Station

Okay, so I don’t know if I have ever talked about this before. Yes, this is leading up to something else. How did you know?

Anyway, growing up, I remember watching the launch of the space shuttles and all the hype around them. I was hooked. This was probably the only time I ever collected news clippings and anything else I could find pertaining to everything space and shuttle launches. I might have been in third grade or so at the time (time escapes memory so don’t quote me on that).

My future goal was to be an astronaut and explore the final frontier and all that. Life doesn’t always work out the way we think it will when we reach maturity and what not. I realize now, my real aim was to become a space pirate and everything that goes along with that imagery. That didn’t work out so well either.

Now that all of that is out of the way let’s get to the point. I recently read the comic “Station” (Boom! Studios 2008). Yeah, this one is set on the International Space Station. It brings back some nostalgia for me.

But I digress…

The story itself doesn’t really hit on any sciency aspect of life aboard the space station. Instead we are hit with a murder mystery. And the astronauts being so far from the Earth and safety makes for high stakes as they try to figure out who the killer is. But even that becomes secondary when they are fighting to survive as things keep going wrong around them.

When it comes right down to it, who the killer is, is actually the least important thing going on. Instead through a series of catastrophic events, we find people dying left and right and the chance of any of them making it back to Earth alive diminishes with every new threat. It’s essentially a look at the domino effect of what one thing going wrong can spiral into, when you are in a high stakes environment.

In the end, the story plays out in such a way that we have a good idea who the killer is. But it doesn’t matter because the killer along with pretty much everyone else doesn’t survive the event. Sorry… spoilers…

In the end, I enjoyed the story and how it played out. Aside from the nostalgia aspect of a life I may never see, it gave a glimpse of what we at one point hoped to achieve. It is something I hope we return to at some point.

But there is another side of that. Through out the story we find the scientist and astronauts on board the station making it a point to hide the troubles from the ground crews. They are more concerned with keeping the mission alive than they were in seeking justice for the initial killing. It’s the kind of dedication you might expect from those putting their very lives on the line in a quest to learn more about the universe we live in.

Sometimes you have to ask yourself, what’s more important? Justice or the protection of something so much bigger than yourself. This is a question we probably have to ask ourselves fairly regularly. Because sometimes we are doing things we never thought we might be doing.

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