Desire for space

“Désir d’espace” examines a profoundly human aspiration: the inner drive that pushes humankind not only to raise its eyes to the sky and imagine other worlds, but also to do everything in its power to “get there”: what we call space exploration.

Imagination whispers in everyone’s ear, influencing individual impulses as well as major decisions. It is in this zone of resonance between symbolic visions and technical achievements that this book is set.

An engineer by trade, and former Director of Launchers at the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), where he directed the development of the Ariane 5 rocket, the author here takes a stroll in a different intellectual register: between mythology, philosophy, anthropology, sociology and literature. This distance – or freedom – gives his reflections a singular relief.

Because the launch of a launcher, or the odyssey of a probe to Mars or Saturn, cannot be reduced to a sum of techniques and performances. Unlike remote observations, it is above all a journey, a collective journey undertaken by delegates to symbolically “touch” celestial objects, to feel their dust… through the glove of an astronaut or the articulated arm of a robot.

“Désir d’espace” questions the conceptions of the world to which space exploration responds, and what it sends back to us in return, in this ongoing dialogue between representations and reality. A return to the Moon, or the prospect of men and women reaching Mars, may not arouse unanimous enthusiasm, but it’s widely shared; automatic probes exploring a particular moon of Jupiter or a particular comet also enjoy widespread prestige. In addition to its obvious scientific objectives, foremost among which is the search for other forms of life, this planetary quest is akin to the quest for the meaning of our existence, or for a better understanding of ourselves. However, what can we say about techno-scientific feats that free us from the Earth’s gravitational pull… only to leave us prisoners of the Sun’s? How does real space adventure relate to the visions of science-fiction literature and cinema, where the exploitation and colonization of distant worlds are often presented as the logical consequences of exploration itself, which is itself announced as limitless? And what sense is there in satisfying this “desire for space” – always partial, insufficient and provisional – at a time when the preservation of our terrestrial biosphere has become a major, if not exclusive, concern?

From the myths of Prometheus and Icarus, as ambiguous as all myths, to contemporary controversies, Desire for Space explores the contradictory forces surrounding space exploration, and invites us to make it part of the human adventure in the fullest sense of the term.

Editions Gingko