Thoughts While Watching a Rocket Launch Deep in the Jungle of French Guiana
It was a rainy night and I was standing with about 50 scientists and engineers on a raised platform surrounded by jungle so primitive and wild and cinematically picture-perfect (hanging vines included) that you could film Tarzan in it.
Five kilometers away, towering over the primeval foliage, was a temple to modernity. The pure white seamless steeple of an Ariane 5 main stage and payload capsule stood as tall as a 20-story building. Flanking this technological spire were a pair of massive, 100-foot-high streamlined columns containing the Ariane's solid fuel boosters.
Here was 780 tons of civilization's greatest ingenuity, highest intelligence, and finest electronic, technical, and mechanical precision plopped down in the midst of what things looked like when proto-humans were still living in trees.
It made me think. Actually, no it didn't. All thoughts were swept from my head once the countdown began. "Dix, neuf, huit, sept..." (Arianespace is a French corporation.)
"Six... cinq... quatre..." Steam billowed around the Ariane as immense hoses sprayed water on the nozzles of the rocket engines to act as a damper for the vibration of liftoff and keep the launch pad from melting.
"Trois... deux... un..."
AND THERE WAS LIGHT...
"The light of the world," or as close as we mortals can get to making it. The Ariane's rocket engines radiated a glare like the flashbulb of an old-fashioned Speed Graphic newspaper camera – if all of the newspaper photographers on Earth snapped a picture at once and the flashbulbs wouldn't go out. Vast luminosity reflected from the low cloud cover and French Guiana was lit like day.
We could have read small print on the jungle platform (if anybody had been calm enough to read). Maybe something in French appropriate for the occasion, such as Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness, given how anxious we were that the launch would result in the former and not the latter.
The Ariane seemed for a moment to hover lovingly over its own shining incandescence. Then 2.9 billion pounds of thrust kicked in. No one watching it could take a breath. No one watching it could hear a thing, either. A pure silence seemed to last forever. In fact, it lasted 4.1 seconds... the time it took the sound waves to reach us.
When they did, it was like nothing you've ever heard before. The noise was not so much loud as it was deep, swelling, surging, rolling. Sound waves are waves. It was a pounding surf of a noise. No audio recording could do justice to a sound that was more felt than heard.
We were awash in a second boom. The speed of sound had been reached in less than 45 seconds.
The Ariane streaked toward orbit atop an arch of blazing fire supporting the firmament.
Excuse me for waxing lyrical. Digest readers who've witnessed a rocket launch will understand. Those who haven't should go out and do so immediately. It's a few minutes that you'll remember forever.
A payload engineer was standing next to me. "When you see power like that, your first impression is destruction and evil," she said. "But we've captured it for productive good."
That's when I began having thoughts again.
"Capturing something for productive good" – the miracle of the free market in a nutshell.
The Ariane launch was the most up-to-date possible example of Adam Smith's three basic free-market principles...
Pursuit of self-interest: Arianespace is a profit-making corporation, and the Ariane 5 payload contained two separate privately funded, commercial communications satellites, one each for ViaSat and Eutelsat. (Note that when governments had monopolies on space flights, they used them... first to attack London with the V-2, and then for Moscow and Washington to threaten each other with Dr. Strangelove movie plots.)
Division of labor: It took untold thousands of workers with a myriad of different skills to build the Ariane, its payload satellites, and the Centre Spatial Guyanais launch facilities. (And some of those skills might not be the ones you're thinking of. The Centre Spatial is guarded by the French Foreign Legion.)
Freedom of trade: The launch was the result of a highly complex trade deal involving Arianespace, the European Eutelsat satellite provider, the American ViaSat communications company plus Boeing, which built ViaSat's satellite, and Airbus, which is the prime contractor for building the Ariane 5.
Many people think the free market is all about competition. Especially politicians, the liberal college professoriate, too many media commentators, and the cement-head kids demonstrating in the street against this, that, and the other thing. They're wrong... The free market is all about cooperation. ViaSat and Eutelsat are trade rivals, not to mention Boeing and Airbus.
This cooperation and Adam Smith's three basic principles are the timeless heart of the free market, which has been around since humankind began. People were engaged in the free market before anyone ever wrote anything about it (or knew how to write).
At the moment I was watching the Ariane launch, primitive folks in the far reaches of that jungle were probably "capturing something for productive good." (There is evidence that French Guiana contains isolated groups of Wayampi indigenous people who have never been in contact with the outside world.) Maybe they were pursuing self-interest, divvying up the work, trading, and cooperating to capture a jaguar. The productive good being that it wouldn't eat them – and they could eat it.
Nor is the free market all about price, as it is often criticized for being. I had an interesting talk with Arianespace's CEO, the charming and relaxed Stephané Israël. Ariane is supposedly being undercut in payload cost by newcomers such as SpaceX. M. Israël had a six-word response to the challenge: "Eighty successful launches in a row."
Reliability is an integral part of value. We free-market capitalists have only ourselves to blame that most market-exchange pricing doesn't adequately factor in reliability. The only place where reliability is as determinate as it should be is on the Volatility Index (VIX). And when reliability is high, the VIX is low.
The free market also isn't all about what's new and novel and catches the eye of the fickle public. I asked M. Israël about the reusable rockets that have gotten so much age-of-recycling press attention. "We have looked into the cost and reliability of that," M. Israël said. "Why doesn't Coca-Cola refill its old bottles anymore?"
My last thought from French Guiana was about the idea that the free market is somehow "soulless" and "unspiritual."
Not at all! (Or as the locals would put it, "Pas de tout!") On the night before the launch the scientists and engineers drank deep libations to the sure and certain hope of success and then went down to the beach for a solemn ceremony.
The ceremony is based upon an ancient legend that comes down through the mists of time from the earliest days of space exploration, maybe from as long ago as the Titan I missile program in the early 1960s.
The story, as the "space elders" tell it, is that the Titan I scientists and engineers at Cape Canaveral got stinking drunk. They were in a lousy mood. They had to scrub their mission each day for the previous eight days because of weather. They decided that something had to be done. They stole a steak knife from the restaurant where they were drinking, went out on Cocoa Beach, and buried it with the tip pointed toward the rocket trajectory's azimuth.
(Yes, I had to look up "azimuth" in the dictionary. It means "The direction of a celestial object, expressed as the angular distance from the north or south point of the horizon to the point at which a vertical circle passing through the object intersects the horizon." Got that? Me either. But spiritual truths aren't supposed to be easy to understand.)
And the next morning, the Titan I launch went off without a hitch.
The Ariane scientists and engineers dug a hole in the sand and placed a knife at the bottom of the hole with its tip pointing toward the Ariane's azimuth (whatever that may be). Then they lined up and each dropped a handful of sand into the hole until the knife was buried.
Perhaps in the far reaches of the jungle isolated groups of Wayampi indigenous people were just then bowing down to the distant "Lightning-Thunder-Three-Sticks-Magic" in expectation that it would please them with its brilliance the following evening. If so, they weren't being any more mystical than the scientists and engineers.
Regards,
P.J. O'Rourke