“Roaring off the launch pad, the rocket’s nine Merlin engines cast a blisteringly bright light,” Josh Dinner wrote last week on the fabulously search-engine optimised news website Space.com. The rocket disappeared into the sky, “the fire’s glow reflected off the low, early morning clouds to disperse a dim yellow hue for miles around the space center, until becoming another shimmering point among the stars.”
Dinner was describing the Polaris Dawn mission, which launched on a SpaceX rocket from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center last Tuesday. The “Dragon 2” spacecraft, due to return to Earth on Sunday, is taking its crew of four astronauts farther from Earth than anyone has been since the Apollo moon missions. (The last such mission, Apollo 17 in December 1972, happened more than two decades before the youngest of the Polaris Dawn mission crew, engineer Sarah Gillis, was born.) It uses lasers for communication, rather than the more traditional radio waves. OK, so it’s hardly Neil and Buzz going for their world-changing walkabout, and the whole thing was commercially funded; but still, it’s no wonder Dinner felt so poetic. Wouldn’t you?
Perhaps not. “Social media users SLAM ‘disappointing’ Polaris Dawn spacewalk,” thundered the ever-supportive Mail Online, “and blast ‘why are you climbing back down’ after civilian crew don’t fully exit their capsule”. “Billionaire floats into space on risky first private spacewalk,” sniffed the Independent.
Whatever happened to our sense of awe? Perhaps all the space exploration of the last 50 years inevitably feels like an anticlimax after the events of July 1969 – a problem so old The Simpsons was making jokes about it as far back as 1994. Or perhaps we just find the adventures of the super-rich unbearable. Once upon a time, the space race was run by two great superpowers on behalf of all humanity, Cold War tensions transformed into a gift for all mankind. Now, though, it’s a sort of dick-waving contest conducted by men with more money than sense, who tell themselves they’re doing something for the rest of us but prefer not to do it in the traditional, boring way of funding social infrastructure via tax. As with the 2021 race between Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos to be the first to enter space – which ended with an unedifying argument about what exactly counted as “space” – witnessing a billionaire, Jared Isaacman, going to the stars using a rocket borrowed from Elon Musk, perhaps feels somewhat tacky.
Perhaps. But I think there’s another reason the excitement has drained from the space race: it just isn’t what we thought it would be.
The history of the world is a history, for good and ill, of expansion. To the cultures of the Bronze Age, Ancient Greece was the western edge of civilisation; the Greek and Phoenician colonies of the western Mediterranean, enabled by improvements in sailing technologies, might as well have been the new world. But the Roman world was bigger, and the Islamic and European worlds that followed expanded further still. Then came Columbus and the Americas, Australia, Antarctica… Not all of these things were entirely positive – millions who had the misfortune of banging into Julius Caesar or Andrew Jackson or Cecil Rhodes had cause to regret it. But the direction of travel was clear. Civilisation was expansion. The world was getting bigger.
So, after we’d explored the seas and reached for the skies, the obvious next step was clear. We went to space, and then we went to the Moon, and every piece of TV sci-fi produced in the late-20th century – mostly created in a country built on the idea of “manifest destiny” – suggested that the trend would continue.
But it didn’t. We stopped. The economy crashed; the Cold War thawed. Lives were lost, in the Challenger and Columbia disasters, and it turned out the next step into space was really hard. And so, 55 years since man first set foot on the Moon, we haven’t taken it. Perhaps we’ll never even get to Mars. The useful bits of space technology, the satellite communications and so on, have become routine; the inspiring bits have been left to overgrown boys with something to prove. Physics and economics alike suggest the future won’t look like Star Trek after all.
One sweet moment that did come out of that private space race of 2021, though, came when Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin took William Shatner, James T Kirk himself, to space at the age of 90. But when Shatner looked outwards, the actor later wrote, “there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold… all I saw was death”. This was not the review I suspect Bezos had been hoping for: Captain Kirk had gone to space, only to find that the only life lay on the world he’d left behind.
This is known as the “overview effect”: a phenomenon reported by many astronauts, in which the sight of the Earth from space provokes overwhelming emotion, a sudden identification with humanity as a whole, and, in many cases, a new understanding of the need to protect its planet. Perhaps the real lesson of the space race is the opposite of the infinite expansion we were always promised: to look after the home we already have. It’s less exciting – no one ever wrote poetry or adventure fiction about the act of cleaning their room. But if we are to have a future, we’d better hope one of those billionaire astronauts turns behind them and looks back.
[See also: The definitive account of the “Challenger” disaster]
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