Fly us to the moon

Fifty years ago, Americans looked into deep space and saw it as a place worth planting a flag. The space race galvanized the country, igniting a nationalistic fervour to beat the Russians to the moon that captured the imaginations of adults and children alike.

Perhaps it’s merely a sign of these resurgent nationalistic times that talk of sending people into deep space is once again in vogue. Or maybe it’s a sudden desire of wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to escape a planet that, once again, seems too consumed with feuding and tribalism and navel-gazing over borders.

Entrepreneur Elon Musk says his company SpaceX has taken on a high-stakes side project: ferrying two wealthy tourists to the moon and back. The weeklong journey, which could happen next year, would take the unidentified pair past the lunar surface and outward before the spacecraft surrenders to the pull of gravity and heads back to Earth.

All told, the trip would cover between 480,000 and 640,000 kilometres. And because we all know that, in space, no one can hear you scream, there are risks.

“This should be a really exciting mission,” he told the Associated Press, “that hopefully gets the world really excited about sending people into deep space again.” Indeed, it’s time America set its sights a little higher.

The Sacramento Bee