The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

1.

In August 2007, on a humid tropical afternoon, an Air France jet touched down in French Guiana, carrying in its Business-class cabin twelve senior executives from a Japanese television company, who had flown from Tokyo to South America to follow the launch of their satellite.

The executives had bought the machine to help them start a new kind of television station, which they hoped would seize the imagination of the Japanese public and overturn the dominance of the state broadcaster NHK, legendary for its narrow focus on lengthy films about the cherry blossom season and the hunting habits of the Tibetan tiger. They had in mind a station that would show anime films about the exploits of warrior robots and romantic dramas about precociously seductive school-girls. They wanted game-shows that would mete out sadistic punishment to their losers and soap operas that would blow open the lid on the extramarital longings of the wives of salarymen living along Tokyo’s commuter lines.

But Japanese topography has traditionally created insurmountable challenges for anyone seeking entry into the broadcasting market, for the country is dispersed across four main islands, most of which are heavily forested and prone to storms and volcanic eruptions, conditions requiring investment in prohibitively expensive maintenance facilities – which helps to explain why, for most of the post-war period, Japanese television has remained unchallenged in the hands of the staid, cherry-blossom-loving, government-owned behemoth.

However, the pioneering executives imagined a way around the logistical hurdles. They discovered that if they fired a satellite into space and, in particular, induced it to settle into an orbit at 110 degrees east, thirty-six thousand kilometres above the ground, they would then be able to beam down a signal to anyone with a modestly priced dish anywhere across their archipelago. A show such as Sensei No Kaban, about the illicit love affair between a twenty-year-old woman and her seventy-five-year-old calligraphy teacher, could be transmitted into the upper atmosphere and bounced back to reach both the icy mountains of Hokkaido and the palm- and skyscraper-fringed coastline of Okinawa.

And so evolved the idea for Japan’s first satellite television station, a business whose very name was intended – as the channel’s mission statement put it – to inspire in its viewers ‘an expression of constant wonder and amazement’: WOWOW TV. But there would be a host of further tribulations in translating the business plan into a reality, including struggles with government officials and regulators, painful equity deals with the Nippon Corporation and Fuji Incorporated, and fraught negotiations to secure broadcast rights to the popular Korean TV drama My Name Is Kim Sam Soon. Finally, there was a protracted search for an actual satellite, which, after pitches from rival companies and a process not much more dignified than a haggle in a souk, led to the purchase, from the Lockheed Martin Corporation, of a $100 million A2100A model, a device now awaiting its first meeting with its new owners in a hangar in a jungle clearing a few kilometres away from the airport.

2.

The Japanese television executives filed off the plane, past a photograph of the French President and into a VIP zone where they were greeted, with all the respect and warmth due to anyone who has lately handed over a launch fee close to $75 million, by bowing senior members of the French commercial space agency Ariane Espace. After clearing customs and formerly entering French Guiana, the executives were each handed a large wooden box containing a silver replica of their satellite and led out to a minibus bound for their hotel.

It was evident that they had arrived in a peculiar corner of the world. The difficulties with French Guiana begin with trying to place it on a map. Seldom has a country been as easily and as regularly confused with somewhere else: Ghana on the western coast of Africa, Guyana east of Venezuela, Guinea next to Senegal, the former Portuguese colony of Guiné next to Guinea and now referred to as Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea below Cameroon or the island of New Guinea divided between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Even the pronunciation is prone to engender trouble, the English referring to the country as French Guiana (Guy-arna) while the French favour a more compacted Guyane (Gü-yann).

More significantly, the territory bears the surreal burden of being at once located on the malarial northern coast of South America, between Surinam to the west and Brazil to the south, whilst also belonging to the French state, having been absorbed into one of the country’s twenty-six départements by its former colonial master in 1946. As a result, it is now a member of the European Union, its highest legal authority is the Court of Justice in Strasbourg, its agricultural and fishery policies are defined in Brussels and its currency, valid even in the Indian settlement of Pilakoupoupiaina on the Oyapock River, is the euro, from the European Central Bank of Frankfurt-am-Main.

