future archaeologist's dream. Structure speaks; society lies written on the ground. In one forgotten corner between river and the sea, a human epic is quickly rewritten, from first world to third world. Kourou, then, is a new colony (its imported elements “up to date”), but one that reproduces an old colonialism in its racial divides reinforced by social class. Taken more broadly, Jolivet's point carries further still. Social class here is reinforced by educational certification and technical expertise. The discrepancies of capitalism, wide verandah to tiny room, meet the gray uniformity of social welfare, row upon row of universal shelters; parts of France's space city
At the moment of Jolivet's survey, Kourou was also entering a period of crisis, anticipated by the failure of the Europa program. Yet even as the space center lapses into inactivity and the buildings it inspired begin to decay (their futuristic touches aging especially badly), the structure of the urban layout remains. The requisite elements of a launch program are still in place, as is the general shape of the town next to it. Prophetically, Jolivet concludes her spatial review by wondering if the hierarchical structure of Kourou would not necessarily reproduce similar social patterns should the program expand again.[39] No matter what might come after, the foundations of the future had been laid.
ARIANESPACE, ESA, AND THE LATER SPACE CENTER
“Ariane is the posthumous child of the General [de Gaulle].”
Former French minister of science andindustrial development, 1993[40]
In 1972 the future of the European Launcher Program appeared in as much doubt as that of the Space Age around it. The successful American moon landing left a vacuum of intensity and purpose, one that affected the Europeans at least as much as NASA. Britain, the driving force behind Europa I, left ELDO in 1970, and the Europa II program emerged stillborn. The shift in U.S. policy toward the space shuttle and toward greater cooperation in space cast the whole project of an independent European rocket into question on both technical and political grounds. The French, however, were not easily dissuaded. A working group at CNES sought a replacement for the planned Europa III, which was to be a two-stage rocket equivalent to the American Atlas Centaur, and came up with a three-stage design known as L3S. A “tough” European Space Conference in December of that year and an even more intense and interrupted meeting in Brussels during the summer of 1973 resulted in several momentous decisions. On the basis of these agreements, ELDO and ESRO were disbanded and then gradually reformulated over the next two years into a single entity, the European Space Agency (ESA), whose purview would include both space launches and space science. Furthermore, the conference endorsed the
ARIANE AND THE TECHNOLOGY OF SUCCESS
The European Space Agency proved a more resilient organization than its predecessors. Formally ratified in 1975, it grew to encompass thirteen member states (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom) as well as an associate member (Finland) and a cooperative one (Canada).[42] The commitment to the new launcher, rechristened Ariane, proved in retrospect an excellent gamble. While the program was not free from hitches and awkward delays, it managed to squeeze under its original deadline, producing a rocket by the end of 1979. Despite subsequent setbacks, the program blossomed, filling a void created by NASA's overreliance on the expensive and problem-prone space shuttle. Largely designed around tested technologies, Ariane evolved into a reliable rocket, well suited to placing communications satellites into equatorial orbit.
The Europeans also proved prescient in another respect: the market for commercial space launches, particularly of communications satellites, expanded considerably in the 1980s. The final frontier became an arena of interest to corporations as well as nation-states, and networks of international communications grew rapidly. Again led by the French, the European venture was ready. At the beginning of the decade the space consortium established a new, semiprivate corporation to coordinate and market the Ariane rocket. Under the name Arianespace, it gradually expanded from its first commercial launch in 1984 to claim over half the satellite market, gaining a significant boost after the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger and the subsequent withdrawal of NASA from commercial launches. The first version of the rocket, Ariane 1, gave way to more powerful siblings, Ariane 2, 3, and finally the mature design, Ariane 4, which appeared in 1988. After its fiftieth flight in 1992, the Ariane program could claim forty-five successful launches (a 90 percent success rate) and eighty-five satellites placed into orbit.[43] At the same time, plans were under way for a new generation of rockets, the Ariane 5 series. Wider, heavier, and shorter, this model was designed to lift close to twice as much as its predecessor into equatorial orbit.[44] The adoption of such a powerful launcher
The Ariane program initiated a second wave of construction in Kourou, at first picking up the slack left by the Europa cutbacks and then expanding the space center to unprecedented dimensions. The new launcher required a series of launchpads and other service facilities, and its success stimulated further urban growth. The number of active personnel required to run the operation remained roughly comparable to that of the earlier period, but the estimated factor of indirect employment related to the base grew.[45] In addition, the percentage of the workforce officially resident in Kourou expanded, surpassing 50 percent in 1985. At the beginning of the 1990s, the space program accounted for over half the department's production, supported a quarter of the population, and was involved in something on the order of two-thirds of all imports.[46] The postponement of the Hermès shuttle in 1991 dampened the expansive rhetoric of the space program, but the third wave of investment and publicity related to the Ariane 5 program, coupled with the continued general success of the Ariane 4 program, maintained CSG's high profile in and out of French Guiana. Given the hollow nature of the region's economy, the weight of the space program grew all the more obvious.
SOME NUTS AND BOLTS OF A LAUNCH
Let us examine an Ariane 4 launch “campaign” of the early nineties in detail, and through it the material culture of rockets and satellites. For all that a rocket may be a glorified firecracker, it is also a complicated one. Preparation of an Ariane takes about three years, including thirty months invested in the three stages and lesser periods invested in the other component parts. Because this is a joint European venture, the major contractors are large corporations spread throughout Europe, headed by the French firm Aerospatiale. Once together, the major elements of the rocket find their way to French Guiana by ship or plane, and after being unloaded near Cayenne, they are transported by road to Kourou. At this point the CSG launch campaign proper can begin, ideally lasting around a month. The preparation of the rocket takes place in the launch pad complex, first in an assembly area and then at the launch site a short distance away. The ground installations are expressly
Over the first five days, the three stages are erected into a rocket. The first two stages represent one of the keys of Ariane's success: powered by liquid fuels, they draw on proven technologies for “simplicity and reliability.” The third stage, however, represents technical progress, being cryogenic, or powered by oxygen and hydrogen at extremely low temperatures for extra thrust. Cryogenics, a technology over which the United States held a monopoly until the 1980s, is both “the key to power” and a matter of technical pride. French engineers were the second to successfully use cryogenics after the Americans, and the design of the next-generation Ariane 5 depends heavily on this approach.[48]
About thirteen days before the launch date the assembled rocket is transferred to the launch zone, while nine days before liftoff the first countdown rehearsals begin. At the same time a parallel preparation campaign for the satellite or satellites destined for orbit draws to a close in a highly sterile environment. Four days before launch the assembled and tested satellite finds a home in the bulbous cargo bay at the top of the thin rocket shaft. The completed object stands 58.4 meters tall (192 feet) and weighs some 339 to 470 metric tons (about 750,000 to 1,000,000 pounds), depending on the exact configuration. White, and painted with the logos of Arianespace and CNES and ESA, as well as the flags of participating nation-states, the completed launcher stands framed by the boosters attached to its base.[49] Though few onlookers consider it significant, many note at least one allusion embedded in the final form. Although all rockets may be vaguely phallic, Ariane 4—slim and shapely—is unmistakably so.
Final preparations include the filling of each stage with fuel, sending balloons aloft to measure the wind, and monitoring the equipment and other atmospheric conditions, particularly the threat of lightning. Sixteen hours and forty minutes before ignition (that point in time designated H0), the countdown begins. At H0 minus six minutes a synchronized sequence begins, the internal power supplies activate, and the umbilical cords binding the rocket to its platform swing away. At H0 the first stage and booster engines fire, and 4.4 seconds later liftoff begins. The rocket climbs vertically for about another eight seconds, slowly gathering speed, before beginning to tilt on its journey
The expense of this explosive venture is staggering. Beyond the cost of launch and the satellite itself, one must calculate appropriate insurance and frequently a spare satellite, should the first be lost. As one industry analyst likes to point out, satellites are worth far more than their weight in gold.[51] Yet if we consider the potential long-term return on initial investment, the economic logic of the industry emerges. Accepting a conservative total cost of two hundred million dollars to place and operate an individual communications satellite in geostationary orbit at the beginning of the 1990s, given eighteen thousand communication lines and an optimistic ten-year life span at full use, the long-term cost could translate into a figure as low as a fifth of a cent a minute.[52] Thus even while this branch of the transport business appears lumbering and slow in a world of high-speed mass production, it constitutes both a lucrative venture and a vital link in the vast network of international communication.
In sum, the technology before us consists of a few simple ideas and many complicated details. It is at once highly advanced and remarkably primitive, bending many fragile components into a raw exercise of power. It requires massive investments, risks all in the brief possibility of devastating explosion, and renders profits slowly at high volume. It is not—and could never be—the work of any single individual but requires the resources and skills of a large, competent organization.
