Flags in Space is an interesting read. They don’t have the latest one though:

Columbia Memorial Station

The conspiracy wackos can rage over the fact that one of those is an Israeli flag, but I’m just a bit disappointed that there are flags there at all. Nationalism was born on Earth and it will die here, one way, or another. Not that I have anything against graffiti artists, but tagging rocks in space is just a little distasteful considering what those icons have been getting up to back home on Earth.

Flags are everywhere around the solar system, but that’s no reason to drop more. The Soviet Venus Missions left some very cool pennants (image below; copyright Don P. Mitchell apparently). However, the Venusian atmosphere is hot enough to melt lead, so all those probes are now just blobs of molten slag. Presumably their symbols went the same way.

In the CCCP, Venus probes you.

The most famous tribal imagery was planted on the moon by real live astronauts, but that was 30 years ago. Someone on the Flags in Space page speculates that the sun’s UV rays, unhindered by an ozone layer, have blasted those scraps of nylon away.

Nothing has ever landed on Mercury, Pluto, or in the Asteroid belt, although the solar system is rife with man-made objects in heliocentric orbits that either ran out of fuel, broke, or were put there for a reason. There may be US or Soviet flags on many of these, but they’re lost forever. Quite thoughtfully, neither the Voyager nor Pioneer plaques had a flag on them (presumably a culture capable of decoding a pulsar map of the local volume would be unmoved by petit symbology). The images encoded on the gold-plated record were similarly multicultural, almost to the point of being an episode of Sesame Street. Johnny B. Goode is on the record too; I wonder if the RIAA know about that.

Jupiter and Saturn though… the Galileo spacecraft dropped a probe into Jupiter, and Cassini will send the Huygens lander to Titan in 2005. Galileo’s probe was destroyed; if Titan has a surface, Huygens may land, or if the surface is an ocean of cryogenic methane, it’ll float there for the rest of eternity.

(Speaking of Titan, I just had a fantastic idea: ship gigatonnes of oxygen there, dump on a carefully chosen spot, then drop a match. If the calculations are correct, half the planet should explode and be sent hurtling towards Earth, where it can be put in a parking orbit and drive the oil companies out of business.)

Galileo itself wasn’t powered by batteries or regular unleaded gasoline. Unfortunately, it required something with a littler more kick - plutonium! Rather than letting a big chunk of nuclear waste hurtle randomly around the Jovian system, NASA decided to crash Galileo into Jupiter, since Arthur C Clarke told them not to contaminate Europa. However, Mr Clark is 87, so he should be out of the way in time for the badass nuclear-powered Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter to go crazy with as much plutonium as they want. Attempt no landings there. Yeah right.

Er, back to the point: Galileo surely had an American flag on it, so it’s a good job anti-flag-burning laws never got passed. When Cassini’s 4 year mission is over, I imagine it’ll suffer a similar fate on the way to Saturn’s metallic hydrogen core.

Incidentally, the Galileo mission is the event that got me online: I told my Dad that we could see pictures of Jupiter right on the NASA website. He said “ooh”, so we just beat the crowds, and were online by 1994, just in time to have a look around the barren grey bgcolors, blue-bordered images, and be amazed by the sufficiently-advanced-technology of any URL with that mysterious “cgi-bin” glyph in it.

Coffee Break

Well, that was a ramble if ever there was one. Point is: the only credibly intact extraterrestrial flags are on Mars, and since there’s no way in hell Bush’ll get the money for his latest space fancies (1989’s price tag of $500bn will only have gone up since then), the Martian dust storms will have ground away the evidence of our nasty nationalistic streak by the time (post-)humans get there. Let’s not put any more there in the mean time. That means you too, McDonald’s.