A layer of French bureaucracy and bourgeois ambition has been unevenly applied across this tropical kaleidoscope. In tin-roofed villages, terrains de boules abut voodoo temples. The country’s only two roads, Routes Nationales 1 and 2, are fitted out with standard French signs, whose font, Frutiger 57 Condensed, is more accustomed to pointing the way to Nantes or Clermont-Ferrand but here twists itself around Amerindian place-names such as Iracoubo and Awala-Yalimapo. Restaurants (Café de la Gare, Bar Chez Pierrot) serve escalopes of wild jungle boar and Amazonian river fish with the scaly appearance of prehistoric coelacanths, cut into fillets and domesticated under a meunière sauce.

Deprivation and despair are everywhere apparent. The country has no economy to speak of. There is neither tourism, for the sea is plagued by sharks and brown from river sediment, nor, thanks to the poor quality of the soil, any agriculture. The roads down to Brazil are largely impassible and the territory’s sole reliable outlet to the world is the daily flight to Paris (a trip to nearby Venezuela or Peru requiring a connection in Orly).

3.

Proud of their achievements and generous of spirit, the WOWOW television executives had given permission for a small group of us to follow them on their journey.

A Hong Kong television station sent one of its most prominent young reporters accompanied – due to budgetary pressures – by only a one-person crew, who bore the contents of a studio on his back, leaving the elegant presenter (something of a household name in her city), to wander around in silver high-heeled shoes, her face frozen in a distressed expression, perhaps not unlike that worn by Amiral Estrées, the earliest French colonist of French Guiana, at the moment when he realised that the country was not to be the El Dorado which Sir Walter Ralegh had led him to expect from his conspicuously mistitled book, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana, first published in London in 1595.

Ten rocket engineers from NASA had flown down from Florida as part of an exchange programme. Burdened by a sense of their own spatial superiority, they felt a pervasive need not to humiliate their hosts by any allusions to their agency’s achievements or the scale of its resources and so bore the unfailingly courteous and humble manner reminiscent of royalty on a tour of a slum district. They engaged in elaborate praise of their counterparts’ most routine achievements, like their ability to build a petrol station or to install air conditioning – though the patronisation seemed to whistle blithely past the French, who were in their hearts no less firmly, if a little less shyly, convinced of their own greatness.

We had all been billeted together in the Atlantis Hotel which, though only newly built, was fast surrendering itself to tropical mould and the incursions of jungle fauna. Vivid yellow lizards scuttled across the hotel’s floors and on returning to the room late at night, it was not uncommon to be confronted by a muscular and implausibly furry spider standing stationary on the wall above the television, a situation resolved by a Creole maintenance man who dispatched the monster with a decisive slap of rolled-up newspaper, leaving nothing but a brown sediment to commemorate the presence, then tossed the corpse off the balcony and, with apparent sincerity, bade one a pleasant end to the evening.

Kourou, the purpose-built town next to the space centre, was in no better shape than the hotel on its perimeter. Evoking comparison with Chandigarh and Brasilia, two other examples of modern architecture’s impressive track record of indifference to issues of context and culture, it was in an advanced stage of decomposition after only a few decades of existence. Unshaded wooden benches rotted unused by the man-made lake, having been designed to provide respite on the kind of afternoon stroll which it had not yet occurred to anyone in the tropics to take, whilst the concrete façades of buildings had buckled in a climate which from April to July could deliver in a single week as much rainfall as northern France might see in an entire year.

4.

However, once inside the heavily fortified gates of the space centre itself, the situation was transformed. Immaculate buildings were dedicated to the assembly of satellites, the preparation of Ariane boosters and the storage of propellants. These were scattered across hectares of marsh and jungle, generating bewildering contrasts for visitors who might walk out of a rocket-nozzle-actuator building and a moment later find themselves in a section of rain forest sheltering round-eared bats and white-eyed parakeets, before arriving at a propulsion facility whose corridors were lined with Evian dispensers.

Early on our first morning in the country, we were driven to a hangar not much smaller than Reims cathedral where we caught our first glimpse of the satellite, resting on a central platform, bathed in a powerful white light, being ministered to by a congregation of engineers in gowns, hairnets and slippers. They were filling the satellite’s tanks, charging its batteries and testing its transponders. Given the cost of carrying matter into space, it was surprisingly modest in size, a box measuring just four metres high by two wide, flanked by a pair of fourteen-metre long solar panels topped by a reflecting dish. Its inner works consisted of an electric motor, some thrusters to help counteract the effects of solar wind and twelve 130-watt broadcast channels with which to beam down an electronic footprint of WOWOW TV’s programming.