HUMAN SYSTEMS AND ROCKET ENGINEERS
A technology, however advanced it be, does not in itself guarantee success. It must be applied by a rational organization.
Participant in a launching base conference, 1972[53]
To continue our consideration of the Guiana Space Center we need to establish a set of social facts delineating “Europe's Spaceport.” At the point of our ethnographic present tense (the early 1990s), the CSG occupies approximately nine hundred square kilometers of coastal land, almost the same surface area as the island of Martinique, or 1 percent of the total area of French Guiana. As we have seen, the primary technical activities conducted at the center consist of final preparation and assembly of the three launcher stages and the payload, preparing and launching the assembled rocket, and monitoring its ensuing trajectory and performance. The CSG provides both facilities and logistical support for visiting teams in charge of particular payloads in different launch “campaigns,” including testing and laboratory space as well as housing and social services. The program seeks to average eight to nine payloads a year using the Ariane 4 rocket, even while development continues apace on the Ariane 5 and the possible (if increasingly doubtful) future European space shuttle Hermès.[54]
The space operation consists of three separate, overlapping entities: CSG itself, a unit of CNES, the French national space agency, which is responsible for the launch facilities; Arianespace, a semiprivate corporation, which is responsible for the commercial aspects of the launch service; and ESA, an umbrella European space consortium, which is responsible for long-range planning and coordination of funding. Although united around common goals, this trio, sometimes jokingly referred to as a “trinity,” do not always share specific interests. CSG seeks to forward French national aims and encounters the brunt of local pressure. Arianespace worries the most about commercial operations, competition, client services, and profitability. And ESA works to increase the European heterogeneity of the program, gradually diluting its French purity and maintaining its public face of European cooperation.
Both directly and through a complex network of arrangements with private companies, CSG itself engages approximately 850 persons and Arianespace another 250, while ESA maintains a tiny bureau of liaison agents. However much economic activity it may generate, the combined space industry only directly employs something on the order of 7 to 10 percent of Kourou's population and less than 1 percent of French Guiana's. Most of the technical and upper-administrative positions are filled by Europeans, and almost half of the center's workforce is still composed of Europeans on temporary overseas contracts. Kourou has the greatest overall number of workers within CNES, outranking the administrative headquarters in Paris and the satellite control center in
In addition to those directly employed in technical tasks, the presence of the center has created a need for a wide range of nontechnical support occupations around it. Such positions include midlevel bureaucratic posts within the town, largely filled by Guyanais Creoles, as well as manual labor and maintenance, largely performed by illegal immigrants. Security is also a concern, and security guards, units of the French army, and a detachment of the Foreign Legion are all deployed during launches. Along with the resident technical personnel, one must add rotating teams of engineers and other representatives of Arianespace and CSG's clients present to oversee the preparation of their satellites for launch. Numbering some two hundred to four hundred at any one time, these missionnaires stay an average of two months. The town has a number of expensive hotels and restaurants to cater to them, and a unit within CSG attends to their logistical needs and arranges entertainment, including nature tours.
The launch base in Kourou is at once pivotal and peripheral to French and European space activities. The success or failure of every satellite first rides on the crucial moment when the rocket carrying it rises through the sky. Thus the responsibility of overseeing the ground operations is great. Yet much of the work actually done at the space center is relatively repetitious and routine—in the realm of operation rather than of design—and hence many of the jobs are not glamorous. Broadly speaking, personnel at CSG fit one of two categories: mobile professionals who are passing through while rising in the ranks of CNES or Arianespace and subordinate technicians who are fixed in place and position. It would be a mistake to divide these realms too completely. Not only do they blur in the cases of certain individuals, but in this realm of technocratic France it must be stressed that the administrators in question are largely engineers, recipients of technical—if elite—education.[56] However, for our purposes the distinction helps underscore an essential difference between categories of people associated with the Guiana Space Center, separating those for whom it represents a temporary point within a career from those for whom it represents a steady job.
These two categories—the mobile and the fixed—fall loosely if imperfectly along ethnic lines; although a number of Europeans fill low-level posts, few workers born in French Guiana enter the career orbit. After all, such a career entails motion: to acquire the requisite experience one must migrate between different key points in the space world rather than remain fixed in Kourou. In this fact lie seeds of systematic resentment. For CSG will never—could never—exist wholly within Guyane. The support systems upon which it depends, from material production to trained staff and clientele, extend elsewhere on the globe, weaving most thickly over technological centers of Europe. Even if French Guiana were to become independent, in order to operate the space center it would need personnel equipped with both instrumental knowledge and international connections. On a crucial, institutional level, the work of the cosmos is irreducibly cosmopolitan.
DEFINING THE FUTURE
Engineers think like savages, my friend, as Lévi-Strauss does not say. It's a matter of tinkering with what you have on hand to get yourself out of terrible muddles: what was only a stage becomes an infinite number of stages, a real labyrinth.
Bruno Latour, Aramis, 1992
However much the Guiana Space Center has changed between its first incarnation in the 1960s and 1970s and the Ariane era, it remains committed to a deep belief in progress, counterbalanced by a deep concern for reliability. Although outer space may have become an arena for commercial as well as national competition, it still represents an expanding domain, a seemingly endless horizon of human opportunity. The fundamental vision of the Space Age depends on improvement and expansion, a belief that the only thing standing between our species and the future is technical evolution. The essential optimism of Verne's nineteenth-century adventurers, cheerfully sailing out of their cannon to colonize the moon, remains very much alive. At the same time, however, rockets remain undeniably tricky and explosive. What is intended to be a transport vehicle can easily become a bomb. Thus every procedure must be standardized and routinized in an effort to achieve consistency. Yet however standardized things become, they remain imperfect and volatile at such a complex
The tension between a progressive sensibility and a neurotic awareness of potential disaster has produced a fertile field of representation around CSG. This representational field, running through Europe, French Guiana, and the Ariane rocket, constitutes an essential dimension of the space enterprise. Examining it will allow us to excavate layers of meaning surrounding the space program and find fragments of cosmology and ritual in the culture of fantasy borne by Verne's descendants, proud authors of “French Guiana, Land of Space.”
6. The Margin of the Future
The future is more complicated than the past.
Satellite pioneer J.R. Pierce, The Beginnings of Satellite Communication, 1968
A LAUNCH WITH GEORGES
In the words of a border patrolman watching on television in California: “I was there, I was part of it, I saw it happen.” In the words of a foreign student vacationing at the Cape: “I am part of history, I have seen the launch.”[1]
Comments on Apollo 11, 1969,quoted inDale Carter, The Final Frontier, 1988
Near the end of 1992 I had the pleasure of receiving a formal invitation to an Ariane launch. Already present in French Guiana (rather than flying in on the charter plane from Paris) and a guest of the European Space Agency (rather than the launch company Arianespace), I was attached to the tour in a more marginal way than the main group of assembled journalists and dignitaries, spending my time in the company of the only other official ESA guest and, periodically, our liaison officer. My companion for the day, whom I shall call Georges, was an affable French businessman. Because of family connections, he had been invited to indulge his passion for space at this center of French technological pride, touring the site and watching the rocket rise. Expansive by nature (addressing me informally almost immediately), he kept up a running commentary throughout the day and evening. I will recount
Figure 14. Control room, CSG, 1993
The morning began with a slide show, film, and briefing in three languages: French, English, and Japanese (the respective lingua francas of the space center, international technology, and this particular satellite). For over an hour we learned about the benefits of equatorial launches and how CSG has become “one of the world's most efficient launch pads and thus contributes to the worldwide reputation of Guiana, France and Europe.” Simultaneous translation was available over headphones throughout much of the presentation. The audience, composed largely of middle-aged European men, along with a few women, a contingent of Japanese, and a smattering of Guyanais Creoles, listened politely without apparent passion.
Following the briefing, we were ushered outside into a group of air-conditioned buses marked by language, French or English. Georges and I climbed aboard a French bus, which left for a tour of the new Ariane 5 installations under construction. Along the way we passed rolled barbed wire and military guards. We inspected a test stand where the solid boosters of the future rocket would soon be put through their paces, a large trench gaping beyond it to receive the flames, and the cavernous hanger where the assembled rocket would take shape. To me it resembled nothing so much as a wide silo, or giant barn, lonely against the sky. From its gates, twin pairs of tracks stretched toward the horizon, awaiting the day when they would support the launch table bearing the future rocket to its launchpad. For now they ran empty, seemingly to nowhere, or to infinity. Georges was excited by everything and particularly impressed with the aesthetic combinations of beige, red, and white used in the design. All told, the completed Ariane 5 ground facilities would represent an investment of something over a billion dollars.[2]
Lunch was held at one of Kourou's newly added hotels and consisted of rum aperitifs followed by local fish, wine, and a dessert labeled bavarois exotique. As the dark-skinned staff maneuvered between the tables, the conversation around me turned to international cooperation, racism, and stereotypes. Cooperation, we all agreed, sounded like a fine principle; the question was how to encourage it in practice. Georges was convinced that international space ventures offered the best possibilities for a peaceful future, a position endorsed by the engineer sitting next to him. However, that man noted, much work remained to be done. Even with all the success of Kourou, few French people even knew where it was, assuming on a basis of the name and hazy colonial memory that the launch base was in Africa.
