Space travel

Tuesday

David Honigmann

Why most scientists don’t want us to believe in life on Mars

From our UK edition

‘Is there life on Mars?,’ asked David Bowie, and would not stay for an answer. The astrobiologist Steven Benner has an answer – which is that Mars not only has had life but still does. The first part of that answer is broadly accepted; the second remains highly contentious. His book is a scattershot plea for increased attention to be paid to searching for evidence – or, as he sees it, more evidence. The stakes are high. As he says in his introduction, if life exists only on Earth, that’s a coincidence; if it exists on Earth and a close neighbour, that’s the start of a pattern. Mars has always excited the imagination. No one has ever speculated hubristically about the chances of anything coming from Mercury. C.S.

Monday

John Sturgis

Tim Peake makes me cringe

From our UK edition

He’s the best-known Briton ever to have boldly gone into space: the first to board the International Space Station, the first to carry out a space walk. Major Tim Peake even ran a marathon while in orbit. So why do I wince every time I hear his name?  When I was growing up, shortly after the Apollo moon landing, the portentous language of that mission – ‘The Eagle has landed’, ‘One small step’ etc – had permeated global consciousness. So when space travel was depicted in popular culture, in music and film, it was often with the atmosphere of an existential psychodrama – in Space Odyssey (Kubrick), Space Oddity (Bowie), ‘Rocket Man’ (Elton).

Tuesday

Shane Cashman

Scientists’ strange offering to the final frontier

Dr. Jonathan Jiang dreams of beaming an easy-to-read message into space before civilization collapses. He’s run the simulations to test humanity’s self-destruction rate. According to his computers, there’s a 0.1 percent chance that humanity destroys itself in the not-so-distant future. He’s even more pessimistic than Stephen Hawking, who bowed out of public life saying, “I don’t think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet.” Jiang, who works for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, co-authored the 2022 paper “A Beacon in the Galaxy,” which argues for the importance of streamlining the communications we send into space hoping they might be intercepted by an interplanetary species.

space

Thursday

Martin Rees

How humans may populate the universe in the billions of years ahead

From our UK edition

I’m old enough to have viewed the grainy TV images of the first Moon landings by Apollo 11 in 1969. I can never look at the Moon without recalling Neil Armstrong’s ‘One small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind’. It seems even more heroic in retrospect, considering how they depended on primitive computing and untested equipment. 20 July 1969 (NASA/AFP via Getty Images) Once the race to the Moon was won, there was no motivation for continuing with the space race and the gargantuan costs involved. No human since 1972 has travelled more than a few hundred miles from the Earth. Hundreds have ventured into space, but they have done no more than circle the Earth in low orbit.

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Like Alan Bennett but less funny: ‘night, Mother at Hampstead Theatre reviewed

From our UK edition

’night, Mother is a two-hander that opens like a comedy sketch. ‘I’m going to kill myself, Mama,’ says Jessie. She’s cleaning a pistol and loading it with bullets. ‘I’ll shoot myself in a couple of hours.’ The pair live together in a lonely farmhouse, and Jessie wants to make sure her mother will be able to cope after her death. She tours the kitchen explaining where the fuses and the cleaning materials are kept. Mama, who doesn’t seem unduly alarmed, offers to phone her son and get him to thwart the suicide attempt. ‘I’ll just have to do it before he gets here,’ says Jessie. This is an intensely dramatic set-up which ought to be either gripping or hilarious, or both. Somehow it lacks punch.

Tuesday

Thomas Fink

What Prince William gets wrong about space travel

From our UK edition

Time was when 'to boldly go where no man has gone before' was not just a line from Star Trek. It was a national dream. Space exploration transcended political divisions. When Nasa pulled off the first moon landing, the world watched in awe. Last week, the Star Trek actor William Shatner was blasted into space on one of Jeff Bezos’s rockets. Yet there was no shared wonder. Instead, there was criticism. Scientists have more pressing problems to solve, argued detractors. In a rebuke to Bezos, who is pouring his fortune into space travel, Prince William told the BBC: 'We need some of the world’s greatest brains… trying to repair the planet, not trying to find the next place to go and live.' Such arguments miss three key points.

Monday

Matthew Lynn

Branson vs Bezos: In praise of the billionaire space race

From our UK edition

They are rich boys with some very expensive toys. As Richard Branson completes his first space flight, it would be easy to dismiss the race between the Virgin founder and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to be the first billionaire in space as the self-indulgence of a couple of tycoons with too much testosterone and too much money.  The competition will be seen by some on the liberal left as a symbol of widening inequalities. They will view it as the emergence of a plutocratic class separated from the rest of us, and as proof of the argument that space should be left to the public sphere. Of course there is an element of truth in all of those complaints.