The new space invaders
IT’S a wonderful time to be alive!” declared Professor Brian Cox, at the end of THE 21ST CENTURY RACE FOR SPACE (BBC2). You don’t hear people saying that enough and especially not scientist people on the telly. Generally, it’s all about melting ice caps, dwindling oil, vanishing species and deadly killer viruses.
I’m not surprised Brian was in a buoyant mood though having spent an entire documentary hanging out with visionary billionaires. Space exploration might once have been the territory of Cold War one-upmanship but today it’s a commercial enterprise.
Richard Branson’s quartermillion-buck tourist flights have yet to materialise although, as Brian saw, the quest for a suitably safe space plane is ongoing. For other business moguls, space tourism is just a necessary first stage in a cosmic transformation.
Jeff Bezos, the staggeringly wealthy founder of Amazon, is a man with his eye on the big picture. The space tourism promised by his offshoot company Blue Origin, he said, is just a way of “driving up the rate of practice”. In other words, if a few thousand paying punters get vaporised while the boffins perfect their rockets, it will all have been worth it in the long run.
The long run, for people like Bezos, might mean two or three hundred years and is all about the future of the human race. There’s already a lot of business going on in space, from TV satellites to privately funded experiments.
One day, there could be vast solar-powered factories up there, making the stuff we need (or which Amazon makes us think we need) and jetting it back to us on our clean, green, smog-free planet.
PayPal founder and electric car inventor Elon Musk has similarly grand ideas. His firm Space X is already taking cargo up to the International Space Station and will soon ferry astronauts up, too.
Planetary Resources, meanwhile, is one of many start-ups planning to send out mining probes to tap into the possibly endless resources of space. The minerals in a single asteroid could yield 30 billion dollars’ worth of profit but that, of course, to the space prophets of Silicon Valley, is beside the point.
This is all about taking civilisation to a new level, or at least that’s the kind of fiery, evangelistic thing they say. They said it about the internet too and for most people (except perhaps Prof Cox) the jury’s still out on that one.
I expect a jury will be involved at some point over the next five weeks of DOCTOR FOSTER (BBC1), the revenge saga back for a second run. Suranne Jones returned as Gemma, the apparently successful GP who becomes a psychopath after her husband cheats on her.
Cheating Simon (Bertie Carvel) was back last night, inviting the neighbourhood to see his swanky new home and celebrate his marriage to swanky new wife Kate.
Gemma was round there in a flash, breaking into Simon’s new house to have a snoop around, and then gatecrashing the party so she could make a bit more mischief.
She brought along Mr Mohan (Prasanna Puwanarajah), one of her son’s teachers who’d asked her out for a drink then mysteriously found he quite liked hanging out with a bitter, spiteful, unbalanced harpy.
Then again, if Mr Mohan’s motivation is hard to swallow, it is nothing compared to that of Gemma, whose character is as well-drawn and credible as that bloke who stepped in a puddle.