Inspired by another glass of wine, Georges went further. Space, he suggested, constitutes a new religion. Through its exploration, people can come together and find a common future. Soon, however, space-planes will replace rockets, taking off directly from Paris. Then the connection will be cleaner, more direct. When I asked him what he thought would happen at that point to French Guiana, he shrugged. “They're part of France,” he said. “They have their vote, and anyway, we support them. A good part of these tours, you know, are to explain to us where our taxes are going.” He added that he considered Guyane to be a rich but hardly “clean” country. Cayenne was the limit, its filth bordering on the third world; Kourou was better, cleaner, and more modern. But the
Back on the bus, we headed for the ELA 2 launch complex, where the present rocket sat ready for flight. As heavy rain began to drum on the roof of the assembly facility, our young French guide told us how CSG experienced many problems with rust and hence was committed to a continual cycle of painting. The high humidity, he went on, also necessitated constant air-conditioning. As had happened a number of times in the different presentations, here he made reference to the space program in the United States, telling us that the climate at the Kennedy Space Center presented similar problems. At this point I noted that NASA represented the acknowledged industry standard, with Americans and (to a lesser extent) Japanese serving as the guarantors of value. American corporations, it was mentioned several times, believed in Ariane. We moved on to a set of control rooms where technicians monitored machines. Our troop watched them through glass. Amid the sea of light-skinned men in white shirts were a couple of women, and by the door stood two dark-skinned security guards.
Having inquired into my own interests, Georges proceeded to give me suggestions for further research. To understand the history behind CSG, he insisted, I must visit the White Sands missile base in New Mexico and, of course, the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Cold War, I must never forget, began with the race for the German V-2. Further, I must not underestimate the importance of the bandes dessinées (cartoon books), including Tintin, which he assured me had influenced an entire generation, particularly the episode where the hero visits the moon. The only problem with satellites and such, Georges went on, was the way they dramatically altered the scale of everyday life. Too much information flows through our brains now, all too quickly. He shook his head. Still, exploration, space, this was the path toward the future.
That evening Georges and I found each other again, in the parking lot where the invited guests waited to be herded onto buses, a much broader crowd this time, including many locals. After a long (and surprisingly cold) air-conditioned ride to the observation site, through guard posts and past long dark stretches of barren landscape, we sipped drinks and chatted until the countdown. As a voice intoned the descending numbers, a hush fell over the crowd, which collectively turned from the television screens and each other to face the horizon. Then the night was shattered as the rocket—at once distant but undeniably real—took to the sky. For a moment it wavered in the fragility of sheer power, and then, as if gaining confidence, gathered momentum. As its
After the launch we returned to the Technical Center of CSG, to enjoy an ample open-air buffet beside fire-fighting equipment: sipping champagne and eating caviar sandwiches, spiced chicken, somosa-style pastries, sweet tartlettes, and eclairs. An official of CSG and a representative of the Japanese communications corporation both made short congratulatory speeches, but few people listened, moving quickly toward the food and talking to their neighbors. Later there would be a poolside party at the Roches hotel, and the guest list would tighten, but for now the crowd was fairly mixed, including a number of local residents not associated with the space business as well as employees and clients of the center. An engineer told me he disliked being in the televised control room during the launch. “It's a sham,” he said, pointing out that the whole affair is automated and that most of the assembled rows of space personnel are there for show, to present a face of authority. Seeing the rocket in open air, even at a distance, he thought felt more real.
I drove back to Cayenne late that night on a largely deserted road. Along the way I picked up a hitchhiker, a security guard originally from Haiti. He spoke French quite well and told me that he had lived in Guyane with his wife for about a dozen years. In a good month his security post might bring in seven thousand francs (some thirteen hundred dollars—far less, needless to say, than the salary of a European space engineer), but the work was irregular and he did not enjoy it. He would prefer to migrate north to the United States or Canada; he would like to see his family in Haiti again; at the very least he would like to find a new job, but for now he was stuck. I dropped him off in a poor section of town and turned on the radio. A man's voice spoke in Creole-accented French about independence. Foreign investment would be allowed in the new Guyane, he proclaimed, as long as the profits poured back into the country to eliminate unemployment. Beneath the ground, he suggested, lies the real wealth of the future, the precious mineral keys to development.
The next day the tour continued, but neither Georges nor I took part in it. As scheduled, the guests spent the day on the Iles du Salut, enjoying the atmosphere of a tropical island while exploring the ruins of the penal colony. This trip constituted a regular feature of the public relations visit; a chance for the invited guests to experience a taste of “authentic” Guyane before boarding the return flight to Paris. In case of
Lest the tone of my narration mislead, I should stress that I liked Georges, however I might disagree with his political and historical assumptions or question his vision of the future. He was friendly to everyone he met and spoke freely. I also believe he was quite sincere in his faith in the Space Age. Thus I think of him while writing, and present him to you now, in order to give a sense of a sympathetic believer behind the rhetoric of the space enterprise. Although his statements about outer space may appear bombastic and empty, they contain a core of belief and affect. And, like the launch at their center, they are not simply false. Watching a rocket leave the ground, feeling its presence, can evoke a powerful sensation of reality. While some in the audience may pray for its safety and others may speculate about the thrill of explosion, a recognition of significant risk remains.[3] Although Ariane's rise is not exciting or magical to everyone—some complain how small, slow, and distant it appears—like the rhetoric around it the event contains a moment of literal power, an instrumental jolt between myth and fact. For humans and their tools have indeed left their planet. And that dream, made real, is not something to take too lightly. As Walter MacDougall reminds us in describing the hyperbole of the moon landing: “President Nixon thought those days in July the greatest week since Creation—ridiculous perhaps, but also the most honest image of the hopes and fears of technocratic man: men as gods, creators in their own right with all the glory and tragedy of divinity.”[4] Georges, I am sure, would more than agree.
SPACE FOR REPRESENTATION
A cultural system that can launch earth satellites can dispense with gods entirely.
Leslie White, “Satellites and Gods,” 1957
One of the metaphors which has occurred to me partly through this experience of trying to share my experience of being an astronaut, is the idea of the space ship as the Gothic Cathedral of our age.
