I stumbled on this picture today thanks to Universe Today. It is awesome.

Astronaut replacing the Hubble wide-field camera.

This is a picture of a hard-working human in work-safe gear replacing a complicated and massive piece of technology in space. Yes, this is just a guy working hard in outer space. This is a definitive picture of my concept of “blue collar space” and an essential image to understand the underlying philosophy of Diaspora: a place where people are in space to do stuff. Not necessarily world-saving stuff, sometimes not even moral or ethical stuff. Sometimes just stuff that any human would do, but it happens to be in space.

This is amazing not because it looks like it is taking place just anywhere. I mean, look at that picture carefully: there is nothing intuitively “right” about what we see. All out intuitions fail us in interpreting it. That huge piece of machinery on the right is unsupported. The orientation of the worker is artificial — it is relative to a spacecraft and not to any force of gravity. In fact it’s a safe bet that the planet is “above” the astronaut in that picture, but you could rotate the image to any angle and it would still be “correct”. There are further counter-intuitive facts that are not obvious from the picture: that camera is massive and consequently carries all its inertia despite being “weightless” — moving it around is hard work, but not the same kind of hard work that moving it around on Earth is. It’s hard to get it moving and it’s hard to stop it moving, so all resistance to motion is with respect to the object itself rather than with respect to the ground or some other “down”. What’s going on up there is expensive and difficult, and some of that currency is simple sweat. It’s hard, good work up there.

Look how brilliant and clear the light is with no atmosphere. You cannot get anything like that clarity, that sharpness, over a distance of more than a few meters down here on Earth, but everything is crisp and sharp up there. And that crispness is also lethal — everything is white or gold or mirror-surfaced up there because it’s important to reflect away as much of that unattenuated radiation as you possibly can before it enters your instruments or your astronauts. Some of it does anyway — space workers face significant risks from radiation just from the sun.

Doing a hard, dangerous, but technically straightforward job is heroic stuff for me. Deep sea rig divers, miners, tall construction, and similar jobs all thrill me in a visceral way. Porting that simple heroism to space is an achievement that makes us, as a species, more than we were.

–BMurray