Since the end of the 30-year US space shuttle programme in 2011, manned space flight has dwindled to a series of mundane but bone-shaking bus-rides on Russian rockets up to the International Space Station in low Earth orbit. True, Nasa, still by far the world’s largest space agency, is developing a new generation of manned spacecraft. But a working prototype — let alone a new Apollo-style programme — is many years away.
Logically, this hiatus should provide an opportunity to rethink the whole purpose of sending people into space, an environment so profoundly hostile that huge sums have to be spent making travel beyond the Earth’s atmosphere even remotely safe. But too many Americans still feel a compulsion to spend billions of tax dollars on manned space flight for a re-evaluation to be politically feasible. When, in 2010, President Barack Obama scrapped the Constellation programme that would have taken the US back to the moon by the next decade, the storm of protest was intense.
The latest to capitalise on the inchoate desire to slip Earth’s “surly bonds” is the Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Elon Musk. He has come forward with a plan to revive the dream of interplanetary travel, proposing a reusable spaceship that he estimates that could travel between Earth and Mars in three months, starting sometime in the 2020s. This would be the first step to building a larger fleet and ultimately establishing colonies on other planets. In Mr Musk’s view, that could allow mankind to become a “multi-planet species” — thus cheating its inevitable extinction on Earth.