James Lileks. His Daily Bleat was one of the first blogs I ever encountered, well over 10 years ago — man, that’s hard to process, that I’ve been reading blogs for over a decade — and I’ve been a more-or-less faithful reader ever since. But I have to confess, there have been times when I’ve been tempted to walk away from him for good. While I share his affinity for mid-20th century ephemera, architecture, and culture, he can be so bloody confounding at times. I disagree with his politics, and find him pretty unbearable when he veers into that domain; his frequent schtick of transcribing customer service encounters in minute detail has grown tiresome; his hatred of all things 1970s is tedious (I actually quite liked that decade; it was a good time to be a child); and his curmudgeonly attitude sometimes gets to be a little too much even for me, a fellow member of the august tribe of misanthropic “get off my lawn” types.

But then, just when I’m ready to pull the plug, he goes and writes something like this (he’s referring to last week’s news that the Voyager 1 space probe, launched in the landmark year 1977, is finally crossing the threshold from our solar system into interstellar space):

I’d like to think it’s not the last we’ve seen of it. If we build fast engines and get out there someday, someone will go looking for it. But it would be wrong to bring it home; that’s not its place. It would be a tourist attraction, like the ruins of an old colonial fort from the 17th century. Pass alongside, snap a picture: if you’ll look out the portside windows, we’re passing Voyager 1, which has a record containing the music of Chuck Berry and Beethoven. What haunts me is the idea that it will never be found, the record never be heard, and long after the sun has guttered out, the idea of Beethoven, unrealized, floats in an empty void, an arrangement of code.

As a would-be writer, I envy that paragraph. It’s an idea I wish I’d had, expressed more eloquently than I know I probably would. And as a space buff and a die-hard romantic, it makes me wistful. It’s a vision that I hope comes true. I can see it so clearly in my imagination: hundreds of passengers lining a futuristic version of a modern-day cruise ship’s promenade railing, pressing against floor-to-ceiling viewports that have been uncovered for just this occasion, straining to catch a glimpse of a historical treasure. The anticipation builds. A couple of people point excitedly at spots that turn out to be nothing at all, false sightings. Then the ship’s officers helpfully announce over the speakers where the crowd should look… and there it is, the legendary Flying Dutchman of space… a tiny, fragile-looking thing, pitted and scoured by centuries of exposure to interstellar dust and micrometeorites, glistening faintly like a dragonfly in the glare of the liner’s external floodlights. Its nuclear powercells are going cold, its transmitter no longer calls home, but somehow, improbably, it’s still going — still voyaging — ever outward…

I wish I could be there to see it, to experience a passage like that. Now that would be something to write about…

So I’m sure everyone heard about the transit-of-Venus thing that happened Tuesday, right? That once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event when the next planet inward from us passed between the Earth and the sun? Did you all manage to catch a glimpse of it? Well, good for you… The Girlfriend and I, on the other hand, got hosed. And considering this only happens every 105 years, I’m a little peeved about it.

I heard a couple days prior that our local planetarium was going to host a viewing party at the Gateway mall in Salt Lake. That’s only a couple blocks from my office, so I suggested Anne pick me up at quitting time and we drive over there for a quick peek, then go for dinner some place in the downtown area. A great plan… if only the weather had cooperated with us. When Anne arrived at my office, the skies were overcast and a cold wind was making it miserable to be outdoors. We still had a couple hours before sunset, so we decided to reverse our schedule, have dinner first and hope the clouds would break while we were eating. No such luck, though; we walked out of Sizzler an hour later beneath churning gray skies. But I wasn’t willing to give up yet… looking off to the west, toward the Gateway, I thought I could see a little patch of sunlight. Surely, I thought, that spot ought to be visible from the Gateway.

It took us a mere five minutes or so to drive across town and find a parking space. The viewing party — such as it was — was set up atop the broad concrete stairs overlooking the Olympic Fountain, an interactive water feature that commemorates the 2002 Winter Games that put Salt Lake City on the map. Not to mention Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee for president. But that’s another blog entry.

There was but a single telescope there, a stubby, fat-barreled model presided over by three very dejected-looking young people. One of them stepped forward to meet us as we approached. Wrapped in a blanket, with a shaggy mane of dark hair and sporting a pointy Van Dyke-style beard with carefully waxed and curled mustachios, he gave the general appearance of a Spanish conquistador.

“Have you been able to see anything?” I asked, hoping he’d have a more hopeful answer than the one I anticipated.

“Nah, we’ve been here since four o’clock and we haven’t been able to see shit, man,” he replied.

Anne and I commiserated with him for a moment, then decided there wasn’t any point in pretending any longer. We thanked the conquistador for his time and wandered into the nearby Barnes and Noble, where we killed close to another hour browsing. We were disappointed to have missed the transit, but it’d been a long time since we’d been in a bookstore with nothing in particular to buy and nowhere in particular we needed to be. It seemed an adequate consolation prize.

The final insult remained to be delivered, though. When we finally made our purchases and left the bookstore, to our surprise, we found the plaza outside was awash in lovely, golden-hour light! The skies had cleared after all, just as we’d hoped they would, and the sun was setting directly in front of us, framed in the gap between the buildings across from where we’d spoken to the conquistador. Except… he and his science-loving buddies were gone. They’d evidently given up and called it a night, and they’d taken their telescope with them. So Anne and I were left with a perfect view, but no equipment through which to view it. We didn’t even have any of the specially filtered sunglasses the planetarium sells for viewing eclipses. Somewhere, I thought I heard quiet, mocking laughter. It might have been the little kid playing in the Olympic Fountain, oblivious to the chilly temperatures. At least, that’s what I’ve been telling myself.

