Jet-man today has leisure time. At least, he has time for self-portraiture.
Astronaut Mike Fossum, self-portrait, June 3rd, 2008.
"The jet-man is a jet-pilot. 'Paris Match' has specified that he belongs to a new race in aviation, nearer to the robot than to the hero. Yet there are in the jet-man several Parsifalian residues, as we shall see shortly. But what strikes one first in the mythology of the jet-man is the elimination of speed: nothing in the legend alludes to this experience.
At 3:45 p.m. EDT on the third orbit of Earth, Ed White opened the hatch and used the hand-held manoevering oxygen-jet gun to push himself out of the capsule, June 1965.
"We must here accept a paradox, which is in fact admitted by everyone with the greatest of ease, and even consumed as a proof of modernity. This paradox is that an excess of speed turns to repose. The pilot hero was made unique by a whole mythology of speed as experience, of space devoured, of intoxicating motion; the jet-man , on the other hand, is defined by a coenaesthesis of motionlessness, as if the extravagance of his vocation precisely consisted in overtaking motion, in going faster than speed.
Tullio Cralli, Nose Dive on the City, old-fashioned "intoxicating motion", 1939.
"Mythology abandons here a whole imagery of exterior friction and enters pure coenaesthesis: motion is no longer the optical perception of points and surfaces; it has become a kind of vertical disorder, made of contractions, black-outs, terrors and faints; it is no longer a gliding but an inner devastation, an unnatural perturbation, a motionless crisis of bodily consciousness.
"No wonder if, carried to such a pitch, the myth of the aviator loses all humanism. The hero of classical speed could remain a 'gentleman', inasmuch as motion was for him an occasional exploit, for which courage alone was required: one went faster in bursts, like a daring amateur, not like a professional, one sought an 'intoxification', one came to motion equipped with an age-old moralizing which made its perception keener and enabled one to express its philosophy. It is inasmuch as speed was an adventure that it linked the airman to a whole series of human roles.
"The jet-man, on the other hand, no longer seems to know either adventure or destiny, but only a condition. Yet this condition is at first sight less human than anthropological: mythically, the jet-man is defined less by his courage than by his weight, his diet and his habits (temperance, frugality, continence). His racial apartness can be read in his morphology: the anti-G suit of inflatable nylon, the shiny helmet, introduce the jet-man into a novel type of skin in which 'even his mother would not know him'. We are dealing with a true racial conversion, all the more credible since science-fiction has already largely substantiated this metamorphosis of species: everything happens as if there had been a sudden mutation between the earlier creatures of propeller-mankind and the later ones of jet-mankind..."
All in a day's work: Robert L. Behnken, STS-123 mission specialist, instals a spare-parts platform for Dextre, 2008.
Text continued in Barthes' The Jet-man, (Mythologies), 1957.
David Bowie's Space Oddity video (1969).
