Saturday Edition
BBC Radio 5 Live
A humans-in-space special (22 June, 7pm) devoted three hours to previewing what it will be like for travellers on the first commercial flights into the void between celestial bodies next year. Thus far, it was roundly agreed, things have been a bit duff. “We were promised space stations,” grumbled someone from the Jodrell Bank Observatory. “We were promised jet-packed lunar whatsits.”
The star of the show was an Italian astronaut, Paolo Nespoli, speaking down the line from Planet Earth, although the connection was very bad. Nobody thought to explain why – it was as if all phone calls from astronauts, whatever their location, necessarily sound this crackly. Paolo trained for ten years for a spacewalk that “never happened”, because there was “never any emergency to deal with”, and spent much of his 12 months up at the International Space Station taking 26,000 photographs of the Great Wall of China.
“Speak English good . . . Health status Superman,” communicated Paolo, mysteriously. “Hmm, hmm,” keened Chris Warburton in the studio. Did Paolo ever get a migraine? “Pretty good . . . Pharmacy on-board,” crackled Paolo. Now you’re talking. But immediately it switches to Richard Branson yelling, “To be perfectly honest, I think it would be sad for someone to not want to go to space!” in an advert for Virgin Galactic. Six hundred people have already bought tickets at $250,000 each. For this, they will train for three days and then take “the slow walk over the tarmac” towards the craft.
This branch of tourism is entirely dependent on this one image: the slo-mo stride in white suits. However, those still hoping for space stations are doomed to further disappointment. With engines so powerful that the jets can eject from pretty much anywhere, travellers will presumably be leaving from Heathrow. The flight lasts two hours – four minutes to reach space, five minutes experiencing weightlessness and oodles of time to take photos of the Great Wall. Never has the banality of the project been so baldly put. Nobody pointed out that surely space travel will become less successful the more people do it. Once you are the third oligarch around the dinner table parading your photos of the pyramids, the price will come crashing down. Eventually, the whole thing will die away out of sheer tedium.
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