To be allowed into the satellite’s presence, we were requested to undertake purification rituals akin to those required for admittance to an operating theatre, for the machine was a curious synthesis of robustness and hypersensitivity. At the speed it would soon be travelling – 3.07 kilometres per second – a stray human hair inside one of its transponders could create a disastrous force field of electromagnetic energy or a single oily fingerprint could fissure its solar panels. The satellite was like a frontline soldier who could be reduced to tears by reading a children’s book, though in fairness, its vulnerability obtained only under the eccentric conditions of outer space, where powerful ultraviolet rays and clusters of oxygen atoms were capable of exploiting any weakness in an electrical system, and where extreme variations in temperature, from 200 degrees centigrade in the sun to minus 200 in the earth’s shadow, could crack any part of the machine which had not been immaculately cleaned and wrapped in a protective carapace of gold-tinted polyimide film.

Raised up on its dais – its surfaces seeming to emit a pinky-red glow, its compartments opened to reveal dense wiring, the whole assembled out of such unfamiliar components as pyromellitic acid – the satellite looked like one of the most unnatural objects imaginable. Yet in truth it contained nothing which had not been present on the earth in the earliest days of creation, nor anything which had not (in its basic form, at least) originally been lodged in the chemical structures of the seas and mountains. It was the cogitations of the human mind which had cooked and recombined the planet’s raw materials into this most unlikely offering to the heavens.

5.

The sight of different groups of hairnetted engineers helping to prepare the satellite suggested what restraint, what effacement of the individual ego, a life in science now entailed. There were no opportunities for individual glory here, no prospect of biographies or street names to be remembered by. This was a collective project or which no one person, not even any single commercial or academic organisation, could take the commanding credit.

Gone were the days of geniuses in their observatories and workshops, single-handedly rerouting scientific history. We had entered the sober era of the collaborative laboratory, where astrophysicists and aeronautical engineers banded themselves together for decade-long assaults on minor mysteries, resisting the media’s attempts to raise any one of their number into a contemporary Galileo. A company might limit itself to perfecting the performance of silver-zinc batteries in zero-gravity conditions, rightly sensing the foolishness of expanding to address further puzzles in satellite electrics. A scientist might spend a lifetime examining the properties of titanium at high temperatures or the behaviour of hydrogen at the moment of ignition. The sum total of one’s contributions to mankind might end up in an issue of the Journal of Advanced Propulsion Methods.

Some of the technical properties of WOWOW TV’s new machine were the result of research done in the early 1980s by a team of scientists from Milan Polytechnic, who, in investigating the use of the upper reaches of the electromagnetic spectrum in communications satellites, had found a way around the interference caused by low cloud and misty rain at microwave frequencies above 10 gigahertz – slow and unheroic work that now, a quarter of a century later, ensured that Japanese viewers would be able to enjoy the uncut version of the anime film Cowboy Bebop even during the worst downpours in Japan’s rainy season.

Though there had certainly been a loss of colour and novelistic detail in the passing of the age of geniuses, there was perhaps something greater and more reassuring in our graduation to a time of collective effort, for it meant that never again would the fate of planetary exploration depend to a hazardous degree on such unpredictable variables as the mood of Johannes Kepler’s wife, Barbara, or the inclinations of his patron Emperor Rudolf II – though the German astronomer, like many of his fellow geniuses, had at least provided Kourou with a name for one of its dispiriting streets, a rectangle of waste ground bordered by a dry cleaner at one end and a burnt-out Internet café at the other, a matter in which the collated proponents of later discoveries would perhaps never be quite so obliging.

6.

Just a short drive away through the jungle, two thirty-metre-high booster rockets were undergoing their penultimate preparations. These delicately tapered structures, decorated with the flags of the European nations which had contributed to their funding, would be responsible for propelling the satellite on the first stage of its journey. They were in truth more bombs than engines, for they had no throttle and once ignited, had to be allowed to expend their full fury, whatever the circumstances, inspiring a particular respect in all those involved in their detonation.

Dr Thierry Proudhon was directing operations. He held a degree in pyrotechnics from the National School of Aeronautical Engineering in Toulouse and had been living in French Guiana with his family for three years. A finely chiselled man in his early forties, he seemed about as reasonable, impersonal and solemn as it is possible for any human to be, given the follies and convulsions to which our race appears prone. Not for him the torments of the insomniac or the agitations of the neurotic. On the day of the launch, he would be responsible for the ignition of 500 tonnes of ammonium perchlorate composite, which would burn for only 130 seconds, but would in that time succeed in firing the fifty-two-metre-high Ariane launcher 150 kilometres into the sky, generating a thrust of 1,100 tonnes and a concomitant boom which would be heard over the border in Brazil. Then, their titanic energies spent, the boosters would detach themselves from the mother ship and drop down into the Atlantic ocean, where a French naval frigate would be standing by to collect them.

