Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Richard Branson’s “live-streamed” coverage of his voyage to the edge of space was, well, little more than an infomercial — in partnership, of course, with New Mexico True.
Guess I should have expected it to be what it was: A larger-than-life promotion of Branson’s burgeoning space tourism business. That’s what his ambitious undertaking at Spaceport America in southern New Mexico has been all about from the beginning.
And, at $200,000 a ticket, it’s exclusively a ride for the rich.
This is a billionaires’ space race for the 2020s, as space travel becomes ever-more privatized. Branson went up, Jeff Bezos will soon go up, and Elon Musk is planning to orbit the moon (with a paying billionaire customer on board) and then setting off to inhabit Mars in the not-so-distant future.
You’ve got to wonder, are the super rich planning their escape from Earth, for that day of reckoning when/if climate change and other catastrophes make this planet too hot to handle?
Maybe. Or maybe they’re just doing what our species has been doing since we first started walking upright — exploring the great beyond.
Whatever the motivation, and regardless of the hype, we’re witnessing a giant leap forward in space exploration. It’s making the unbelievable far more believable. It gives credence to guys like Musk, who has said he wants to build a self-sustaining outpost that could grow to as many as 1 million people — it’s theoretically possible, he says, to have a city on the Red Planet by 2050.
That means a child born today could see humans living on another world before they turn 30 years old.
Science fiction? More like science feasible.
When Branson made his trip from southern New Mexico to the edge of space and back again, I watched it with a brand new grandchild in my arms. I worry what’s in store for her, with climate change and other global upheavals bearing down on her generation, but I found solace in the Virgin Galactic flight.
Somehow, the idea of humans reaching into space in a routine manner makes me think that maybe science and technology can also offset the poisoning of our planet. We should explore space, but not because we’ve trashed Earth.
Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:
