Superstitions in Space
(Note: This post got accidentally overwritten in the rush to Air my Grievances. Apologies for any confusion or inconvenience caused.)
I stumbled across a great article this morning detailing the superstitions, rituals and customs that cosmonauts and astronauts go through before, during and after their missions.
While they’re mostly irrational, you can perhaps forgive them somewhat, given that these peoples’ job involves being strapped onto a missile and being fired into orbit. It’s also interesting to see how rituals evolve and the pragmatic purpose they serve – to dampen fear in times of stress and to build solidarity.
Perhaps understandably, the Russians have the biggest canon of space faring rituals, which are literally Byzantine in their complexity and, in some cases, origin:
When on orbit, whether in Salyut, Mir or today’s ISS, the crews of space stations have always offered bread and salt to visitors, in accordance with timeless custom.
The funniest of the Russian cosmonaut rites happens on the way to the launch pad:
The crew board the transfer bus, suitably adorned with horseshoes, and on their trip to the pad perform yet another ritual harking back to Yuri Gagarin. The bus stops, the crewmembers file out, and repeating an act performed by the great Gagarin himself, urinate on the right rear wheel of the bus. Female members are excused this obligation, but the more enthusiastic women cosmonauts have been known to take a vial of their urine with them and sprinkle it on the bus.
It’s interesting to note that though this tradition is apparently based on Gagarin, there’s documentary evidence that he never in fact pissed on the wheel of the transfer bus. Which goes to show that people will never allow the facts to get in the way of a good superstition.
The Americans are much more low-key (not to mention dignified – adult nappies notwithstanding) about their astronaut superstitions. But there’s something poignant about the tradition of the losing hand:
At the same time the commander of the mission must play cards with the tech crew until he loses a hand. This card game, variously described as a type of blackjack and as a kind of five-card poker, has its origins in the earliest American spaceflights, though apparently nobody knows who began this custom. Since the ritual specifies that it is the mission commander who must play and lose, this suggests a beginning with the Gemini missions and the first two-man crews.
The writer’s closing speculation about future space-farers keeping artefacts of their predecessors as saintly relics reminds me oddly of the JG Ballard story, The Dead Astronaut, even though that story posits a far less optimistic future for human spaceflight.
As the dead capsules lost orbital velocity, they homed onto the master radio beacon. As well as the American vehicles, Russian and French satellites in the joint Euro-American space projects were brought down here, the burned-out hulks of the capsules exploding across the cracked concrete.
Already, too, the relic hunters were at Cape Kennedy, scouring the burning saw grass for instrument panels and flying suits and – most valuable of all – the mummified corpses of the dead astronauts.
These blackened fragments of collarbone and shin, kneecap and rib, were the unique relics of the space age, as treasured as the saintly bones of medieval shrines
At three o’clock that morning, as we lay awake on the narrow bed, Valentina Prokrovna came down from the sky. Enthroned on a bier of burning aluminum 300 yards wide, she soared past on her final orbit. When I went out into the night air, the relic hunters had gone. From the rim of the settling tank, I watched them race away among the dunes, leaping like hares over the tires and wire.
…the relic hunters worked on the fragments of Valentina Prokrovna’s capsule: the blistered heat shield, the chassis of the radiotelemetry unit and several cans of film that recorded her collision and act of death (these, if still intact, would fetch the highest prices, films of horrific and dreamlike violence played in the underground cinemas of Los Angeles, London and Moscow). Passing the next cabin, I saw a tattered silver space suit spread-eagled on two automobile seats. Quinton and the relic hunters knelt beside it, their arms deep inside the legs and sleeves, gazing at me with the rapt and sensitive eyes of jewelers.
It’s a typically Ballardian story – full of rust and melancholy beauty.