Prompted by a question from the Hong Kong television presenter, but chary of the sensationalist tenor of her enquiry, Dr Proudhon paused for a moment to consider what might ‘go wrong’, responding with all the austerity of a chemistry teacher reviewing the risks of the Bunsen burner before an assembly of excitable pupils. He explained that if the propellant paste were incorrectly mixed in such a way that it retained air pockets, it could produce a sudden increase in the surface area of flammable material and a corresponding rise in exhaust gases, which might well have the power to rupture the casing of the rocket and cause an explosion equivalent in its short-term destructive force to that of a small nuclear device. But, he added to reassure – and thereby also, inadvertently, to disappoint – his audience, there was only a 0.2 percent chance of such an incident’s occurring on any given launch.

At a loss as to how to return to the salient topic, but unwilling to conclude the conversation, the presenter asked what this mysterious propellent substance might look like. Was it a little like toothpaste? Or perhaps more like cake mix? Dr Proudhon fixed her with his grey-green eyes and, answering the query at the level of detail he felt the media deserved, embarked upon a monologue that wandered with archaeological precision through the history and byways of chemistry, disclosing along the way that the paste consisted of ammonium perchlorate (69.6 percent), aluminium (16.0 percent), HTPB polymer (12.04 percent), an epoxy curing agent (1.96 percent) and iron oxide catalyst (0.4 percent).

But Dr Proudhon was not finished with us yet, for he now revealed that the booster rockets constituted only a part, and perhaps not the most important, of the mechanics of propulsion, for the main rocket was in addition equipped with a liquid-hydrogen-and-oxygen engine to help it complete its journey into space. This masterwork of engineering, named Vulcain after the francophone-version of the Roman god of fire and iron, had been thirty years in the making and based its claim to greatness on its ability to keep two highly reactive and pressurised propellants safely separated in adjoining tanks, preventing them from combining prematurely and maintaining them at their different freezing temperatures (minus 251 degrees centigrade for hydrogen and minus 184 for oxygen) even when, just fifty centimetres away, the combustion chamber into which they were being driven by a turbo pump, at a rate of six hundred litres per second, was burning at 1,500 degrees centrigrade. There were a thousand other things about Vulcain which might interest anyone seeking more than a cursory journalistic understanding, Dr Proudhon concluded coldly, but he hoped that we might excuse him: he was due back at his home in Kourou shortly, as he and his wife planned to take their children on a late-afternoon outing to watch the newly hatched baby turtles learning to swim in the Maroni River.

The pyrotechnician appeared imperturbable in the face of his power. He had at his command more force than almost any ruler in history, more – for example – than the eighteenth-century Chinese emperor Qianlong, a paper tiger by comparison, whose armies had viciously subdued both the Uyghurs and the Mongols. But Dr Proudhon’s strength was the opposite of intemperate might, it was the disciplined and sedated authority of the scientist entrusted with the safe management of unfeasible rage. Somewhere inside this white-coated man, there must have remained vestigial urges to dominate, shout, master, blow up and attack, but how carefully such instincts had been contained, by what cautious laboratory rules his urges had been governed, how quiet modern omnipotence could be.

7.

The satellite and its launch vehicle were practical achievements no doubt, but they were also, and perhaps primarily, the products of revolutionary changes in belief systems.

Isaac Newton (whose namesake street was home to Kourou’s only travel agency) was the first to postulate the theories on which the launch itself would be based, when he speculated that if a cannonball could be fired at a tremendous speed from a great height, the top of an implausibly tall mountain, for instance, it would orbit right around the earth, for gravity would pull it downwards at the same rate at which the planet spun away from it. The Englishman’s ideas, along with a raft of other discoveries in chemistry and physics, were the fruits of a scientific perspective that had marked a gradual separation in European consciousness from the long and tenebrous age of magic that had preceded it.

Four hundred kilometres from where the rocket was being readied, in the rain forest on the border with Brazil, lived the last of the Waiwai Indians. The majority of the tribe had long ago left the jungle and moved into towns or government-sponsored camps (one group lived in Kourou, where they ran the popular Waiwai takeaway restaurant in the Place de l’Europe). But those left in the wild preserved the rudiments of a cosmology comparable in structure to that of the inhabitants of the prescientific West.

For the Waiwai, the movements of the planets, the cycles of the weather, the behaviour of animals and the properties of plants, were all apprehended mythologically, without any attempt at precise observation or detached understanding. There was no room for developments in knowledge. Time stood still. Traditions could not be altered or probed, being the preserve of sacred elders and medicine men. The Waiwai projected themselves into all they saw. Why might the moon be a particularly deep shade of red in the evening? Because someone in the tribe had developed violent thoughts, likely to break into bloodshed the next day. Why had it not rained? Because the network of anacondas who lived in the clouds and spat down droplets of water had been angered during a hunt. What was the sky? A clay pan resting on three upright rocks.

In the Waiwai schema, man could not directly affect the world. He would have to ask, or more accurately implore, the spirits responsible for its functioning. On a breathless day, he would have to take care not to injure any tapirs, for the wind was controlled by a giant example of one hidden in the sky, responsible for wafting a large palm leaf to create a breeze. If he wanted the sun to come out, he would have to put on a diadem of toucan feathers and blow down a long pipe carved with anaconda patterns, so as to flatter the sacred orb into rising into the sky.

The scientists now occupied by fuelling and loading in their hangars at the edge of the jungle had moved unrecognisably far from such thinking. They had completed PhDs on the numerical analysis of stirred-tank hydronynamics and the drag reduction effects of polymer additives on turbulent pipe flow. They read the universe as an orderly and logical machine, which worked independently of their sins and virtues, a mere impassive clock, which could be taken apart by reason and rendered theoretically predictable without requiring recourse to incantation.

And yet, as a non-scientist examining the rocket-assembly building, gazing at a needle of solid propellant nine storeys tall, one felt that a most unmagical of approaches had nevertheless succeeded in producing a device which was not entirely free of supernatural associations. Living with science without understanding it forced one to consider machines in the same quasi-mystical way in which a sparsely clothed Waiwai might have contemplated the phenomena of the heavens. What talent and insolence it was on the part of the white-coated fraternity to have succeeded in generating an impression of mystical awe with the help only of an ammonium perchlorate composite.

8.

Nevertheless, as the appointed launch time approached, a feeling of tension and of foreboding became palpable. The sky turned a purply-grey, and the air was oddly still. In Kourou, a France Telecom van collided with a car at the corner of the Avenue Nobel and the rue Mère Theresa. The lizards were out in force at the Atlantis Hotel.

The weather, always complex and histrionic in the region, was of particular concern to the scientists. Almost every afternoon brought a violent thunderstorm, with clouds up to eighteen kilometres thick, eight kilometres being the usual maximum over northern Europe. In tearing through such a lofty mass at great velocity, the rocket ran a risk of driving a lightning bolt into its own flight path. Furthermore, the area was known for its high atmospheric winds, which meant that even if all was still at ground level, thirty kilometres up, a tapir with a palm leaf might be stirring up a current capable of deflecting the rocket onto a catastrophically errant trajectory.

At eight in the evening, an hour before launch, under armed guard, we were driven in the darkness to an observation site in the jungle, only three kilometres from where the boosters would be ignited. We took our places on a raised clearing with uninterrupted views onto the launchpad – and said little.

Technologically extreme situations have a habit of whetting the appetite for sentimental safety briefings, which in turn tend to reveal both the scale of the danger involved and the inadequacy of the proposed response to it. A member of the elite Brigade de Sapeurs-Pompiers de Paris – a branch office of which operated in the space centre – came forward to address our group. At this distance, a malfunctioning rocket would be upon us in under a second, the fireman declared, though this hopeless prospect did not prevent him from distributing a set of yellow gas masks and explaining that we should secure them over our heads to activate their breathing tubes, then leave them alone until, and unless, there was an emergency. Despite these instructions, a few minutes later, ever alert to the need to bring science to life, the Hong Kong television presenter removed her cameraman’s mask from its casing and, with it hanging loosely over her face, delivered a muffled soliloquy to the camera, outlining the hazards to which she was exposing herself for her audience – while her own mask remained cocooned inside a tasselled Balenciaga handbag.

