All spaced out

One short flight into space for a private citizen, a giant leap for the popular imagination. This week an American test pilot steered the first privately developed craft into space. It was, to be sure, a tiny rocket ship, it touched just the edges of space before returning to earth. But the possibilities! For ever so long, governments have been the sole legitimate carriers into space. From plans for a colony on the moon and for a human landing on Mars to joyrides in the great emptiness beyond, so many dreams for so many millions have rested on government endorsement. Pilot Michael Melvill’s craft, SpaceShipOne, may have cost $20 million, pretty much out of reach for most prospective space tourists — but then, for them space travel is more about ifs and hows than about actual flier miles. Like Albert Einstein plunging into one of his thought experiments, we armchair space travellers too need confirmation of actual research and regulations before we take off.

That has always been the way of it. Man has always gazed at the stars up above to keep himself tethered on the ground. He has contemplated the inky darkness to illumine his place in the world. He has spent centuries preparing for contact with life forms from other planets, even other solar systems and galaxies, in attempts to define what it means to be human. And he has dreamed. What, for instance, happened to Laika, that little dog who lifted off on Sputnik 2 one November day in 1957 never to return? For a species with frightening tolerance levels for warfare and destruction, we turn remarkably protective when an earthling ventures beyond the planetary zone. Or when an extraterrestrial visits earth. Whether it be real-life heroes like Kalpana Chawla or reel-life characters like ET, the allure of space and its inhabitants gives nut-and-bolts workers on space missions a special purpose. Dreams embellish their engineering.

Certainly, there is something self-indulgent about men who pay millions of dollars for a ride in space and those who brandish a rocket hop as a Lindbergian adventure. But then, they are the mavericks who put their money where our dreams are.