Space travel, nearly 70 years on: Is the reality disappointing?

In an article entitled 'Why Go to Space?', NASA doesn’t give us a single answer. The agency claims the reasons are as “vast and varied” as those for exploring the forests or the oceans. Everybody has their take on what’s so exciting about space - the potential for life, the thrill of racing around in a spaceship, or finding the answer to why we’re here at all. Of course, this leads to another question. Are people as excited about the thought of space as they were at the dawn of the space race?

'Guided' by sci-fi
We get much of our fondness for the universe from movies and TV. Classics such as Alien (1979) and Star Trek have found a new audience decades after their inception but the presence of space themes in other kinds of entertainment, like casino games, means that new fans can arrive from anywhere. Starburst Galaxy and Stars Awakening in the Paddy Power slots catalogue feature many elements of movie worlds such as Star Wars, including aliens, planets, and exploding stars. These features have not only bled into the iGaming world, but most major sci-fi franchises have also transplanted their lore into books, too.

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So, how do fictional universes relate to the real one? Unfortunately, a BBC Sky at Night survey confirmed that 18-24-year-olds are “guided” by sci-fi media rather than what’s actually going on in reality. This is for two reasons. The first, that our use of space is dominated by the mundane, WiFi and weather reporting (etc.), is ironically a consequence of how successful we’ve been at exploring near-Earth orbit. The second reason is a bit more disappointing - we don’t go anywhere anymore.

Martian intentions
Humans haven’t been to the Moon since 1972, on the Apollo 17 mission. The last person to set foot on our rocky companion had some words that would become prophetic - “[…] as I take man's last step from the surface, back home for some time to come.” NASA has been trying to launch another mission to the Moon - Artemis II - since 2017 but to no avail just yet. Artemis II should have lifted off in September 2025 but the agency pushed the date forward to approximately April 2026 at the end of 2024.

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Of course, the other stellar body on the table is Mars, an important part of sci-fi ever since H.G. Wells revealed Martian intentions in his 1898 book The War of the Worlds. We now know that the Red Planet is a much less interesting place on the macro scale but, as robots like Curiosity and before it, Spirit and Opportunity, have proven, there’s much about Mars that we still don’t understand. The current estimate for a crewed NASA mission to the planet is the 2030s.

Robots
So, what does all that mean for our interest in space? Chris Lee, of the UK Space Agency, told The Week that space exploration with robots has “never had such a high profile with the public”, suggesting that we’re at least happy to explore space vicariously for a while, through our electronic friends. Lee does dampen the public’s hopes of doing anything else, noting that putting humans in space is “more challenging”. The International Space Station is the pinnacle of what we’ve achieved in seventy years.

It’s fair to say that reality hasn’t kept up with the fantasy in space exploration - but, give it another ten years, and we might be walking around.

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