Does space need a rebrand?
We were once awestruck by those first fuzzy Moon landing images. Now we’re tied up with technical practicalities, writes James Belfield.
Space has an image problem: it’s losing its mystique. Where once it was the domain of wild fictional imagination, heroic pioneering adventurers and theoretical physicists spouting intergalactic hypotheticals, it’s now the playground of the small-screen entertainment world.
Maybe it’s because we’ve got a US president who’s reduced the wonder of rocket science to the militaristic jargon of ‘‘Space Force’’. Maybe it’s because the nightly news is full of rovers landing on asteroids, satellites plunging Sun-wards, and litterpicking probes netting space-junk. Or maybe it’s because we’re now so used to Nasa’s 60 years of boldly going that we’ve become blase´ about where the astronauts boldly went.
But just as wholesale mass space travel seems to be within touching distance, the way we’re selling it seems to be losing its gloss.
Case in point is the opening episode of Space Colonies, the History Channel’s season-opener for a month of celebratory programmes across it, National Geographic and Discovery to mark Nasa’s big birthday.
The schtick is that Earth’s doomed one way or another and, rather than simply racing to plant flags on the Moon, Mars or varied orbiting asteroids, we’d be better off actually working out how to inhabit those places.
As National Space Society board member Geoffrey Notkin (whose credentials include sourcing a 40kg meteorite to give to Sting) puts it: ‘‘Perhaps the most important reason we should go into space is to safeguard our own existence because, sooner or later on little planet Earth, we’re going to meet an unhappy end.’’
So while the bulk of the monthlong space doco extravaganza concentrates on Nasa’s historical exploits, its launchpad is loaded with a story about potential.
And certainly, Space Colonies paints a picture of an industry that’s right on the edge of take-off. We learn that the discovery of water on the Moon and asteroids means that they can be mined to create rocket propellant (and, hence, affordable space travel). We learn that the reusable spacecraft already manufactured by companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX will battle the ‘‘timidity of bureaucracy’’ to bring space travel to the masses. And we learn that Nasa already has a project to put humans on Mars in the 2030s and that the European Space Agency has a wonderfully named plan for a ‘‘Moon Village’’.
The trouble is, now that we’re at the stepping-off point for humankind’s greatest leap, we seem to have got tied up in knots about practicalities. It used to be sexy to dream about 2001: A Space Odyssey-style loneliness and get awestruck by those first, flickering grey images of Armstrong and Aldrin bouncing around on the Moon in 1969.
Now, we’re worried about gaining public-private partnership funding to finance projects, or the potential for mining companies to make $1 trillion per asteroid, or how to combat space travellers losing bone density and suffering from poor sleep. It’s all just a little prosaic.
Such a grand theme as abandoning the good ship Planet Earth surely deserves an expedition into the final frontier of documentary-making? Or at least some more relatable info on what this Moon Village will look and feel like? What, for example, might these interplanetary pioneers do for entertainment? What, in heaven’s name, will their television look like?
Those undertaking the six months or so that it will take to get to Mars must surely hope not to be shackled to an eternal loop of insipid reality television.
If there’s any reason to accelerate our efforts to abandon Earth, then it must be in the hope that we’d leave behind shows such as TVNZ 2’s Renters (which returns to our screens on Thursday) and Restaurant SOS (which is so generic that it feels like it’s returning, but is actually a new series for TVNZ 1, also starting this Thursday, at 8.40pm).
As more than a third of Kiwi households rent their homes and there’s currently serious debate about tenancy laws, there’s more than enough ammunition for a decent show titled Renters.
Instead, however, this is a homegrown car crash that delights in the dregs of society as it parades smug property managers picking over the odd and odorous detritus left by bad tenants. Episode one: drug paraphernalia, a stash of porn and a smelly, flea-ridden cat. Great.
Restaurant SOS is slightly more highbrow but tediously familiar. Alex Polizzi (aka The Hotel Inspector) and her brother-in-law Oliver Peyton (aka the really smug judge off Great British Menu) help turn around failing restaurants in a carbon copy of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, Kitchen Nightmares and Restaurant Impossible.
Look, we get it. Some people are bad tenants and some people run failing restaurants – but not all of their stories make great telly. And if that’s what we’re resorting to for our entertainment, then stop the world, I want to get off.
We’re worried about gaining public-private partnership funding... or how to combat space travellers losing bone density. It’s all just a little prosaic.
Space Colonies: Thursdays from October 4 at 7.30pm on the History Channel Renters: Thursday at 8pm on TVNZ 2. Restaurant SOS: Thursday at 8.40pm on TVNZ 1.