A screen had been set up to provide us with a live feed from the control room. At their terminals, a group of thirty were monitoring Ariane’s vital functions. Dr Proudhon, back from the turtles, was at his desk, staring impassively at a bank of screens. In a challenge to the team’s sense of their indispensability, a second identical control centre was up and running a few kilometres further away to the east, harbouring another thirty, identically trained people, standing by to pick up operational command were the launcher to get off to a temperamental start and incinerate their colleagues.

Across the humid night, Ariane stood out on its platform, illuminated by a set of arc lamps around which clouds of tropical insects were dancing frenziedly. Deeper in the jungle, there were peccaries and spider monkeys, giant anteaters and harpy eagles, while in this unlikely outpost of air-conditioned Newtonian civilisation, something was preparing to leave the planet. All shipping and aircraft had been cleared in an arc extending to the West African coast. Ariane’s engines took their last breaths of oxygen through a thick black umbilical cord. Every remaining human had been removed from the area. It was hard not to feel some of the same sadness that might attend the departure of an ocean liner or the lowering of a coffin.

Thirty seconds before lift-off, Dr Proudhon’s voice came over the loudspeakers. The tapir seemed ready to allow the mission to proceed. The work of years was about to condense itself into an instant. Time, which in so many of our mid-afternoons flows by aimlessly and languidly, felt meaningful at last. With ten seconds left, like a prison warder releasing his charge, Dr Proudhon turned a set of keys and initiated the formal count-down. There would now be no way for matters to end peacefully. Dix, neuf, huit, sept, retrait des ombilicaux … It was peculiar to hear a sequence so indelibly associated, via cinema, with Cape Canaveral being enunciated in another language. At cinq, there was a dull sound as if a shell had gone off, and a first puff of smoke rose from the bottom of the launcher. By trois, white billows had enveloped its base, and on the cue of un, et décollage …, the rocket ripped itself off its pad in immaculate silence.

When the noise reached us a second later, we recognised it as the loudest any of us had ever heard, louder of course than thunder, jets and the explosive charges set off in quarries, the concentrated energies of tens of millions of years of solar energy being released in an instant. We recognised that we were caught up in an irreproducible and irrepresentable event. Moreover, what lent the scene its particular drama, though it would invariably be omitted from later accounts, was our terror as to what would happen next, for it seemed unlikely that there could ever be a sane, bloodless conclusion to this cataclysm.

The rocket rose, and there was a collective gasp, a most naive, amazed Ahh, inarticulate and primordial, as all of us for a moment forgot ourselves – our education, manners and sense of irony – to follow the fine white javelin on its ascent through the southern skies.

There was light, too: the richest orange of the bomb maker’s palette. The rocket became a giant burning bulb in the firmament, letting us see as if by daylight the beach, the town of Kourou, the jungle, the space centre’s buildings and the faces of our stunned fellow spectators.

The launch seemed capable of upholding any number of symbolic readings. Here was a tube carrying an Asian television satellite into orbit, but it was also, depending on one’s inclinations (and there was little in the scene to prevent such thoughts), a spirit, Yahweh, the Holy Trinity, or a reincarnation of Mawari, the omnipotent creator of the Waiwai universe. The scene brought to mind the moments of smoke and fire which the Old Testament prophets had invoked to make their audiences shudder before the majesty of their lord. And yet this modern impression of divinity was being generated by the most secular and pagan of machines. Science had taught us to upstage the gods.

The launcher pierced through a layer of clouds and disappeared, leaving only an untraceable roar which reverberated across the heavens, the earth and the jungle. Then, through a gap in the clouds, it promptly reappeared, higher up than any plane could fly and reduced to a smudge of flame. The satellite I had been in a room with just a few days before was already reaching the upper atmosphere. The rocket boosters had been jettisoned somewhere in between and were on their way down, halfway to Africa by now, swaying from parachutes.