NASA astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman at ESA conference,in Jean Schneider and Monique Léger-Orine, Frontiers and Space Conquest, 1987
The language woven around rockets has been far from modest. A complex field of representation, influenced by mythology and science fiction as much as by technical description, underlies both the overall narrative of the space effort and its composite elements. Not only is the “step” into outer space described in cosmic terms, but the names of rockets and satellites—particularly Western ones—carry mythic allusions. The American space program invoked Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo to watch over the march to the moon and named its fiery chariots Atlas, Jupiter, and Saturn. Not to be outdone, the Europeans stressed their connection to classical civilization and the tradition of science, and when it came time to choose a moniker for their new launch design, they recalled a Cretan princess, whose precious thread allowed escape from the labyrinth. Underlying this language we find a tireless claim to significance (a “messianic zeal” one French space official called it), based on a mixture of national pride and a very general anthropology. For even as the technological prowess of a particular nation-state rises or falls with its rocket, the figure moving into the Space Age is Man, that aging, gendered actor on the evolutionary stage.[5]
Let us examine the rhetoric of space, beginning with a brochure presenting the European Space Agency, its activities, and its aims. “Our Inheritance—Our Future: Space,” the opening line reads, neatly collapsing time into a geometry of human expansion. Concerns for knowledge, civilization, and competition mingle through the paragraphs that follow:
From time immemorial, human beings have looked up at the Sun, the Moon and the planets and beyond them to the stars, and wondered. The Universe has drawn their mounting curiosity throughout the millennia. They have worshipped it, dreamed about it and tried, for many thousands of years, to learn more about it with the limited means at their disposal. Europe has an invaluable heritage in this respect, built upon the work of the ancient Greeks and, nearer our time, of such famous astronomers as Copernicus … Kepler … Galileo … Newton … Halley … and so many, many more. With this inheritance behind them, it was clear that Europe could and would not be left behind when the “space era” was suddenly upon us with the almost unbelievable news that the Soviet Union had launched the world's very first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, in October, 1957.[6]
Descent, it would seem, is destiny. Europe's very heritage must drive it forward, prevent it from being “left behind” (symbolically on a lower technological plateau, and literally on Earth). The goal of the presentation, we learn at the end of the overview, is to inspire pride in the reading public (“who are after all financing our endeavors”)—the pride of having participated in this, “the greatest adventure of the twentieth century, if not all time.”[7]
Here we have the major themes of space: religion and evolution. In the heavens, divinity and humanity can meet. The future is inevitable and fast approaching. It has always been overhead, beckoning, in the mysteries of the night skies. Now that destiny calls, one has to be on the rocket, or one is eliminated from this leap of destiny, bypassed and terrifyingly “left behind.”[8] This is a race, a challenge of selectionary pressure, and once the gates of heaven are thrown open, one must leap through them to evolve. The combination of technocultural survival and progressive expansion is strikingly imperial in tone, recalling the rivalries of late-nineteenth-century European empires, where a focus on national expansion blended with ideologies of human progress. Not surprisingly, one of the frequent allusions in the Space Age is to an earthly adventurer, Christopher Columbus. Outer space is only the most modern of New Worlds.[9]
The choice of the name “Ariane” for Europe's resurrected launcher program is also instructive. The designation “L3S,” while suitable for a hypothetical technical enterprise of a three-stage rocket, lacked the requisite “poetry” to represent Europe's future in space. CNES considered about two hundred suggestions, including “Ganymede” (the male lover of Zeus) and “Vega” (which was dropped when someone pointed out that it was the brand name of a Belgian beer). Two other proposals seriously considered were “Phoenix” (the mythical bird reborn in fire) and “Penelope” (the faithful wife of Odysseus). Delegates from France's partner countries eliminated both of these, the “still warm ashes” of the Europa project counting against the first, and connotations of an interminable wait eliminating the second. However, the French minister for industrial and scientific development, who was “very knowledgeable about Greek mythology,” came up with “Ariane” (Ariadne), a name he would have given his daughter if he had one.[10] The allusion to Theseus's escape from the labyrinth appealed to everyone, though some wondered about giving a feminine name to so masculine a rocket. The gender of the machine, though treated as a topic of light humor, was actively considered. In the end, the choice was clear. “Ariane, part of a common heritage
Not only was the naming of Europe's rocket conscious and carefully considered, but the resulting object quickly became anthropomorphized in both formal and informal presentations. Through the alchemy of feminine pronouns the metal and chemical tower transformed into a woman, powerful but fully in the service of Europe. This Ariane had a mission: to set Europe free from NASA and to demonstrate that old continent's unity and its future prowess following French leadership. Another example from promotional materials makes these links clearly: “The name Ariane harked back to the earliest of European mythology. It was Ariane who provided Theseus with the thread which he used to make his way out of the Minoan labyrinth. The modern Ariane takes satellites beyond the clutches of gravity, and Europe out of the labyrinth of dependency on others for launches.”[12] In acquiring a name, the European launch vehicle also acquired the narrative around it. And as the program became successful, the designation “Ariane” could be read back into prophecy, developing new meaning. Europe, in the role of Theseus, had indeed escaped the Space Race labyrinth, avoiding the superpower Minotaurs. Ariadne's golden thread led from the Guiana Space Center up through the sky. Old culture, in the end, can learn new tricks.
In this abbreviated allusion, Ariadne, the “feminine” figure behind the scenes, moves to the front of the myth. The hoard of (mostly) male engineers, administrators, and technicians remain faceless, and in the absence of an astronaut, the rocket itself rules supreme. The personification contained in this promotional material continues, enumerating the design's progress: “All dynasties express themselves by numbers, and Ariane is no exception. Ariane 1 founded the family fortunes; its first test flight was in 1979. Since then the family has grown in statue [sic] and strength through Ariane 2 and 3 until today Ariane 4 ensures that, like all good leaders, the demands of the people—in this case the customers—are met.”[13] The machine has become an actor, a ghost of monarchy, safely materialized and ruling through international corporation. Of course, this is all the coy and hopeful prose of publicity brochures. But within its focus on a humanized machine we find a key element of modern representation: the magic of scale.
Unlike many products of high technology, launch rockets are not items of mass production but very singular objects. Each represents a substantial investment of materials and hours upon hours of labor, unified and dramatically tested. In a world familiar with giant quantities,
Yet space is transparent and obfuscating all at once. Even as rockets and satellites represent clear and limited objects, the vast alignments of technologies behind them are nominally acknowledged but effectively hidden. At a great enough distance, the sea of humanity resolves into a single being free from internal conflict, facing the horizon. Still, while the apotheosis of the machine beyond the atmosphere may obscure the actual technologies involved, it is the faceless army of designers who hold the key card of defining function. Though the name matters, it is not a technical issue: the rocket would fly, whether called Ariane or L3S. Symbolism, while at the center of things, is constantly trivialized. The mythic figures invoked in this technoculture are a matter of poetic overlay rather than engineering; in the sense of divine efficacy, they are effectively dead, disenchanted in their very resurrection. Moreover, their symbolic fabric itself is thin, stretched to simplicity by rational disbelief. The cosmology of space gyrates between grandiosity and simplicity; amid the passive, detailed jargon of technical description we find flat mythologies—old ghosts now ordered by a straight arrow of progress. In making their history, the prophets of space neutralize the past, drawing on the machinery of the present and the endless gravity of the future. Returning to old tales, they forget that heroes could be as base as noble in conduct, open to opportunity even while directed by fate, creatures of selfish desire and fickle interest. Theseus was no exception. When he sailed back to Athens, he left Ariadne behind.[15]
EUROPE, FRANCE, AND ARIANE
Hermes is not only a technical challenge, but also a demonstration of Europe's determination to take an active part in the further evolution of the human race.
ESA, “Hermes,” 1991
Within the representational field of space, Ariane oscillates between overlapping demands of European cooperation and French national interest. On the one hand, the launcher program constitutes a multinational European enterprise. In this setting, as we have seen, common labor and the technical investment of an entire continent erase nationality, replacing it with an appeal to common humanity, professional identity, or greater cultural heritage. On the other hand, France has always been the driving force behind the resuscitated European launch program, remaining the largest investor in Ariane in symbolic as well as material terms. Here national pride takes central stage: Ariane is a shining example of French independence, ingenuity, and leadership. These twin influences affect both general representation of the program and particular concerns regarding the role of the Guiana Space Center.
By way of illustration let us glance at two advertisements, the first for a multinational corporation and the second for the French government. The figure of universal citizen of space takes clear shape in a Matra Marconi promotion that shows two figures, clad in sterile outfits, their backs turned, reaching over their heads to adjust a gleaming tangle of machinery. Around them the copy reads:
Higher/Nearer: Who's French? Who's British? Who cares. They share a common language. They have a single culture—space. They belong to Matra Marconi Space, the first international space company. Across national boundaries. Without technological limits. Their goal: to bring higher technology nearer to users.[16]
It is amid this general, unified race of corporate technicians that ESA stresses its difference: peaceful cooperation before all. The context for French desire for particular national recognition becomes apparent in the following public relations release from the French Embassy:
Throughout the world, France benefits from its image as the country of savoir-vivre—knowing how to live well. The French do not refute this image: they even work hard at defending it through painstaking efforts to ensure the quality of French wines, the refinement of French cuisine, and the charm of pedestrian promenades in their cities and towns, so rich in museums and historical monuments. But the American tourist visiting the Centre Georges Pompidou or discovering the Pyramide du Louvre might not be aware of another reality—that France is a country of technological prowess, capable of eminent and spectacular accomplishments known the world over—from the world's fastest train, to the Ariane rocket, to nuclear reactors, to advanced telecommunications systems.[17]
Echoing de Gaulle's desire that Frenchmen “marry their century,” this passage serves as a reminder that official France sees itself as leading the
For the most part, French and European interests align, in keeping with strong French commitment to a united Europe. As a former French minister for science and research explains in the preface to a book about Ariane, the launcher combines market logic with the promise of common development: “It is easier, and more agreeable, to build Europe by constructing the future than by repairing the effects of past explosions.”[19] Ariane promises the allure of a pure future, banishing historical darkness with a new and common technological day. However, at points the interests of Europe and France diverge, and one of the places they do so most concretely is with regard to the Guiana Space Center. ESA has worked to distribute contracts related to its projects to its member states in proportion to their financial commitment. As the Ariane program has grown to be more central and successful, and the level of its funding filtered through ESA has grown (particularly with the Ariane 5 program), that organization has sought to make the workforce at CSG less exclusively French and more representative of Europe. In contrast, the French agency CNES, which owns CSG, has no particular desire to yield slots within it to workers of other nationalities, and the French employees of the space center are in general less than enthusiastic about welcoming them. French Guiana, after all, is French territory, and the de facto work language of CSG is French, unlike ESA's official Anglo-Franco bilingualism. Addressing the fears of French workers, the head of the European delegation at CSG admitted that the process of “Europeanization” was “a little barbaric and very technocratic” and that it had prompted concern about a possible loss of “soul” as well as a job. By way of official response, the center points out that it counts only 106 “non-French Europeans” (largely Italians and Belgians) in the extended local space program and that knowledge of the French language is obligatory.[20]
The life of Europeans who live in Kourou is not always easy. Several non-French employees emphasized to me the degree to which the base is a French domain and the extent to which they feel alien. Even an official interview with an Italian couple in CSG's largely upbeat house magazine, Latitude 5, reveals strains of discord. Information, the Italians complain, was difficult to obtain prior to their departure and
THE CITY OF THE STARS
Living conditions in Kourou, whether in a villa or an apartment, are extremely pleasant.
