‘Spacers’ live to leave Earth someday
It’s not just the dream of scientists and astronauts
The sun was not yet up Saturday, the second day of the New Worlds space conference in Austin, but already a dozen or so of us were in the conference room. The coffee hadn’t arrived yet, but nobody needed it; people were practically vibrating already. This was what they lived for.
SpaceX’s launch window would open at 7 a.m. People snagged seats in the front of the room, as close as possible to the big screens. I grabbed a doughnut and took a seat in the second row. That way, I could watch both the screens and the people watching the screens.
New Worlds’ founder, Rick Tumlinson, has described the conference as a “tribal campfire” where “tomorrow’s Space Tribes meet today,” and that sounds about right.
“Spacers,” as the tribe members call themselves, are a diverse bunch — scientists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, technologists and sci-fi enthusiasts. What they share is a passion for space so intense that many organize their lives around it.
I’m both an observer of the tribe and a newcomer to it. As an evolutionary biologist, I’m interested in what would happen to human beings if people were to ever leave Earth to live in settlements on Mars or elsewhere.
Many spacers think we’re now on the verge of that enormous leap: As wealthy tourists routinely make day trips to the edge of space, nations and corporations are vying to create permanent bases on the moon and Mars.
The sticking point? Access to space costs too much. And that’s why this morning’s launch attempt was as big as it gets.
On the projection screens, the “Everyday Astronaut” livestream showed the spacers’ best hope: Starship, the latest SpaceX rocket, sat majestically on its launchpad in Boca Chica, Texas.
If it managed to launch, Starship would be the most massive, most powerful rocket ever to fly. Still in the shakeout phase, it’s designed to ultimately be reusable, which means far cheaper than single-use rockets. NASA has contracted a Starship for its 2025 Artemis III mission to the moon, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says that Starship is designed to carry crew and cargo to Mars for a human settlement.
But first, of course, SpaceX has to get Starship to work. To make progress fast, the company embraces “iterative design” and “successive approximation” — which is to say, it tries stuff and learns from its mistakes. If a rocket blows up, no problem — as long as that rocket got farther, performed better, than the one that blew up before it.
I could feel the nervous energy in the room as the countdown paused at Tminus 40 seconds. Maybe this launch would be scrubbed at the last moment. Maybe the rocket would blow up on the launchpad. Or maybe humanity would get a little closer to its extraterrestrial destiny.
Suddenly the countdown on the big screen resumed. On the livestream, “Everyday Astronaut” producer MaryLiz Chylinski pumped her fist in the air. Something was definitely going to happen today.
The conference room fell silent. Everyone leaned forward: Here we go.
Embodies the dream
All over the world, other people were watching, too. Everyday Astronaut, a spacer favorite, has 1.5 million YouTube subscribers, and more than a million people had tuned in for its live coverage of the launch. Tim Dodd, the channel’s host, may be the purest embodiment of the spacer dream.
He is in fact an everyday astronaut: Nerdy-dad vibe and all, he’s slated to serve as crew next year on a Japanese billionaire’s SpaceX flight around the moon on Starship — assuming its development proceeds as planned.
The Everyday Astronaut livestream had started at 11:30 p.m. Friday night. As the launch window drew near, the rocket occupied the livestream’s main panel, and Tim was in a smaller rectangle in the upper right corner. Headphones over his trademark black baseball cap, he was casting from a makeshift studio in a house near the launch site.
Sitting across from Tim was MaryLiz, Everyday Astronaut’s full-time “mission director.” She isn’t as famous among the spacers as Tim, but I’d met her before at another space conference, and it seemed that everyone I met at New Worlds knew her, too. Like Tim, she embodies the dream of a space-centered life — but in an even more everyday way, in a way that doesn’t actually require leaving Earth.
Unlike many spacers, MaryLiz had told me, she caught the space bug as an adult, not a kid. In 2016, she was a working musician, touring as half of a psychedelic folk duo, when she saw the documentary “The Overview Effect.” It’s about the profound emotional and psychological impact that spaceflight has on astronauts — a combination of awe and self-transcendence.
The idea seized her. “I decided to start doing more research,” she told me. “I wanted to interview astronauts myself to find out, really, is this true? Like, how impactful is this?”
She switched careers. She took a job with The Planetary Society, and in 2018, watched SpaceX conduct its first test of the Falcon Heavy rocket. “I was standing there,” she said, “weeping my eyes out, watching this graceful thing take place. I was so moved by that experience. I thought, oh my God, I want to be part of this.”
You don’t have to leave the planet, she found, for spaceflight to have a profound psychological impact on you.
