Going to Outer Space
What’s the most remote place we’re fantasising about visiting once we can travel again? It’s certainly not on Earth
Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 cult sci-fi classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, predicted that by the start of this millennium there would have already been Pan Am-operated shuttles in space staffed by hostesses wearing “grip” shoes in order to saunter down the zero-gravity aisles, as well as galactic hotels and technology to facilitate a mission to Jupiter.
Well, we’re not quite there yet. But the world’s billioniest billionaires have taken the prospect to heart and into their own hands, founding private companies dedicated to researching space travel and rocket-building in the admirable quest to make commercial spaceflight a more realistic thing of the near future.
Just last month, Nasa sent two American astronauts—Robert L Behnken and Douglas G Hurley—on a mission to the International Space Station (ISS) from the Kennedy Space Center. What made this mission particularly groundbreaking is the fact that, for the first time, astronauts travelled to orbit on a privately owned spacecraft. In this case, it was the Crew Dragon capsule built by Tesla founder Elon Musk’s SpaceX. This marked an important milestone in the goal to broaden access to space to more civilians while also lowering costs, and one that ultimately, hopefully puts space travel within reach for the rest of us.
To date, only seven people have actually travelled to space as tourists. The first went there in 2001, when Space Adventures, an American space tourism company, sent millionaire Dennis Tito on a Russian Soyuz rocket to board the ISS, where he spent eight days in orbit as a crew member. Just a year later, and also through Space Adventures, South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth spent a total of 10 days in space, including eight days at the ISS, where he participated in experiments related to Aids and genome research.
Of the experience, Tito told BBC World Service, “the sight of Earth from space was just spectacular. I cannot ever duplicate that euphoric feeling that I had at that moment.”
It’s a feeling known as the “overview effect”, a term coined in 1987 by American author Frank White. While interviewing several astronauts, White found that they shared something in common; they had each experienced an intense emotional response upon seeing our home planet from space. After spending prolonged
periods in isolation during the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, finding a new perspective on the world of today is something a lot of people dream about. The answer, as these astronauts have shown, may be to get as far away from it as possible. Allow us to show you the way…