Anonymous, Kourou, 1987
Kourou, ville maudite [Kourou, cursed town].
Graffiti on wall near marketplace, 1992
If relations between France and the rest of the European space force sometimes exhibit strain, such discord pales before the tensions between the French space program and the rest of French Guiana. As we have seen, the Guiana Space Center plays an uncomfortably prominent role in the local economy, and both the infrastructural developments surrounding it and the everyday life of its employees have served as a catalyst for dramatic social change. Efforts to represent the place of CSG in Guyane reflect such tension, and at times it is difficult to believe that all parties are describing a common subject. From the perspective of the space center and many of its employees, the Ariane program not
Ethnic terms near stereotype infuse everyday speech amid the order of society in much of French Guiana, and discussion of the space center is no exception. Kourou is sometimes called a “white” city: although Metros may only account for perhaps a quarter of its population, they dominate the upper echelons of the space enterprise and set most norms of behavior and consumption.[23] The “City of the Stars” is a place that evokes strong reaction in the rest of Guyane, much of it negative. The local left resents what they perceive as a legacy of colonialism, referring to CSG as CSE, the “Centre Spatial Européen.” Middle-class residents of Cayenne, Creole or otherwise, often dismiss it as a “town without a center,” and reports in the local media identify it as a locus of crime. Rotating space personnel tend to either enjoy or hate Kourou, depending on whether they interpret their experience as adventure or exile. Yet I have met few people who live there for the town itself; it is not local enough for those seeking French Guiana, not global enough for those seeking France. Rather, it seems a place where lives muddle but rarely mingle, a suture between worlds.
Let us take another quick tour through Kourou, following its street map. The town has grown drastically in the decades that have passed since Jolivet's 1971 description, and its divides are less crude but no less visible. The luxury Hotel des Roches is still there, if a bit faded around the edges, as are the rows of villas beyond it. On the beach one finds a motley collection of sunbathers and volleyball players, mostly Metro, as well as the “Aloha Holiday Center,” a thatch-sheltered bar framing the islands out to sea. A few men of indeterminate age, sporting tattoos, thick bodies, and cigarettes, mingle with bored teenagers at its counter, and nearby a group of Brazilians kick a soccer ball. The road fronting the shore, named for Félix Eboué (the colonial administrator, Free French hero, and one of Guyane's most famous sons), twists inland near the end of the beach and becomes the Avenue des Frères Kennedy (the Kennedy Brothers), nicely intersected by Christopher Columbus. Nearby a new set of green villas stand imposingly, with every entrance, even the garage, carefully barred. To the left one finds the central section of the New Town constructed in the first expansion, with squares
At the end of the Avenue des Frères Kennedy lies a major thoroughfare, the Avenue de France, which twists into the Street of the Jesuit Fathers. Across the street lies a modest quarter of low houses, schools, and a hospital, while to the right stretches another modest line of apartment buildings. Continuing in that direction, one encounters a remarkable constellation of the military, passing the yellow compound that houses the Third Regiment of the French Foreign Legion, behind which the Rue Alfred Dreyfus intersects with the Allée Bonaparte. Just beyond, the Village Indien matches this representational directness with the intersection between a street named for the Caribs and one named for the Galibi. At the end of the Avenue de France lies the traffic circle where it intersects with the Avenue Gaston Monnerville, another of Guyane's (and France's) former political luminaries. The road beyond leads out of town, past an artificial lake, a water ski center, two hotels (Atlantis and Mercury), and a residence named for Saint-Exupéry. Left and right lie newer districts that sport more imaginative architecture than that of earlier periods, including tiles and pastel colors that evoke southern France. The types of dwellings vary more quickly here as well, apartments and houses keeping less to themselves. In the area closer to the shore the street names follow the arts (Picasso, Dali, Matisse, Gauguin, van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Monet, Renoir, Seurat, and Cézanne), while on the other side we find representatives of the letters (including Sartre, de Beauvoir, Baudelaire, Mauriac, and Cendrars, and, a bit further out, Senghor), with a scientist (Pasteur) and a politician (Jaurès) thrown in for good measure.
Moving in this direction our first stop is the supermarket, which, along with the ubiquitous “Chinese” shops (small food stores predominantly owned and operated by Chinese proprietors), provides residents of the town with most of their staple items. Further on, the road divides around a small plaza that contains a covered fountain and is surrounded by small specialty shops of the sort common to any French town. Délices de la Ferme snuggles next to Déli-France, imported meat, baked goods, and mountain bikes are all available, and a small crowd at the corner bar surveys the scene. Continuing past another lake on the right, an ice cream parlor, and an ethnic arts store, we enter another field of names. A gallery of musicians lies to the left (Verdi, Mozart, Strauss,
Figure 15. Cows, Kourou, 1992
Skirting the lake to the left instead, we move away from Mother Theresa and toward Martin Luther, passing a sports complex and municipal pool, en route back to the classic standby of modern French thoroughfares: Victor Hugo. Beyond some of the first temporary housing built for the space center lie the library and city hall, near the intersection with the older Avenue des Roches (named for a rocky spit at the juncture of river and sea). The road back to the Hotel des Roches runs past a hydroponic garden, as well as cul-de-sacs named for the Caribbean and the test rocket Véronique. Across the Avenue des Roches, the Rue du Suriname leads to the Village Saramaca, hardly changed from Jolivet's shantytown.[24] This crowded jumble of dwellings is
Throughout the tour the incongruity between reference and place is striking. The stars of civilization lend their names to shadeless streets, prefabricated buildings, and hot concrete. Air-conditioning and insects provide a background hum, broken by the sound of automobiles. The daily dramas reported in the news seem well removed from the themes of high art: a break-in here, a brawl there, a bike race, or yet another beauty contest. The villas sport security bars, and a number of shacks sprout satellite dishes. The composite landscape is undeniably modern, but its starker lines recall little of the grandeur of Mozart or the subtlety of Matisse. The allusions are present in name, but in name only.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF GRANDEUR
The location of the Space Centre and launch site in Guiana, a French state located in South America, has helped to transform this country [sic] its old unwholesome image—often called the Green Hell, Inferno, or the land of jail—into a brilliant picture of the avantgarde: “French Guiana, Land of Space.”
Jean-Michel Desobeau, “CSG: Guiana Space Center,” 1990
Like all of the European space program, the Guiana Space Center invests quite heavily in public relations. A multitude of glossy brochures are available to describe its activities and overall mission, and visits by the public are encouraged. Beyond the ample welcome of the sort that Georges and I received, CSG runs regular tours of its facilities and features a space museum on its grounds. Although many visitors come from beyond French Guiana, the center has become a significant tourist attraction in relative local terms and invests energy in creating a positive local impression.[25] While its critics might complain about the tight
Entitled “When the Sky Takes Root in the Ground of Guyane,” the brochure's cover shows a number of humped cattle standing before a nebula. A bit further on the subject narrows to “The Milky Way and the City of the Stars,” and subsequently we learn that the topic at hand is “The Milky Way, a project for the space of a road.”[26] A remarkable flood of poetry follows, accompanied by equally remarkable illustrations, including another nebula with stars marked for “Monumentality,” “Economy,” “Culture,” “Technology,” “Urbanism,” and “Health,” and a river flowing from the tail of the Hermès space shuttle, on which three Amerindian children paddle a canoe. Only after nearing the end of the brochure does one realize that the “space of a road” in question was that running between Rochambeau Airport and Sinnamary, a singularly unremarkable stretch of two-lane highway. At the very end of the document we find that its call for research into practical and symbolic domains (“Functional, Technical, Aesthetic, Toponymic, Climatic, Ecological, Ethnological, Historical, Geographical, Touristic, Economic, and Mythic”) is intended to lay the groundwork for a design competition. Given that all this symbolic interplay is to occur over a mere 131 kilometers of lightly traveled road, it would be a daring architect indeed who would undertake the Milky Way commission.
The space program does inspire practical as well as symbolic investment. New buildings rise, and new plans are made. Yet the results remain uneven, and with every new neighborhood built, the shantytown of the Cité Saramaca becomes all the more glaring.[27] The flights of rhetoric aloft, such as that along the Milky Way (which with the postponement of the Hermès program and the financial problems of French Guiana's local government has quietly faded from view), leave the red soil of the tropics far below. If the road through Kourou is indeed a mirror, it reflects a mobile reality more immediate and homely than Ariane. Still, however meaningless in technical terms, the space center furiously renews the symbolic landscape around it, continually struggling to redefine both present and past through the future.