Chasing rockets
As MaryLiz and Tim chatted in the studio, MaryLiz’s husband, cinematographer Ryan Chylynski, was outside, manning one of the livestream cameras he’d set up to track the rocket. MaryLiz met Ryan in 2018, when they were both at Kennedy Space Center to document a launch. It was love at first sight, MaryLiz said: “I was living in a camper. He was living in a camper. We were the two craziest people, who, like, sold our homes and all of our possessions to chase rockets.”
Together they started a spacefocused media company, Cosmic Perspective. “It’s wild, it’s really silly, and wonderful,” said MaryLiz. “And it’s like heaven for nerds.”
In 2020, the couple traveled for the first time to watch a SpaceX launch in South Texas. NASA rocket launches on Florida’s space coast have attracted large crowds since the Apollo era, but SpaceX’s felt less bureaucratic, more intimate, and edgier.
Starbase, SpaceX’s facility in Boca Chica, is located along Texas 4, a public road. That means that the general public can get far closer to a SpaceX launch than to a NASA one. Spacers keep a close eye on comings and goings, making minute observations of each new tweak on a rocket. No detail is too small to discuss on a platform like Everyday Astronaut.
A friendly community of spacers now lives full-time in South Texas, and MaryLiz recognized the place as a kind of a spacers’ heaven on Earth: “This was like being on the edge of human exploration. I had that feeling of wow — I just found it.”
She and Ryan moved there immediately. “We often ride horses, and have tacos, and surf on the beach, or camp out on the beach while Starship is right there,” she marveled. “It’s wild.”
‘Humanity’s progress’
MaryLiz and Ryan got married on April 15 at one of the spaciest places possible: Kennedy Space Center, in front of the Space Shuttle Atlantis. The officiant, a close friend and fellow spacer, wore a Jedi robe.
But they had to cut the celebration short: Back in Boca Chica, the April 17 launch window was about to open for the most important launch of the newlyweds’ young careers: SpaceX’s first flight test of Starship integrated with the Super Heavy Booster. They apologized to their families and, an hour after the wedding, took a red-eye flight back to Texas.
They made it to Boca Chica in time to stake out camera sites near the launch pad — only for the flight to be delayed due to a mechanical issue.
Finally, on April 20, the countdown reached zero. The blastoff was so powerful that it triggered a “concrete tornado” that unexpectedly destroyed part of the launch pad. Flying debris knocked out many of Ryan and MaryLiz’s cameras. They were hosting the Everyday Astronaut livestream several miles away. Even so, they felt the blast.
Tim was thrilled. “Yes!” he screamed as the rocket cleared the pad. “Humanity’s progress right here! This is the future that I’ve been waiting for!”
His enthusiasm continued even after the rocket exploded. “They got it off the pad,” he reminded his viewers. “Everything is OK, my friends.”
SpaceX later confirmed that the launch had largely been a success. Things had been learned. Humankind was a little closer to leaving the planet. Next time would be even better.
Main objective
If a rocket blows up, no problem — as long as it performed better than the one that blew up before it.
Now, that next time had arrived, and the New Worlds conference-goers were glued to the livestream. As the rocket’s engines fired, MaryLiz and Tim began jumping up and down, screaming in excitement, their hands in the air.
Liftoff!
The conference-goers were wide-eyed. As the booster cleared the pad, we could see that all 33 engines had fired. Ryan’s cameras tracked the rocket as it roared into the morning sky, the launchpad left properly intact behind it. “This is so much better!” said MaryLiz.
“This is phenomenal!” Tim said.
Three and a half minutes into the flight, the question was whether this time the booster would separate properly from the rocket’s second stage, the part of the ship designed to carry cargo and people — including, eventually, Tim.
Suddenly, on the livestream, there was an orange flash that encircled the spacecraft. Something had happened.
“Oh, my God!” MaryLiz said. There was a pause: Was there a problem? Or had the flight achieved its biggest objective?
“That was not a big explosion,” Tim offered hopefully.
“See!” MaryLiz exulted, pointing. “They’re separated!”
A few seconds later, the booster did explode. But that hardly mattered: It had separated first, so the flight’s main objective had been achieved. The conferencegoers were on their feet, jumping up and down.
“Unbelievable!” exulted MaryLiz.
The rocket continued onward. A few minutes later, somewhere in outer space, it, too, exploded. But on MaryLiz and Tim’s faces, and at the conference, the mood was joy.
Space isn’t supposed to be easy. And that day, humans had taken one more major step.
Scott Solomon is an associate teaching professor in Rice University’s biosciences department. His documentary series “Becoming Martian” is available for streaming, and his first book, “Future Humans,” was published by Yale University Press. He is currently at work on a book about how living in space will change the human body and mind.