Space flights of fancy

 I am a space baby.

I grew up watching the federally subsided glory days of NASA, rooting for the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space programs to develop and then, ultimately, culminate with the moon landings in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

It was exciting stuff until both the funding and the national will dried up. There never was any colonization of the lunar surface, which I always thought was the ultimate goal of NASA. Instead, we got a space shuttle program that seemed like an unsatisfying substitute for space exploration. Shuttles were never going to go to the moon, much less into deep space.

And then the shuttle program, stunned by the Challenger (1986) and Columbia (2003) disasters, dried up.

All that's left is the International Space Station and robots on Mars. I know important research is being done on the ISS, but it seems like the $100 billion spent so far mostly gives us images of astronauts turning weightless somersaults in their cramped cylinder. Okay. Ho hum. Go back to your research.

Until this month when the billionaires arrived.

On July 11, Sir Richard Branson took himself and several of his Virgin Galactic employees to the edge of space. They traveled in a vehicle (Unity 22) that looked something like a cross between an airplane and a gooney bird, and even though they didn't exceed the Kármán Line (that arbitrary threshold between atmosphere and true space 62 miles high that nobody ever heard of until this month), they got to float weightlessly for four minutes and saw the curvature of the Earth. That makes them astronauts in my view.

Then, today, Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos took three other passengers with him beyond the Kármán Line in a more traditional-looking rocket in a flight that lasted 11 minutes. It was reminiscent, to me, of Alan Shepherd's sub-orbital Project Mercury flight in 1961. You gotta start somewhere.

Bezos' mission looked pefect. The most amazing thing, I thought, was how the reusable booster rocket made a perfect upright landing on a pad not far from its desert launch site. The crew capsule, which included 82-year-old Wally Funk (an original Mercury 13 astronaut who trained with the guys but never flew because, well, she was a woman in a high-ceiling era), also made a perfect landing. Funk flew today and she could barely contain her excitement. Consequently, neither could I. She brought tears to my eyes. Good for her.

Originally, I wasn't too excited about billionaires trying to beat each other into space. Wouldn't humanity be better served if they put some of that incredible wealth into social projects to help the hungry and homeless? Or would it?

But I've revised my thinking. Maybe later, I'll revise it again.

We live on a fragile and finite plant. Eventually, some bazillion years from now, the Earth will be swallowed up by its dying giant red sun. Hopefully, by then, humanity will have found a way to Star Trek itself to other life-sustaining systems. Unless, of course, we continue to reject vaccines and mask mandates every time a pandemic comes along to try and wipe us out.

We can be, at the same time, both brilliant and extinction-insistent dinosaurs.

So, yeah, I salute private funding of space exploration. It's their money (if would help if Amazon would pay taxes, though. That's a good way to help the hungry and homeless. Actually, you might be helping to subsidize each space mission with your next Amazon order), they can do what they want with it.

In the end, this makes me feel like we're back in the game. This kind of space race might be just what we need.