An odd quiet settled over us again. A nature-made wind could be heard through the trees, then the call of a monkey. My mouth was dry. I realised that my left hand was hanging in mid-air, still fixed in the same position it had been in when the commotion began. Nearby, under a tent in which a few rows of chairs had been set up, two people were speaking quietly in French. A young woman with shoulder-length hair and an unaffected sort of beauty was explaining to a friend how the satellite would reach its final orbit. She had on a white cotton skirt adorned with small bluebells, and she was using one of her knees to represent the earth and a long, slender finger to trace the path of the satellite. She was keen to make clear to her companion that the launcher would not, as might have been presumed, deliver the satellite all the way to its destination; instead, its job was to lift it 250 kilometres into the atmosphere, to what was known as the point of injection, from where the satellite would require an additional ten days to travel, by means of its own motors, to its orbiting location, thirty-six thousand kilometres above Japan. It would need to complete a number of lower orbits in a curious elliptical shape (sketched across her skirt) before it achieved sufficient force to describe a perfect circle (around her left knee) – an intricate piece of ballistic science I was unable to follow to its conclusion, for the tensions of the scene grew distracting enough to force me to walk out further into the night.

Command of the rocket now passed from the engineers in Kourou to a series of ground tracking stations which ringed the earth, unbeknownst to the inhabitants of their host countries. The first of these was located in the middle of the Atlantic, on Ascension Island, where a small building was manned by a solitary technician brought over from France by ship a month earlier, whose one responsibility was to track Ariane’s journey during the four-minute window following the ejection of its boosters. After that, control devolved to another, similarly lonely tracking facility north of Libreville, in Gabon, which in turn ceded it to a station in Malindi, Kenya. The last in the chain was a lighthouse in the western Australian desert, to whose isolation I felt, at that moment, singularly able to relate.

9.

A post-launch party had been organised in a beachside restaurant in Kourou. The dining room had been decorated with images of Ariane and its satellite, and a buffet laid out that included goat, octopus and a tower of barbecued shrimp sculpted into the shape of a launcher.

On the other side of the earth – where it was tomorrow already, though it had been only twenty-seven minutes since the rocket left our company – the upper-stage engine cut out, and Ariane’s nose cone flipped up to allow the satellite to begin its progress under its own power.

There was high emotion, even euphoria, amongst our group. The Japanese executives pressed themselves one by one against the white shirt of the director of the space agency, the NASA staffers began drinking beer, the propulsion team uncorked some Bordeaux. I shared in their excitement. The planet’s outer atmosphere, which so few objects had ever penetrated in its four-and-a-half-billion-year history (how quiet it must have been in space during the Roman era, how uneventful the Middle Ages from 250 kilometres up), had just let through our elegant white spear. The engineers had learnt how to make a home for one of our machines in the most inhuman of places. There would soon be another eye above us in the firmament. I thought of Walt Whitman’s ‘Passage to India’, from Leaves of Grass, in which the poet had pictured himself surveying the earth and the works of man and nature from on high, an imaginative exercise to which only the modern satellite had been able to lend a concrete dimension:

I see over my own continent the Pacific Railroad, surmounting every barrier;

I see continual trains of cars winding along the Platte, carrying freight and passengers;

I hear the locomotives rushing and roaring, and the shrill steam-whistle,

I hear the echoes reverberate through the grandest scenery in the world;

I cross the Laramie plains – I note the rocks in grotesque shapes–the buttes;

I see the plentiful larkspur and wild onions – the barren, colorless, sage-deserts…

Now, in a garishly lit room at the fringes of the South American jungle, a glass of Brazilian rum in hand, I turned against my tendencies to pessimism and suspiciousness. It seemed too easy to claim that there was nothing new under the sun, that any material progress would inevitably be counterbalanced by spiritual regress, that our spear-wielding ancestors had been as wise and good as ourselves and that the onward march of rational thought had brought with it nothing but tragedy. Did any of these arguments take into account Ariane’s profile on her way up? Did they credit the impeccable logic of her hydraulic systems? And most of all, did not such bromides merely betray the resentment of a defeated and unimaginative class? I felt my allegiances shift to the engineers and technicians around me, these new medicine men who often sported baseball caps, and had a tendency towards unsophisticated humour – but who had nonetheless mastered the workings of the universe. What astonishing creatures they were! What extraordinary horizons they had opened up!

The only person who seemed unable to join in the excitement was the Hong Kong television presenter, who sat glumly at a table pushing shrimp around her plate. She had found the launch a disappointment, she said and, smiling weakly, added that she had now started her own countdown: to her return to her apartment overlooking Victoria Harbour. Her bitterness smacked of bruised egocentricity. The only topic she appeared comfortable with was mosquitoes. Though tales of the bites of others are usually no less wearing than those of their dreams, she boasted at length about how she had been devoured during the launch, and proceeded to show off her ankles, hopeful that the interest of so many minute beings might stand as a last, desperate proof of her continued magnetism. I realised then that it might be possible to feel jealous of a rocket.

