August 10: When the price of flight is paid in a person
On August 10, 1896, Otto Lilienthal, German aviation pioneer, died after a glider crash. Tonight's film: The Astronaut's Wife (1999).
There is a sentence that has stayed with me for years. Opfer müssen gebracht werden. Sacrifices must be made. Those were said to be Otto Lilienthal’s last words before he died in a Berlin clinic on August 10, 1896. Thirty-six hours earlier his glider had gone down in the Rhinow Hills near Stölln. He fell fifteen meters and fractured his third cervical vertebra.
He was a German engineer, later called the Flying Man. Not a crank trying to grow wings overnight. In 1889 he published Der Vogelflug als Grundlage der Fliegekunst, the first systematic aerodynamic study, which showed that a wing’s curved upper surface produces lift. Over five years, between 1891 and 1896, he completed more than two thousand successful glider flights in sixteen different designs. His Normal Segelapparat could glide up to three hundred meters in about fifteen seconds, on a willow frame covered in cotton fabric. Wilbur Wright later wrote that of all the men in the nineteenth century who attacked the problem of flight, Otto Lilienthal was easily the most important.
And still. On August 9 that machine stalled in the air and fell. Fifteen meters. The whole project of human flight got its invoice that day.
Tonight’s film belongs here. Rand Ravich’s The Astronaut’s Wife, from 1999, takes that same idea up into orbit. Johnny Depp plays Spencer Armacost, a NASA astronaut, and Charlize Theron plays his wife, Jillian. During a routine spacewalk, the link between Spencer and Alex Streck, played by Nick Cassavetes, and Mission Control in Houston cuts out. For exactly two minutes. Both men come back, but something has changed. Spencer quits NASA and takes a job at McLaren in New York. Jillian gets pregnant with twins, and slowly realizes that during those two black minutes something crossed into them and means to continue through the children.
The film is a deliberate space-age retelling of Rosemary’s Baby from 1968. For Ravich it was his first feature as director. Let me be honest: it is not the standout entry in the genre. It cost thirty-four million dollars and brought back only nineteen and a half. Joe Leydon in Variety called it an aggressively stylish but dramatically flaccid drama that plays like an upgraded reprise of a 1950s sci-fi potboiler. FilmAffinity rated it four point four out of ten. Nick Cassavetes’s character dies suddenly, his wife Natalie, played by Donna Murphy, takes her own life. Joe Morton plays the NASA investigator Sherman Reese, who was fired for insisting that Spencer was no longer human. Clea DuVall plays Jillian’s sister. At the end Jillian electrocutes her husband, but the entity transfers into her body, and the film closes with her remarried, the twins heading off to their first day of school, both children wearing a strange, knowing smile.
What ties the two stories together? The price. Lilienthal tested his machines with his own body. In The Astronaut’s Wife the astronaut returns in his own body, and the body is no longer his own. Both say the same thing: when a human being lifts off the ground, something will happen to them that cannot be undone. Lilienthal’s broken spine and Spencer’s two-minute silence stand at the two ends of the same fear.
This is what always lands for me in science fiction. Not the laser pistols and not the alien planets, but the question of what the things we build do to us. I recognize the feeling in software work, in miniature: you assemble something, you let it go, and afterward it is not really yours anymore. Lilienthal paid that price for gliding flight in 1896. In a Berlin clinic, thirty-six hours after the fall, at the age of forty-eight.
That is why The Astronaut’s Wife belongs tonight. It is not a perfect film. But it puts the same weight on the table: flight always asks for something in return. Sometimes a vertebra. Sometimes a husband.
Tonight, press play.
