"Alas! What boots it with incessant care?" asks Milton very wisely in his poem, Lycidas:
Were it not better done as others do,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair?
This - but only in a manner of speaking, let me add - is precisely what many hundreds of members of the space community will be up to this weekend. They are gathered in Dublin for the annual "Ariane Cross", an annual fete, of which cross-country running seems to be the central theme. The designation Ariane derives from the European rocket used to put weather and other satellites in orbit, and the space athletes are all from organisations that have some association with said Ariane.
The Ariane Programme was organised by a consortium of European nations back in the 1970s to provide a European option for placing geostationary satellites in orbit. The first Ariane rocket flew on Christmas Eve, 1979, from the launching pad, still used, in Kourou, French Guiana, South America, and over the years the rockets have ferried nearly 150 spacecraft into space. The early launchers, those of the model known as Ariane 1, were replaced in 1984 by the more powerful Ariane 2 and Ariane 3, pending the arrival in 1988 of the further improved version, Ariane 4, which was to become the workhorse of the European space effort for a decade.
Then, as many may remember, disaster struck in 1996. The prototype of the most recent model, the revolutionary and much more powerful Ariane 5, capable of carrying three satellites into space, exploded shortly after ignition on June 4th of that year. Europe held its breath on October 30th last year when a second Ariane 5 was launched, and breathed a continental sigh of relief when all went well. A second failure might have been a death-knell for European space endeavour.
The Ariane Cross brings athletically-minded space-people together for a day or two to talk of their achievements and their failures, and is held in a different city every year. Naturally, a team from EUMETSAT, the European Meteorological Satellite Organisation in Darmstadt, Germany, well known to regular readers of this column, will participate. The treats in store for them include all the usual events from one to 10 km, and for those with greater reserves of fuel and power there is a circuit of the Howth peninsula and an optional sally up and down the Three Rock Mountain, outside Dublin. Meanwhile, the more athletically challenged among them will amuse themselves at a special Space Exhibition at the Aer Lingus Sports Complex close to Dublin Airport.