REWRITING TIME
“History” means: yes, we know there were disagreements, but that's in the background, that's over and done with, let's forget it and deal with what is on the table in front of us right now.
Stacia Zabusky on ESA personnel, Launching Europe, 1995
Time is of immediate interest to space personnel, whose experience of French Guiana stretches between exotic fascination and desperate boredom. Separation from “civilization” and experience of life in a “third-world country” can cut both ways: the living is “free” but also at times lacking in “culture,” its rhythm more relaxed, a bit of “easy California living,” but without benefit of major urban centers.[28] For those who long for elsewhere, the sojourn resembles that of a prisoner. The most graphic story I heard along these lines was that of an engineer who kept a calendar with vacation days marked in red and completed days crossed off in blue. He then watched the white space between the blue and red diminish, wistfully awaiting his next leave. In such a calendar we have a meticulous flag of exile, the colors of France infusing the slow passage of time.
However, for many displaced Metros the sense of exile mingles with one of adventure. The following comments from an interview in the internal magazine for CNES provide an intentionally representative example. The subjects, JL and C, are both thirty-five years old, have two young children, and have lived in Kourou for two and a half years. He works in the planning of satellite operations, while she is a secretary.
JL:The appeal of the money, whatever one thinks, was not my first motivation. I wanted to change my surroundings [me dépayser], to go to a hot country. I spent my childhood in Morocco, and here I found the heat that I missed.
C:
The nature is fantastic here, but I'm waiting until the children are bigger to do some jungle tours. French Guiana, it's a paradise for children …. The worst for me are the mosquitoes and red ants; it's impossible to picnic.
JL:
In the Metropole I would never do what I do here …. I have nevertheless been disappointed not to find at CSG the same wealth of athletic and cultural activity as at Toulouse [another CNES center].
C:
Currently, because of having young children, I feel a bit cut off from others. I miss that. Kourou is a closed city. You meet the same people at work and in town. People are only here in passing, they are tied to contracts with the space base. Above all, I haven't yet made the effort …. Cayenne certainly offers greater interaction with populations with deeper roots [mieux enracinées].
When I return to the Metropole, I long to return to Kourou and this calm rhythm of life. I'll renew my contract to spend three more years here.[29]
Life is easy, even without picnics. Yet Kourou is closed, particularly for a woman with small children. With less professional stake in staying in French Guiana, C waxes less enthusiastic than her husband. She also points out how transitory the space population is, much less involved in its surroundings than the neighboring population of Cayenne.
This detachment on the part of détachés, those on assignment from the Metropole, is not universal or always intentional. A few become actively involved in French Guiana, being stationed there for long periods or at different points in their careers. Yet their involvement remains fragmentary and subject to class interests well removed from the majority of the population. Witness an affable Belgian ESA official, whose efforts included working to establish the department's first golf course. He warns of the need for more balanced economic growth in the region, but his appeal remains a call for general progress: “The Land of Prison has become the Land of Space, but Space must remain only a prelude and a support in creating a real development of this region, complete and balanced in all three sectors, primary, secondary, and tertiary …. Europe and CSG have to continue to improve … and French Guiana rejoin them.”[30] Such a view finds consistent voice in pronouncements of most space officials: appreciation of local charm and a desire for mutual growth. As a director of CSG commented on his assumption of the post:
Guyane? I like Guyane very much! … The nature is extraordinary, it is still a place on the Earth where there are many things to do, which makes for living well, I believe, in all senses of the term …. The adventure of space is exciting, the adventure of developing a country such as Guyane is exciting too. It must be hoped that the space adventure helps French Guiana to develop, and conversely, that French Guiana equally helps the development of space on its ground.[31]
Yet even as such space officials express hopes for the development of French Guiana, the greatest pleasures they find in life there lie not in experiences of modernity but rather in its absence. We find the virtues of a calm life and an untouched landscape extolled repeatedly. In Guyane, the “real” Guyane beyond the confines of Kourou, lie the promised pleasures of authentic nature. The Belgian quoted previously remembered how the “Green Hell” he imagined he would find turned into something else, as “the rivers and forest of Guyane would allow us to
A trip made by the director of the space center reveals a particularly curious mix of business and pleasure:
In company of the secretary general of the prefecture and our spouses we spent three unforgettable days of Pentecost 1989 in a protected region on the Island of Twencke on the Upper Maroni, among the Wayana Indians. At the request of the secretary general I was to speak there about the space program. Therefore I had taken small models of Ariane and various satellites in my baggage. After my installation in a school carbet, curious Wayanas began to arrive little by little. There, in a hall that rapidly filled with about a hundred children and adults, I gave a presentation of our activities in Guiana (of which they had heard very summarily). And above all, I told in as simple as possible a manner the story of this rocket that takes off from the soil of French Guiana. I spoke slowly and I tried, as much as possible, to also demonstrate what I was telling thanks to my models. What was astonishing was the double translation practiced beside me. The instructor, an Alsatian who had lived for ten years in this village with his wife, translated my French into “standard” Wayana, and behind him, a young Wayana of twelve or thirteen years, apparently a very brilliant boy upon whose shoulders, I believe, rest many future hopes of the village, translated the “standard” Wayana into colloquial Wayana in his turn. At the end, out of curiosity, I asked how they had translated the Ariane rocket. In their language it was the “vessel of spirits.” When I arrived in this village where we were to pass almost three complete days, I have to say that I had an immense moment of doubt about the interest of this journey. I told myself, “But you are mad to have come here while you have so much to do in Kourou!” We were indeed on a small island where, outside of fishing in a canoe or participating in the simple life of Wayanas, there was nothing much to do. And then the magic took hold, I felt myself completely relax. We spent tremendous days there, living very simply. We went hunting and fishing with the Wayana, and there was also this little lecture and evenings together. These are powerful moments that I will never forget![34]
The account invokes several tropes common to descriptions of encounters between civilization and the nobler varieties of savagery, between the involved translation of Space Age technology to a Stone Age
For personnel of the space center, French Guiana—particularly its interior—represents a landscape of the past, alternately troubling and alluring. When venturing up rivers and into the forest, they are more likely to find a haunting paradise than the nightmare experienced by convicts half a century earlier. Yet what haunts them may be as much their own conceptions of worlds lost as the vanished lives of others. Like any true prophets of progress, they are acutely, if selectively, aware of history. Marking advancement, after all, requires rulers of measurement.
COMMEMORATION AT CSG
I was now come to the unhappy Anniversary of my Landing. I cast up the Notches on my Post and found I had been on Shore three hundred and sixty five Days. I kept this Day as a Solemn Fast, setting it apart for Religious Exercise, prostrating myself on the Ground with the most serious Humiliation, confessing my Sins to God, and acknowledging his Righteous Judgments upon me … and having not tasted the least Refreshment for twelve Hours, even till the going down of the Sun, I then ate a Bisket Cake, and a Bunch of Grapes, and went to Bed, finishing the Day as I began it.
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 1719
Many families like to trace their ancestry, and the Ariane “clan” is no different.
ESA, “Reaching for the Skies,” 1988
In space, it seems, every day is an anniversary. Actions and events are constantly placed in reference to their precedents, as well as a greater temporal narrative. Launches function as historical markers (“Flight
Recent years have been kind to the Guiana Space Center in this commemorative regard: 1988 marked the twentieth anniversary of the first launch from French Guiana as well as the first launch of Ariane 4; 1989 was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the decision to found CSG and the tenth year since the first Ariane launch (not to mention the bicentennial of the French Revolution and the twentieth anniversary of the moon landing); 1992 brought the thirtieth birthday of CNES as well as the fiftieth launch of Ariane; 1993 marked the twentieth anniversary of the Ariane decision and the twenty-fifth operational year of CSG; and 1994 was the thirtieth anniversary of the base decision and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the moon launch. Each of these temporal landmarks (and more) have been carefully, and sometimes lavishly, observed. In 1989 a hot air balloon and a model rocket based on the one used by the cartoon hero Tintin graced the skies of Kourou. Less dramatically, but no less significantly, in 1992 (as in other commemorative years) the house magazines of CNES and CSG ran appropriate notices and interviews with employees who remembered earlier periods. Somewhere between entertainment and statements of official history, these interviews highlight human moments “then” and “now,” reminding the reader that the frame of the space enterprise is inherently progressive.
