The rational part of my brain realizes this is totally unsurprising, maybe even normal. And that’s not likely to change any time soon. (Yes, there are some passengers who were invited as guests, but they are the fig-leaf exceptions, not the rule.) The average person still has no hope of experiencing zero-g or of peering out a window to take in the whole planet below. Right now, these flights are literally ego trips: the people who ride aboard are rich or famous passengers who pay immense sums of money for the privilege. Today’s Blue Origin flight featuring William Shatner as one of the passengers is emblematic of this issue. Seriously, pick from Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Richard Branson-any of them would feel like a natural choice to play the villain of a James Bond movie. It doesn’t help that the men who are behind these corporations are unlikable billionaires. And so only some of the richest people in the world can fund that development. Building and testing and launching a rocket understandably costs billions of dollars.
It might not turn out this way in the long run, but right now this feels accurate.īut I (and many other people, it seems) feel very conflicted about these flights.
They’re a manifestation of Human ingenuity and determination. These flights, launched by three different corporations, are each the culmination of literally decades of research, development, experimentation, failures, and ultimately successes. Just in the past three months, we’ve seen multiple suborbital flights and even a multi-day orbital flight. Until this summer, Human spaceflight was the sole domain of national governments and their space agencies. But 2021 has been a remarkable year, because it’s marked the first flights of all-civilian crews launched on commercial rockets. But those stories generally have one thing in common: once the capability is built, space travel in some form is comparatively accessible and even mundane to some degree. Others go far beyond, using technologies that blur the line between science and fantasy. Some of those stories go just a short ways up into Earth orbit, or to the Moon, or other planets of our solar system. Storytellers of all sorts have come up with fantastic tales of going beyond our planet’s atmosphere. Our society has been dreaming about space travel for more than a century. Check back often for reviews and commentary, musings about (fictional) politics and ethics, rants about inconsistency and idiocy, or any other sort of soapbox material! Yes, it's another blog. The Subspace Cafe is a semi-regular publication about recent (or not-so-recent) developments in the world of Star Trek and other science fiction-related issues.
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