“Put your hands over your eyes. Jump out of the plane. There is no pilot. You are not alone. Standby.”

-Laurie Anderson, “From the Air”

The Space Shuttle is gone. The program ended after thirty years when the orbiter Atlantis landed this past July 21st.

The Space Shuttle was designed to act as, and resemble, something between a pickup truck and a commercial airliner. Humanist and anthropomorphic, the shuttles climbed to orbit on two leg-like rocket boosters to advance NASA’s stated mission: “to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.”

Before the shuttle, the first few generations of human built spacecraft were highly legible artifacts. Antenna, solar panels, docking ports, attitude thrusters and portholes clearly indicated that they were only components in larger contextual systems, processing nodes dependent on complex streams of input and output.

The ship pictured above is the X37-B, first launched by the Air Force in 2010, mission unknown. Blunt and blind, with no windows or doors, no visible human or network affordances at all, this object has nothing to indicate that its autonomy would be threatened or influenced by any other controller inside or outside its smooth heat shielded skin. Who could suspect that this baby robot spaceplane, cute and sinister like a vinyl Dunny toy, designed by the Department of Defense, would be capable of deploying orbital weapons?

In The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe describes the anger and frustration of the early American astronauts, all originally fighter test pilots, when they discovered that the vehicles they were expected to fly were really only subject to little more than the faceless math of ballistics and orbital mechanics. The Shuttle, famously at the intersection of myriad budgetary and engineering compromises, can be seen as the bargaining phase in humanity’s relationship with autonomy and agency in Low Earth Orbit.

If the end of Kübler-Ross model of coping with grief is the realization of a new condition, then surely this is it: a sky full of eyeless robots, some of whom want to be our friends.

Fred Scharmen

There is a framed picture on my dresser from when I was eighteen. In it, I am sitting on the floor of the Frankfurt airport. M., my first love, a lanky German boy, sits next to me and quietly studies my face. The other friend in the picture holds my hand, his eyes closed, crying. In slow motion, M. and I are being torn from each other: an hour after the click of the shutter, I will pass through the gate and go back to Minnesota after spending a year in Germany.

Twenty years later in a different city, I took a set of pictures the last time I stayed at J.’s apartment: the knives on the magnetic strip in the kitchen, my reflection in the mirrored closet doors, the vertical blinds and the West Coast light casting diagonal beams on the bed, the view of the bookshelf from the orange couch, each of us on an end, watching old movies and West Wing episodes under a thin turquoise throw. Here was Christmas, here was the most important letter anyone gave me. Here were the meanest things anyone ever said to me.

Neither love nor depression have the words “finish” or “end” or “done” in their vocabulary. Love is belief in expansiveness, of more and again and adventure, of a year that keeps unfolding, of Death Valley in summer and northern Sweden in winter and even just Venice Beach on a gloomy day in June. Depression, too, is expansive, but in a different way, a swirling vortex of shit, a downward funnel that just spins deeper.

Grief, however, is bounded. It twists and gnarls and it stifles the breath. It forgoes the linear in favor of spikes and spots and synchronicity. When you think you’ve managed to escape grief, it hoods you again, capturing you in another convolute. A knot under my sternum that sticks on every inhale, a peach pit, the bitter walnut falling out of a cracked shell. And then: the knot tires itself, giving way to all the muscles that gripped it; the walnut spit out, the peach pit tucked into a napkin, then folded in quarters.

M. W. Steenson