To examine the phenomena more fully let us look at a particularly significant act of commemoration, the celebration of “twenty-five years in space” held in the summer of 1993. In honor of that occasion, CSG sponsored weather reports on the official television station, featuring a blast of music and a new slogan: “De Véronique à Ariane, la passion des lancements depuis 25 ans” (From Véronique to Ariane, the passion of launches for twenty-five years). As well as booming out nightly after the local news, this suggestive motto flashed boldly across numerous posters and other liberally distributed paraphernalia printed at the time.[36] The anniversary found its climax in an expansive soiree at the end of August, held in the new, enormous hotel built on the road near Sinnamary. Here, eerily separate from any larger settlement, in a blaze of light against the black expanse of the neighboring forest, a poolside gathering brought together the cream of French Guiana society. In addition to currently active space personnel and a number of pioneering figures who had been
For comparative purposes let us turn to another commemorative moment, one on a smaller scale but focused on a more significant historical event, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the moon landing one summer later. Here, amid general discussion of the significance of space and the importance of the decision thirty years before to found CSG, commemoration took a new twist as, in keeping with a tradition established five years earlier on the twentieth anniversary of the moon landing, a second Tintin rocket sat ready for launch from the CSG test rocket pad. Constructed by the model rocket club of Kourou, checkered red and white and in every respect a miniature of its cartoon prototype, the small machine basked in the admiration of an audience composed of several hundred people, a largely Metro family crowd. A speech by the club's president, the epitome of a tanned middle-aged engineer, expressed hope that activities like this would help youth make good use of their spare time and would inspire dreams of the future. The launch, he informed us, would be activated by a young woman born around the time of the moon landing. There followed a countdown, a quick pop, and then the rocket shot a short way up into the sky. At the apex of its flight it hesitated and then turned nose down. A parachute opened, and the little machine slowly drifted sideways to the ground in the neighboring savanna. Part of the audience ran to recover it and then paraded back, as if following a religious icon. The reception afterward featured chips and soft drinks. The accompanying press kit included statements by the club and the director of CSG, as well as a souvenir page of the 1989 rocket, nicely framed against a particularly
Between these two moments we find more in the way of similarity than difference. Both feature a degree of lavish excess—catered consumption on the one hand and an overpowered toy on the other—and both accompany rocket technology with allusions to “passion” and “dreams,” simultaneous appeals to ancestors and coming generations, the achievement of the past, and the promise of the future. Both work to rewrite the present, with the failure of Europa becoming a temporary setback and the clarion call of the Space Race echoing on. The forest of Guyane is reborn in the shape of Ariane, and the American triumph on the moon is framed by the earlier exploits of a Francophone children's hero. Symbolic power returns momentarily to retired men, who grip their souvenir rockets, and is paraded before an audience of young people, who watch the exploits of youth. Thus, amid the repetitive everyday cycle of launches, the space program strives to make sense of itself. A commercial success, a French success, a European success, a human success—CSG succeeds only as long as its progress can be measured.
The historicizing impulse present in commemorative displays also finds expression in the space center's wider role as a protector of French Guiana's historical and natural heritage. In addition to maintaining its own history and historical sites (abandoned launchpads) through its museum, CSG works to curate all artifacts of value around it. Through an act of geography, the land grant bestowed on CNES for space activities includes the Iles du Salut, strategically positioned in the line of launch. Thus the space center is responsible for their upkeep and preservation, protecting both the natural habitat and the vestiges of the penal colony. In anticipation of the centennial of the Dreyfus Affair in 1994, CSG and the Regional Direction for Cultural Affairs (DRAC) combined forces to renovate the hut where the famous exile spent his days on Devil's Island. The operation involved helicopters and the expense of nearly two hundred thousand dollars, but in order to preserve the natural character of the setting, no means of public access was constructed.[38] History, once well defined, remains carefully sealed. As conceptions of national heritage (patrimoine) have widened, CSG has grown more catholic in its interests, proudly reporting rock carvings discovered on its territory and enumerating the species its estate protects. Like the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the Guiana Space Center has found new meaning in an ecological age. Wilderness used as wilderness can remain wilderness; the open space around a rocket neatly translates back into a nature preserve.[39]
THE FUTURE OF NATURE
A few kilometers from Kourou lies the Amazonian forest, with its rivers and creeks, flora and fauna, and also men and women who live in perfect symbiosis with the natural environment.
Anonymous, Kourou, 1987
The last decade has presented the space program with new concerns, stemming from the growth of environmental activism both in Europe and in French Guiana itself. In the face of pressure to justify budgets, and in keeping with its nonmilitary role, the European Space Agency has increasingly focused on promoting its beneficial role with respect to the environment, emphasizing the work of satellites that help to monitor a wide range of natural phenomena. At the same time, the Guiana Space Center, challenged by charges that its rockets (and even more their attendant technologies) threaten pollution, has gone out of its way to stress that satellite launching is a relatively clean industry and that CSG helps to maintain French Guiana as a wilderness preserve.
A connection between space and the environment is not entirely new. In representational terms the most unforgettable image of the Space Age is not of the infinite beyond but rather the finite below: our own planet, blue, green, and white against the sea of darkness. Viewed from beyond, the Earth becomes a whole and suddenly intimate place, one that can fulfill the promise of Copernicus by traveling across another sky. Moreover—thanks to the compelling present tense of photography—it can be seen from a distance, recognized as a globe, and widely reproduced as a potent symbol for reconceived relations to the environment. Thus the tie between outer space and the fragile planet is actually in some ways quite close.[40]
In environmental terms the direct impact of rocket activity is relatively light, barring a massive explosion of the launcher on takeoff or of stored fuels. Although a launch itself does create some pollution, it is an infrequent event and hence less relentless than the usual by-products of industrial production. Tests related to the Ariane 5 program and its plans for increased local production of propellants have raised additional concerns, but the key charge that local ecology groups level at CSG is that it fosters the development of attendant technologies, consuming massive amounts of electrical power, and imports urban norms, accustoming people to air-conditioning, automobile transportation,
In response to these local concerns, as well as an increase in environmental discussion throughout Europe (as CSG's director proclaimed in 1991, “Everybody's preoccupied with the environment!”), the space center began to adopt a mantle of ecological concern in the early 1990s. Articles related to environmental issues appeared in the CNES and CSG magazines, and CSG even appointed a “Monsieur Environnement,” an in-house ecologist who would oversee environmental matters for the space program, as well as conduct research.[41] The richness of Guyanais fauna and flora was extolled, including the red ibis, whose territory overlapped with that of Ariane. Archaeological remains also evoked concern. Satellite photos from the French SPOT system (itself launched by Ariane) were enlisted in the analysis of the environmental impact of the dam project. Trained back on the tropics below, these watchful eyes monitored the terrain, allowing French Guiana to “better know itself.”
Here the representational cycle comes full circle and begins to turn inward. Humans, beings separated from nature by culture, develop civilization with the help of tools. The Space Age marks the technological triumph of these creatures as they complete their conquest of the planet, breaking the last links to nature. And yet, even as humanity's triumph is achieved, nature emerges to be rediscovered again. Humans, it turns out, are back on the ground. The future leads through the past, all the way to Eden.
SYMBOLIC MAPS
Those three have taken with them, out into space, all the resources of art, of science, of industry. With such resources, they can accomplish anything; you wait and see, they will resolve this situation soon!
Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon, 1865
Launches, brochures, neutralized myth, and a mantle of misplaced names, such is the symbolic fabric surrounding the space center. It is a culture of
Figure 16. Postcard of control panel, CSG, ca. 1987
As we have seen, the presence of CSG has failed to acculturate the bulk of Guyanais population to the Space Age; the devotion displayed by my companion Georges remains an imported phenomenon. A symbolic line runs through Kourou, and in it we can distinguish the outlines of two symbolic maps of French Guiana. In one, CSG represents the future, coastal Guyane the corrupt past, and the department's interior all the pristine qualities of origin. In the other, CSG represents a continuing colonial legacy, coastal Guyane the deserving center of future
SPACE AND PLACE REVISITED
What's up is like what's down, said Hermes. The goal is to create the conditions for this truth.
Jean-Michel Desobeau, “CSG,” 1990[43]
Consider this postcard: a blue machine sits in a vaguely defined room, surrounded by green panels and the glow of fluorescent light. The focus rests on the control panel at its center, a glowing bank of buttons, and as one's eye travels away from it the field of vision grows blurred, uncertain, sensing a roomful of motion. Nothing in the image itself conveys a sense of specific context, and only the legend on the reverse side securely locates it as an interior shot of the space center in Kourou, French Guiana. Unlike neighboring scenes along the rack of souvenirs—shots of exotic animals, people, and tourist landmarks—the card intentionally portrays something apart from conventional locality: a dynamic, artificial space, free from ties to the world. In this sense it is a veritable snapshot of modernity, a photo of a where that could be anywhere. And yet, significantly, the card marks a particular site on the globe and a set of human activities embedded in it. Indeed, the appeal of the image to its potential purchasers is partly based on this fact, for the room that could be in Houston or suburban Paris actually lies in northeastern South America, on the edge of a vast rain forest. What shouldn't be modern sometimes is; what is modern sometimes rests on what is not. Within the frame of a minor, banal artifact, the order of things modern is at once established and undermined; the nature of its subject locates a center of technology out on the margin.