The next transit is due on December 10, 2117. I suppose there’s always a chance that someone will develop a longevity serum in the next couple decades…

When I awoke last Friday morning, I thought I’d missed all the fun already, and would have to content myself with a YouTube replay of the Dragon spacecraft arriving at the International Space Station. But whether because I miscalculated my time zones (always a possibility; I can never figure out how Utah’s daylight savings time works with the other zones) or because the Dragon’s approach was delayed by a small problem with its laser rangefinding device, it turned out that I was in fact just in time to watch live as the ISS grappled the spacecraft with its robotic arm.

(If you haven’t followed the coverage closely, I should explain, briefly, that Dragon was not allowed to maneuver into the ISS’s docking port under its own power, as the space shuttle used to. Rather, it closed to within a certain distance and matched speeds with the station, so it appeared from the ISS to be standing still, and then the ISS reached out and grabbed hold of the capsule with the Canadarm2 manipulator, which, as you can see in the image above, is a beefier version of the Canadian-built robot arm used aboard the shuttles. After holding the Dragon for a time while some final checks were made, the multi-jointed arm then pulled the capsule down to a port where it was made secure with latching bolts. This operation is called “berthing,” as opposed to “docking,” which involves some different hardware and techniques.)

I must confess, my expectations of how this sort of thing is supposed to look have been honed by countless sci-fi movies and TV shows, which rarely waste precious screentime on what usually amounts to an establishing shot as far as the plot is concerned. Which means fictional spacecraft meeting up with each other are usually depicted as moving with the same mundane carelessness as a city bus pulling to the curb. But in real life, the process is much more cautious and methodical, i.e., everything… moves… very… slow…ly… And that means I got a wee bit impatient before it was all over. At one point, it appeared as if the grappling head had stopped moving altogether, and when the voice of mission control announced that there was only half a meter’s distance remaining — a mere foot and a half — I actually yelled at my monitor something to the effect of, “Oh, come on!” But at last the grapple snapped down over the fixture on the side of the capsule, and the historic message came down from the ISS: “Looks like we’ve got a Dragon by the tail.” And I felt a warm glow of cheer spread through my chest that I haven’t felt since the space shuttle Discovery blasted off on her post-Columbia disaster “return to flight” mission.

I had to switch off the computer at that point and get to work, and by the time I reached the office, Dragon was berthed. I intended to blog my thoughts about the event then, but naturally it was a busy day at work, as it always seems to be when something is going on that I really want to write about (it’s almost as if The Man knows). And a busy day led to a busy three-day weekend that blurred into another busy week. Meanwhile, high above our heads, the ISS crew had opened the connecting hatches and reported that Dragon had a “new-car smell” and looked “like a sci-fi filmset” inside, with its blue LED lights marking the deck (as opposed to the walls, difficult to distinguish when you’re floating in zero-g), before getting busy unloading the 1,100 pounds of food, water, clothing and equipment she’d brought up. This cargo was replaced with over 1,300 pounds of used equipment and other items scheduled for return to Earth, the first time the ISS has been able to send anything back since the last shuttle flight a year ago.

And then early yesterday morning, after nine days in space that seemed to pass with astonishing speed (at least from my perspective), Dragon was pushed away from the station by the Canadarm2, fired her thrusters to begin decelerating, and re-entered the atmosphere for a controlled splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, a little under 600 miles west of Baja California. For old-timers and space buffs who know their history, the scene looked like a return to the glory days of Apollo, with the scorched capsule descending beneath fat, red-and-white-striped parachutes. Today, she’s on a barge that will return her to Long Beach, California. The capsule will need to be thoroughly inspected, of course, but as of right now, it looks like the mission was a flawless success, aside from that one glitch with the rangefinder. The demonstration phase is over; SpaceX has proven it’s up for the job of supporting the space station, and now hopes to fly the first of twelve contracted cargo runs to the ISS as early as this summer. Looking a little farther down the road, the plan is to fly the first humans aboard a Dragon capsule in 2015.

I’m sure everyone who doesn’t live and breathe this stuff is sick of hearing it, since every news article has said the same thing, but this point must be emphasized again: this mission was historic, as much so in its way as the Mercury missions or the first space shuttle flight. This was the first time a private company did what has previously been the sole province of national governments: they designed, built, and successfully demonstrated both a booster rocket and a functioning, useful spacecraft. Yes, NASA provided some seed money and the parameters to follow, but SpaceX, and in particular the company’s founder Elon Musk, essentially did this on their own. And while there are several other private companies aiming for the same goal, SpaceX got there first. A plucky little company comprising fewer than 2,000 employees, mostly enthusiastic young people from what I can see, has brought us into the age of commercial space travel. It’s a great story. And you know, as much as I love my space shuttles and wish there was still a role for them up there, even if it’s a much-reduced one from what they previously enjoyed, I’m overjoyed about this development. It means that somebody still wants to go up there and has the will to do it. And it opens up… possibilities. As depressed as I was about our future in space only a few months ago, today I am hopeful. Hopeful that in only a few short years, the skies will be filled with spacecraft — manned, reusable spacecraft — from a dozen private-industry firms, and that NASA is back in the big-idea business, and maybe, just maybe, the public gives a damn again about seeing what’s over the horizon…