10.

I helped myself to some goat stew and sweet potato and made my way to a table outside. There was an improbable density of stars in the sky, as if glitter had been prodigally scattered across a swathe of black satin. For thousands of years, it had been nature – and its supposed creator – that had had a monopoly on awe. It had been the icecaps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us a sense of finitude and limitation and had elicited a feeling in which fear and respect coagulated into a strangely pleasing sense of humility, a feeling which the philosophers of the eighteenth century had famously termed the sublime.

But then had come a transformation to which we were still the heirs, and of which Ariane was an exemplar. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the dominant catalyst for that feeling of the sublime had ceased to be nature. We were now deep in the era of the technological sublime, when awe could most powerfully be invoked not by forests or icebergs but by supercomputers, rockets and particle accelators. We were now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves.

Nature, meanwhile, had become an object of concern and pity, like a former foe arrived at one’s gates, bleeding to death. No longer standing as a symbol of all which surpassed us, the natural landscape instead everywhere bore the scars of our quixotic powers. We could look up at the diminishing snows of Kilimanjaro and reflect on the ill effects of our turbines. We could fly over denuded stretches of the Amazon and perceive the rain forest to be no more robust than a single flower in our hands. We had learnt to feel respect for circuit boards and pity and guilt towards glaciers.

11.

I had planned to get a lift back to the Atlantis Hotel from one of the engineers who lived nearby, but at one in the morning, he put on a paper hat and started dancing with a Brazilian waitress, so I headed out alone.

The streets of Kourou, never an inviting milieu, looked especially drab and sinister this late at night. The shops were shuttered and largely unlit. The Waiwai restaurant, having been robbed the day before by a gang from across the border in Surinam, was cordoned off with police tape.

I fell into an unexpectedly melancholic mood, perhaps inspired by the realisation of how few of the accomplishments that lay behind Ariane’s launch would in fact be able to filter down reliably to everyday experience and hence how much of life was set to continue as it had always done, prey to the same inner inclemencies, gravitational pulls and depressions as those our cave-dwelling ancestors had known. Our bodies would disintegrate, our plans would be blown off course, we would be visited by cruelty, lust and silliness – and only occasionally would we be in a position to recover contact with the speed, elegance, dignity and intelligence evidenced by the great machines.

I felt keenly the painful psychological adjustments required by life in modernity: the need to juggle a respect for the potential offered by science with an awareness of how perplexingly limited and narrowly framed might be its benefits. I felt the temptation of hoping that all activities would acquire the excitement and rigours of engineering while recognising the absurdity of those who, overly impressed by technological achievement, lose sight of how doggedly we will always be pursued by baser forms of error and absurdity.

12.

The next day was my last in French Guiana. To kill time before my evening flight, I toured the capital, Cayenne, ending up in the nation’s main museum, a traditional tin-roofed Creole house in a poor state of repair, filled with spears, colonial portraits and pickled snakes.

In a back room hung depictions of the country’s inhabitants at work, across different periods of history. The first frame was of a family in animal skins peeling fruit; the second of some fishermen staring limply from the side of a canoe; the third of a horde of slaves setting fire to a plantation building. Finally, twice the size of the other images, in attractive Technicolor, came a picture of five white-coated engineers attending to a satellite’s cabling in a hangar in the space centre. The moral was clear: French Guiana had overcome the degrading labour of its past and was headed towards a future consecrated by the hand of science.

Yet I felt the awkwardness of having to look up to rocket engineers and technicians as our ancestors might once have venerated their gods. These specialists were unlikely and troubling objects of admiration compared with the night sky and the mountains. The pre-scientific age, whatever its deficiencies, had at least offered its members the peace of mind that follows from knowing all man-made achievements to be nothing next to the grandeur of the universe. We, more blessed in our gadgetry but less humble in our outlook, have been left to wrestle with feelings of envy, anxiety and arrogance that follow from having no more compelling repository of veneration than our brilliant, precise, blinkered and morally troubling fellow human beings.

13.

A little more than a week after my return home, the Lockheed Martin satellite successfully entered its orbit, joining the hundreds of others which necklace the earth. It now beams down images of WOWOW TV’s programmes across Japan, from where it can sometimes be seen on a clear night, impersonating one of nature’s stars.