Bruce Sterling - Essays. Catscan Columns

I have a hard time maintaining friendships via e-mail alone. Though I get a lot of e-mail from friends, I have no sustained relationship with any person whom I've met only by and through e-mail. I've heard of this being done, but I've never done it myself. I uncharitably speculate that it's because I already have a life.

I can already sense the nature of my next major online challenge. I will have to deal with the consequences of a spectacularly growing Internet and my slowly growing notoriety within it. Increasing traffic on the Information Highway is slowly but surely overwhelming me. Lately, I have begun logging onto my home system, the WELL, every day; not by choice but by necessity. I've become much better at online research, and my use of my online time is much more efficient. But there are limits, and the limits are visibly approaching.

I'll never forget the strange chill I felt when I once logged onto the WELL after a brief absence and found 115 pieces of mail awaiting me -- *every one of which was interesting.* There was simply *nothing left to skip.* I was captivated by all of it, and it was all there right at my fingertips, and I suddenly understood why certain unlucky souls rupture their wrist tendons at the keyboard.

An hour a day online is hard work, but I feel it's worth it; the stuff I get online is no longer soup, I'm getting real cubes of bouillon online, nuggets of information of intense interest that are unattainable anywhere else. But if this goes on I'll be beaten to a pulp; I'll be pelted into a coma with little croutons of incoming data. Somehow I'm going to have to find a way to make it stop. And it's not just dry data that is getting out of hand, but the socialization, the increasing demands online for my personal attention. As more and more people obtain my net-address, my replies must become briefer and briefer. The crush of the virtual crowd will eventually overwhelm me.

When that happens, I believe I'll have to take stern measures. I could simply ignore unsolicited mail. But that seems a stopgap measure. I'll probably have to drop my current online identity, and go back online incognito. It's a pretty problem in virtual etiquette: who will get my new address and who will have to be dropped? How will I convince people to maintain the secrecy of my new ID when the whole raison d'etre of the infobahn is instant access to anybody anywhere anytime?

I don't know yet. But if I keep at it I'm sure I'll learn something.

Back in the heyday of the twentieth century, you couldn't keep a space hero out of network television or off the glossy pages of LIFE and LOOK. Nowadays LIFE and LOOK are as dead as Yuri Gagarin. Even the TV networks are assuming a rather sickly post-digital hue.

Space news out of the USSR -- a defunct entity itself looking very true to LIFE -- no longer kicks up nine-day Sputnik wonders, no longer appears in major monthlies. It's to be found instead in the workaday pages of IEEE SPECTRUM, a specialized magazine for electronics engineers.

In March 1995, longtime cosmonaut-watcher and NASA engineer James Oberg engaged in an extensive first-hand tour of the formerly Soviet launch sites and space complexes. Oberg is a recognized Soviet Space expert, somtime NOVA host on PBS, special consultant to the Sotheby's auction house for Soviet space memorabilia, and the author of the definitive tome RED STAR IN ORBIT (Random House 1981). His article appeared in the December 1995 issue of SPECTRUM.

For decades during the Cold War and Space Race, Oberg basically used the techniques of other career Kremlinologists -- rumors, defectors, body counts, overheard radio telemetry, May Day parade stands, and informed speculation.

But with the USSR defunct, Oberg simply breezed into the legendary Baikonur cosmodrome with camera, videocam and notebook in hand -- and what a story Oberg has to tell.

The Russian space centers haven't quite caught on to the unromantic fact that the century has left Khrushschev and Gagarin behind. The space facilities still boast a plethora of hammers and sickles, with the names and profiles of Lenin, Kalinin and other Old Bolsheviks. A certain nostalgia is only to be expected, as the space worker corps is littered with deadwood. Most of Russia's current top space experts are men in their 60s and 70s, a Brezhnev-style gerontocracy of rocket-science.

Many of these veteran space workers have simply outlived the Space Age. They first took up their sacred calling in the 50s and 60s, during the super-secret Sputnik and Vostok days, when technical knowledge was strictly compartmentalized and doled out on a need-to-know basis. Institutional senility is creeping in, as Oberg demonstrates with an anecdote. Last April the Mir space station cosmonauts began showing odd bits and pieces of lost hardware to ground control, asking what these gadgets were. Nobody on the ground had a clue; they couldn't recognize the gear or even guess its purpose. The machines were still in orbit, but the paper trail was gone.

The Mir space station itself is ten years old. It has had at least one fire on board. No one has any idea how to "de-orbit" the decaying station safely, but the Russians hope that American money and American technology will keep the station running through the turn of the century. The Soviet tracking ships, which once kept a global communication net running for the sake of space exploration, have been sold, scrapped, or have ended up rotting in the harbors of the breakaway Ukraine. The Mir station can only speak to Russian ground control in ten- to-fifteen minute bursts, broken by up to ten hours of enforced silence as it flies over areas of the globe where Russia no longer has radio presence.

The USSR had two major launch centers, Baikonur Cosmodrome (aka Tyuratam) and the ultra-secret Plesetsk site. Official fraud claimed that Baikonur existed some 250 kilometers away from the actual site of launches; the launches from Plesetsk were denied entirely and officially proclaimed to be UFOs.

Like a lot of Russian government military and paramilitary sites, Plesetsk hasn't been paying its power bills lately, and has sometimes had its power shut off. But Plesetsk is a thriving haven compared to Baikonur, because Plesetsk is at least within the physical territory of the Russian Federation. Baikonur/Tyuratam isn't so lucky. The launch site of Soviet manned space missions is now entirely within the independent state of Kazakhstan.

The site, according to Oberg (and his many fine color photos strongly back him up) is in a state of advanced decay. The water is no longer safe to drink, and runs only intermittently. Fires, explosions, and toxic leaks are common. Tumbleweeds (an Asian species) roll unimpeded through the launchpads. Many civilian workers were left unpaid for months on end, and they simply fled. Drafted militia sent in to maintain order broke into rioting and looting through the abandoned, windowless apartment blocks. There haven't been any new-hires taken on to the space enterprise in at least five years.

With the near-collapse of security, thousands of Kazakh squatters have moved in to the launch center. They're still there, defying eviction by Russian and Kazakh military cops and armied militias. The cosmic capital's thickly-strewn junk-piles, broken fencing and abandoned industrial warehousing made it a positive boon for the Kazakh refugees, peasants fleeing the ecological disaster of the poisoned Aral Sea. The streets of Baikonur are choked with blowing dust from the distant Aral salt flats. The pesticide-thickened runoff from dammed rivers cannot keep the sea from dwindling.

Amazingly, the veteran Russian space workers, on average well over 50 years old, are still launching rockets from Tyuratam. Their work has been cut back by 90 percent or so, and they're begging passers-by for canned food and pencils, but the cosmic enterprise staggers on. The fading glamour of space-flight has become one Russia's few foreign cash-cows.