The regular televised screenings of Star Trek on Sunday evenings were met with great fanfare in my household. My father would supply the ever more inventive snackwich (or however the new, improved sealed toast from the future was spelt); my mother was on Nesquick (chocolate milk) duty. Timing was of the essence as television waited for no family or their snacks at that stage of the game. The show would go on no matter what. Oh, but once we'd settled into formation on the couch, what a show it was. There we were in the flickering blue light, slightly bewildered by the Roquefort fillet steak snackwich, but powering through, our very own satellite hub of fantasists ready to be dazzled by the final frontier.
Space is where you go when you want to get away from the Earth. And let’s be completely candid about this — Earth is a shitshow at the present moment. I would totally hop on a flight out of here. Those astronauts who were stranded on the space station, growing spores and doing science for many extra months before Elon rescued them last month, were probably quite happy to stay there a while longer.
They'd finally settled into their parallel lives, free of the daily dailies and all the usual claptrap of our existence. I imagine the inherent appeal of space travel is similar to that of travelling to another country. If you're anything like me, you find yourself unaccountably drawn to the real estate advertisements in the windows. There it is — a totally new life in a foreign climate just within reach. This fanciful trawling of alien homes leads to escapist ideas about these other lives you could be living. You could just about afford this 3m² hole in the wall, with unusual plumbing arrangements, in a foreign currency. Ah the larks you'd have — eating foreign stuff, wearing foreign clothes, taking up your rightful place in an entirely foreign universe.
I can see it now — the astronauts living it up, a zero gravity existence in a tiny apartment, wearing adult nappies and squeezing their sustenance out of a small, squishy bag of gloop. Space travel — it’s crazy but it’s true.
Apparently you get a whole new perspective out there, gazing down on our blue planet that's quietly spinning on its axis, imperceptibly doing its thing, while you're fumbling about trying to catch the experimental beaker that just floated off. It’s called the overview effect. Researchers report that it's “a state of awe and self-transcendence, qualities precipitated by a particularly striking visual effect”.
But I fear the effect is eventually muted. Like all these fantasies, the reality is a little less romantic. It’s the smell in space that would get to me — it’s pretty bad up there. If you have been cooped up in the space station for extended periods of time you can see how the gaseous content produced by the intrepid frontiersmen and women could give a decidedly earthy tone to the whole thing.
It's so much better to get a quick fix — an 11 minute round trip, like an astronomically expensive funfair ride for the 0001%. It means that you'd get all the good bits: floating — tick; overview effect — tick; sexy space suits — tick; good hair — tick. And your make up stays in place while you get to make all the content for the socials that your heart desires. As Katy Perry, intrepid songstress, kisser of girls and Mother Earth, explained with her fellow astronautical angels team rustled up by Lauren Sanchez, paramour of Jeff Bezos: “We are putting the ass into astronauts.”
I just love that for humanity the rule goes: pay enough money and you too can dress in fire-retardant Lycra and a built in space corset to live out your Star Trekking cosplay fantasies without any downsides. I mean, almost no downsides. There are no snackwiches but there is a bit of a carbon footprint situation as you blast through the ozone layer. Think of all the transcendent feelings you'd get about the little people still mooching around on the surface of the planet while you sing: “Baby you’re a firework, come on, show 'em what you're worth, make em go oh oh oh — as you shoot across the sky.”
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