I encountered the image in question on a hot and slow afternoon in the summer of 1990, during my initial visit to French Guiana. Few people were out in the streets of Cayenne, and most doors remained firmly shut from the noon siesta. Newly arrived on a flight from Paris, slightly jet lagged and uncertain of my surroundings, I felt strikingly out of place. Coming upon an open stationery store near the center of town, I stepped inside to escape the sun. Instantly, the surroundings became familiar: the constant climate of air-conditioning, the ordered racks of
Beside the postcard with its glowing machine, let us now place a series of other snapshots, these taking their inspiration from ethnographic observation. While the specific notes from which they are drawn date primarily from late 1992 and the summer of 1993, I splice them here in an uninterrupted and flowing present, evoking an illusion of presence and omniscience of the kind suggested by film and providing a backdrop to the earlier description of my tour with Georges.
Before us we have an almost cool December night on the coastal savanna. Though the light has faded too far to distinguish distant forms, in one direction stretches a green ocean of rain forest, and in the other a sluggish brown sea. At the juncture where a slow river flows away from land lies a motley assortment of houses in Caribbean style, dimly lit by streetlights and serenaded by insects. People are out on the sidewalk, visiting, four older men play a domino game, and a woman lounges at a corner, perhaps waiting for a lover or a customer. All the signs are in place: this is the tropics, and the pace is slow. Yet the town does not end with this tranquil image. Moving further along the shore, one passes an uninviting huddle of shacks amid puddles, the scene displaying all the requisite symptoms of squalor. Further still and the scene changes dramatically; huts give way to concrete apartment blocks and then suburban houses, laid out with the methodical certainty of large-scale planning. Large, expensive automobiles of the sort designed for cooler climes are parked in driveways. Here and there a window flickers with the light of a television, and the streets are eerily empty.
Further inland, a crowd surrounds a number of air-conditioned buses in a large parking lot, talking in small groups. Both male and female,
Champagne is served to invited guests beneath the tropical stars, toasting the newest addition to the heavens. Now that the rocket has successfully risen and disappeared over the horizon, checkpoints around the launch zone are reopened. At a lonely intersection a part-time Haitian security guard prepares to leave his post. The last Chinese store has closed, and an Amerindian checker at the Euro-supermarket has departed to watch her television. In a crowded nearby shantytown, a Saramaka Maroon turns the page of his calendar filled with rockets, while in an empty villa a Brazilian maid puts an Italian child to sleep. Somewhere above, marking the same equator but focused on another sky, a Japanese satellite begins to broadcast. Europe's spaceport is working.
Let us compare this little collage to the earlier postcard with its glowing machine. Where the postcard features a technology of things,
Yet perhaps this ethnographic collage itself remains too smooth, too concentrated, too distant. Perhaps we should suspect it as well, for what, after all, does it lose of experience even by framing it? Then again, in focusing more closely, which particular stories shall we highlight? That of an engineer who wishes he were in Florida? That of a security guard who worries about his family in Haiti? That of a journalist who commutes from Cayenne for a Kourou dateline? Different experiences of CSG occur with different frequencies and only intersect momentarily. Behind the spectacular moment of the launch (a moment present for all,
Indeed, in a way the launch itself reflects the presence and absence of the space center in French Guiana: one need not be there to observe the event. Not only is a video feed transmitted by satellite to CNES, ESA, and Arianespace offices in Europe and elsewhere, but it is also broadcast live on local television.[44] And yet a chartered plane of invited guests arrives from Paris for almost every launch, while members of some circles in French Guiana fish for formal invitations. Physical presence, even when technically bypassed, remains a mark of social distinction. Even as the rocket rises, carrying its load, the signals of other satellites rain down; in enclaves of Brazilian immigrants one finds satellite dishes set to catch soap operas and soccer from further south, providing them with alternative spectacles. Negating absence maintains other cultural distinctions. But if it is Europeans who care most for the launches, it is also largely Europeans who travel to the interior in pursuit of the “real” jungle. What represents the local comes to be defined in global terms, and vice versa.
Just before leaving French Guiana in 1993, I had dinner with two young residents of Kourou, one a French citizen of Iranian descent who had grown up in the town and the other a Saramaka Maroon, a refugee from Suriname. The first was dressed well enough to attend any polite gathering in France—indeed he was now in university there. The second wore a less transportable array of clothing and sat quietly, because he spoke little French. The student gestured toward his companion and said to me, “Between us you have all of Kourou.” He meant, he went on to say, that between them lay extremes of circumstances, opportunities, and histories, the one treated as a Metropolitan Frenchman, the other as an foreigner only recently emerged from the forest. The distinction between them was that between villa and shantytown: coexisting, interacting, ever-separate lifeworlds. What was unusual, the student noted—with insight and regret—was that the two of them should be not just next to each other but actually sharing a meal. Cultural twists and social divides are hardly unique to Kourou, of course; I could describe equivalents in both France and the United States. But in French Guiana they lie on the surface, concentrated and exposed.
With regard to human space, the “Land of Space” is a world of yawning divides collapsed into narrow fissures. Through its very existence the space center in French Guiana negotiates the boundary of physical worlds, providing means of transportation across them. At the same time, its geographic being in the world redefines other boundaries, superimposing advanced technology and an open horizon. Recall the transformation of French Guiana into a Space Age launch site that gave us a first point to consider: wilderness has its uses, even for high technology. In a more pointed reformulation, we might say that space technology did not erase wilderness but rather found parts of it useful when properly redefined. Unlike a factory or railroad, which might value uninhabited land only in terms of its potential for development (its transformation into a different kind of productive space, or a destination), the space center found value in the openness of the land itself, in its marginal status relative to human networks, and in its specific geographic position. Here, then, we have an example of a modern technology that acknowledges place.[45]
Yet the space program in French Guiana modified the local geography even as it used it. Social issues tied to development crept through the back door: CSG served as a catalyst for transformation. As a consequence of the space program—partly planned and partly unintended—the size and configuration of both Kourou and French Guiana shifted dramatically. Thus the analytic picture before us grows more complicated. A technology that sought a measure of continuing wilderness for its work, that required a well-positioned margin for experimentation, nevertheless transformed that margin in the act of making it useful. To use a place whose location mattered, additions were made, both to create a site adequate to the needs of the project (such as the construction of a series of launchpads) and to create a network of support structures for the technical personnel (such as living quarters and recreation areas). Further personnel not directly tied to the technical project were recruited to provide services approximating those of a culturally appropriate landscape for the technical personnel (such as restaurants and schools), and, as a result of the remarkable level of investment relative to the economy of the surrounding region, the project acquired another layer of unofficial personnel in marginal service categories (such as gardening and baby-sitting). In this way a site that was chosen for characteristics of place becomes increasingly an epitome of the placeless space of modernity, objects, and people that could—and have been—else-where. Like the Ariane rocket that it serves, the world of Kourou is an
Modern machines, then, can create a sense of universality, but at differing costs. The postcard described previously is an accurate illusion in yet another way: it appeals to the universality of technology. The central panel, empty, awaits command; it is free, available, open to any viewer. And yet not just anyone can be in front of any machine; modern technology requires modern technicians. The room that could be anywhere welcomes an inhabitant who could be anywhere, or rather an inhabitant who has been somewhere else and learned how to work within such glowing walls. Placeless space is not free from culture or social norms, for all that it may blur location. Rather, it depends on mastery of a set of cultural and social codes that allow for the possibility of universalized, mobile experience—the recognition of things one has never specifically seen before. The stationery store in Cayenne was, in this sense, familiar to me before I entered it.
To live a modern life is to live with such experience of dislocation, with neutralized environments and transported technologies. Engineers, while they may hunt for pleasure, can hardly be expected to hunt and gather on a daily basis. The last point runs deeper than irony, because in the Guiana Space Center we have the anthropological story in miniature: different ends of “development” collapse together, rain forest to rockets, “stone age to space age.” As one visiting French executive pointed out, where else can you buy wooden arrows one day and watch a satellite launch the next?[46] Irony lies on the surface here, but it is an irony born of technique, local conditions, and global possibilities. Surrounded by languid tropical heat and rain, the Guiana Space Center tries to accommodate the rhythms of Paris, tries to be modern—at a distance. In this unlikely (but carefully chosen) point on the planet, global technology is revealed to be awkwardly local, and nature and culture are shown to be concepts in action rather than stable endpoints on an analytic grid. Concentrating on location, one encounters motion. Concentrating on space, one encounters place. Conceived in these terms, the vastness of modern heaven weighs heavily on the ground.
