Between heaven and hell: Frank Westerman on our fascination with the cosmos

At the time Covid-19 flattened normal life, Frank Westerman had fortunately already done his research for his new book. To take care of his parents, he was suddenly living "at home" again for three months, in his boyhood room on the outskirts of Assen. Writing offered him the chance to escape to heavenly spheres: The cosmic comedy is about the human fascination with the universe.

En passant, the reader takes a fascinating journey, from Westerbork and Franeker to Venice and Florence, through four centuries of astronomy and space travel in which the Dutch have played a surprisingly large role.

'From my parental home to Radio Observatory Westerbork is about 8 kilometres as the crow flies,' says Westerman. 'I went running a lot and stretched my usual distance of 10 kilometres more and more, so I could run back and forth to the 'whispering forest' of my childhood. There are those beautiful majestic dishes, antennas 25 metres in diameter, listening to the cosmos, to the echo of the Big Bang. The little road to those telescopes is called Hemeloor.'

Heaven and hell

A bizarre and symbolic fact that on the site of former deportation camp Westerbork, a Radio Observatory was later erected: heaven and hell literally meet here.

'Yes, you don't make something like that up. From childhood, I was taught that you have to strive for the good. Not: the good life. So when, in secondary school, I read Etty Hillesum's diary about camp Westerbork, where evil ruled the roost, it cracked my world view. During World War II, Westerbork was a town in its own right, fenced in with barbed wire and watchtowers, but also with a theatre, revues and sports games. And then a transport every Tuesday. That same forest where I had drop-offs as a child, which until then I knew as the whispering forest of telescopes, suddenly turned out to be also the whispering forest of the deportation of 102,000 people, mostly Jews, to concentration camps in Germany and Poland. This fact became the pivotal point of my book.'

In an episode of Planet Earth said biologist David Attenborough that we know more about the moon than we do about the bottom of the ocean on our own planet. What does that say about humans?

'In The divine comedy Dante had given a crisp picture of the order of the universe. In that epic poem, he linked heaven, where rewards awaited if you had been a good person, and hell, which was underground. For two thousand years that had been a moral compass, but when Galileo pointed his 'Dutch viewer' not at the horizon but at the stars in 1609, we had to recalibrate our worldview. Because of what he saw - four moons near Jupiter, the Milky Way made up of countless stars - he chucked the earth out of the centre of the universe forever.

Born out of wonder, our fascination with the universe grew into a projection screen - there is no bigger screen than the firmament. The planets beckon like forbidden fruits and we project dream worlds onto them. Between 1890 and 1910, humans were captivated by a civilisation on Mars, where astronomers believed they saw complete oasis cities. On the red planet the 'Martians' would cooperate, peace would reign there.'

Human deficit

Telling are the golden plates still floating through space on Voyager I and II, on which we present ourselves to space aliens as a cheerful and peaceful people. Do we actually want to escape from ourselves more than anything else?

'That is the thread of the story: our reaching for the stars is a desire for a better world. But by seeking salvation far away, we actually expose our human shortcomings. We project a better world in the universe because we are making such a mess of things here on earth. The shinier the achievements of space travel - three spacecraft will arrive on Mars in February - the more poignant the light reflects back on the mess here on earth. Stargazing comes from wonder, but space travel from rivalry: the USA versus the USSR, capitalism versus communism. With the astronauts as gladiators, who had to provide a new interpretation of right and wrong. The first spacewalker Aleksey Leonov could say back on earth that there is no God in heaven; we as humans had to ascend that throne of heaven ourselves. With that, I fear, we will also export our flaws beyond the atmosphere.'

That caricatured self-portrait of man was introduced, nota bene, by former United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, who later turned out to have been a Nazi officer. Good and evil, heaven and hell, converge everywhere.

'Yes, that is the linchpin of my book, if you bump heaven and hell out of their familiar locations, where is paradise to be found? Good and evil are proving increasingly difficult to tell apart. Take Wernher von Braun, who developed the V2 rocket for Hitler. Later, Von Braun was shipped to America as a kind of trophy to fulfil Kennedy's promise that there would be a man on the moon before the end of the decade. The only one who could build such a rocket was this Wernher von Braun, the same man who fired V2s at England from Wassenaar. The first space projectiles were actually launched behind the dunes in the Netherlands.'

Bridge between nations

Yet the astronauts you spoke to seem genuinely convinced that we will indeed be peaceful in space. Where does this illusion come from?

'Years ago, when I was a correspondent in Moscow, I witnessed the launch of the International Space Station ISS. This space house the size of a football field, at $100 billion the most expensive structure ever made, was supposed to be a 'bridge above and between nations'. It has now been in existence for 20 years and 20 nationalities have already lived there. It works! But do we really need something so expensive and so far away to serve as a laboratory for a better world? I listened benevolently to all those enthusiasts who say: in space, you no longer see borders. The idealism drips from them. If you handle that with self-mockery and humour, I think idealism is a beautiful thing, but when it gets something better, it gets serious - and seriousness isn't called deadly for nothing.'

Nightmare

Your writing moves around the point where a dream turns into a nightmare. Why does that fascinate you so much?

'Originally, I was trained as an engineer at Wageningen University. Although I didn't start building irrigation canals in Africa, I do feel involved in the world. I find doom thinking lazy thinking, but I find it fascinating how much attention it attracts and also how easily the prophets of doom get away with it. They certainly have my fascination, but not my sympathy; I like to think about how things could be better. Book after book revolves around such a burst of energy: we're going to do better! But somewhere halfway through, that aspiration, that dream, turns into a nightmare and I want to be able to put my finger on the tipping point.'

Is that failure inevitable?

'Those who sanctify their principles cause a lot of misery. Striving for a better world? Yes! But in moderation. This is precisely why Galileo is a hero to me. He loved wine, debating, life. He denied his scientific rightness because he didn't want to end up burned at the stake like a martyr. Galileo chose to live for his ideals. I think that takes more courage than dying for it.

Future of space exploration

According to some of them, space travel is going to develop this century as much as air travel did in the last century. Do you believe that too?

'Well, things are moving fast, yes. Tax money from us is going towards the development of an 'interchange station' around the moon: Gateway. You and I are currently co-building a hotel on the moon, an igloo-like space lodge. A Japanese man has booked a cruise around the moon with Tesla's Elon Musk. When NASA asks: who wants their name on Mars, 10 million people immediately sign up - I was too late. It is no longer the countries bidding against each other, but the companies.'

What has space travel brought us?

'Stargazing has forever changed our view of the sky; space travel our view of Earth. We have started looking backwards, literally. Seeing the earth from space has made us more aware of the fragility of our planet; there are 7 billion of us sitting on a sphere under a membrane, whizzing around the sun at 30 kilometres per second; we have to make sure we don't fly out of alignment.

But quite apart from whether you come back as a climate activist like André Kuipers and most other astronauts, it has crumbled our religious idea of being chosen. The universe is so big, forget that we are unique. What gradually became clearer to me: space travel sheds a harrowing light on our mess, our inability to eradicate war and oppression. By putting so much effort into creating a better world elsewhere, we as earthlings let ourselves be properly known. But that is all NOT on those golden LPs.'