What else could have been tonight
The other thread is more liquid and more modern. On August 10, 1945, Robert H. Goddard, the American physicist regarded as the father of modern rocket propulsion, died of throat cancer in a university hospital in Maryland, at sixty-two. He had been diagnosed two months earlier, and he died in the very month the world entered the atomic age. On March 16, 1926, he launched the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket from his Aunt Effie’s farm in Auburn, Massachusetts. It flew for two and a half seconds, forty-one feet high and one hundred and eighty-four feet downrange. The newspapers mocked him when he talked about the Moon. By his death he held two hundred and fourteen patents: gyroscopic stabilization, variable-thrust motors, multi-stage rockets. In 1959 NASA named the Goddard Space Flight Center after him. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s Sunshine, from 2007, belongs here. In 2057 the Sun is dying and Earth is freezing. The starship Icarus II, with a crew of eight, carries a colossal stellar bomb meant to reignite it. Cillian Murphy plays the physicist Capa. The film plays out the idea Goddard opened up: that rocketry can put a person where they have no business being, and there the Sun, like a god, swallows anything that drifts too close. Pinbacker, the burned and religiously unbalanced captain of the first Icarus, is the end state of that process. Goddard’s death closed the era when the rocket was dismissed as a crank’s dream.
The third detour is quieter and more philosophical. On August 10, 1990, NASA’s Magellan spacecraft reached Venus and entered orbit with an eighty-three-second braking burn. Magellan had been deployed from the shuttle Atlantis on May 5, 1989, and was built almost entirely from spare parts and the inheritance of earlier missions, the leftovers of Voyager, Galileo, Ulysses, and Mariner 9. Its three-and-a-half-meter high-gain antenna served as a synthetic aperture radar that cut through Venus’s opaque clouds. By the end of the mission it had covered ninety-eight percent of the surface at one-hundred-meter resolution, returned one thousand two hundred gigabits of data, and revealed that volcanism rules the planet. Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris, from 2002, belongs here. George Clooney plays Chris Kelvin, a clinical psychologist called to a station orbiting the planet Solaris. The planet is a sentient ocean that materializes the crew’s deepest memories and relationships. Kelvin’s dead wife Rheya, played by Natascha McElhone, appears again in his cabin. Ninety-nine minutes of film, a forty-seven-million-dollar budget, thirty million in revenue, and a rare F CinemaScore from audiences. Magellan’s radar sees through the clouds and finds a volcanic world below. Solaris sees through the human and finds what the mind had hidden away. Both whisper the same thing: when we look deep enough into something alien, most of the time we see ourselves looking back.
Sources
Death of Otto Lilienthal (1896)
https://www.thisdayinaviation.com/9-august-1896/ (August 9 crash, death 36 hours later, “Sacrifices must be made”)
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/this-quirky-contraption-lifted-19th-century-pilots-into-the-air-for-a-short-exhilarating-glide-180979843/ (died August 10, 1896 at age 48, Wilbur Wright quote)
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/lilienthal-glider/nasm_A19060001000 (willow frame, cotton fabric, broken spine, inspiration for the Wright brothers)
The Astronaut’s Wife (1999)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138304/ (Rand Ravich, Johnny Depp, Charlize Theron, two-minute blackout)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Astronaut’s_Wife (Rosemary’s Baby comparison, $19.6M gross against $34M budget)
https://variety.com/1999/film/reviews/the-astronaut-s-wife-1117752058/ (Joe Leydon, “aggressively stylish but dramatically flaccid”)
Robert H. Goddard dies (1945), film: Sunshine (2007)
https://www.nasa.gov/dr-robert-h-goddard-american-rocketry-pioneer/ (August 10, 1945, age 62, throat cancer, 214 patents)
https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/robert-goddard-and-first-liquid-propellant-rocket (1926 first liquid-fueled rocket, Auburn)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0448134/ (Sunshine, Boyle and Garland, Icarus II, Cillian Murphy)
The Magellan probe reaches Venus (1990), film: Solaris (2002)
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/magellan/ (August 10, 1990 orbital insertion, 1,200 gigabits, 98% coverage)
https://www.astronomy.com/today-in-the-history-of-astronomy/aug-10-1990-magellan-enters-venusian-orbit/ (August 10, 1990 arrival, shuttle deployment)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0307479/ (Solaris, Soderbergh, Clooney, 99 minutes, F CinemaScore)