Editor’s Note

Mark Barnes, whose candid column about worrying appears in this edition, sent me a WhatsApp this week. It was written by a nurse who works with ventilators and it outlines what it’s like to be attached to one of them. In summary, the experience is one of painful intubation that goes down your throat and stays there until you live or die. It goes on ... in graphic detail.

Reading these kinds of things makes me want to stay home. It makes me realise just how risk-averse I am. Most of us are. That’s why the world needs people like Elon Musk. Though mocked by the media for some unusual behaviour and strange choice in names (one journalist described his new baby’s name as the result of hitting the keyboard with your head), you can’t deny that he has beeg balls.

On Wednesday, Musk’s California company, SpaceX, is scheduled to launch two veteran Nasa astronauts to the International Space Station. There have been people on the ISS — a co-operative venture between the US, Russia, Japan, Canada and the European Space Agency — for more than 19 years, usually six at a time, but it will be the first time since 2011 that people will be launched into space from US soil.

If all goes according to plan, the mission will mark a monumental moment in space exploration: the first launch by a private company of people into orbit. If it fails, it will, according to the Washington Post, “derail Nasa’s plan to restore human spaceflight from American soil and fuel criticism that the space agency never should have outsourced such a sacred mission to the private sector”. Big stakes indeed. The rocket leaves at about 10.30pm local time and on Friday we can watch the capsule docking with the ISS.

If it fails, well, what a way to go.