SPACE!

It’s NASA’s fiftieth birthday this week.  Can’t let that go by without comment.  NASA put men on the moon.  12 of them*.  Which is still incredible to me.  I know space exploration is expensive, ecologically unsound and potentially dangerous, but C’MON IT’S SPACE! WITH ROCKETS! As you can see, my objectivity goes out of the window.  As well as the moonwalkers, NASA has given us the Hubble telescope, satellites (therefore Google Earth, Sky TV), and this year a new probe on Mars.  All cool stuff.  But it’s the men in rockets that get me.  The vainglorious bravery of it.  The Apollo rockets had 6 million working parts.  Scientists predicted 99.9% of them would work fine.  Leaving just 6000 things to go wrong.  If you’re interested in what affect touching another world had on the Apollo astronauts, check out Andrew Smith’s Moondust.

While I’m praising NASA, others are trying to bury them.  I doubt that it’s any coincidence that Virgin Galactic chose this week to unveil EVE- their new mothership.  For the first time space travel is within reach of private citizens, albeit private citizens with vast personal fortunes.  It’s hugely expensive now, but perhaps within my lifetime the price will go down enough for me to give it a try. 

Burt Rutan is the man who made commercial space travel a possibility.  He’s a genius.  SpaceShipOne is a beautiful, elegant machine, and I can’t wait to see SpaceShipTwo.  The thing that gets me is that he beats himself up for not thinking of the design sooner: ‘If only I came up with this in the 70s, we’d be on Mars by now.’

For any Space geeks out there without £100k to spare, check out Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope.  It’s Google Earth for space – stitching together images from Hubble and other telescopes so you can explore the cosmos from your own desk. 

SpaceShipOne

* 11 out of 12 of the men who walked on the moon were scouts in their youth.  Maybe Baden-Powell was on to something.