To Infinity...and beyond!

I read this morning that Sir Richard Branson believes that Virgin Galactic are now a mere 18 months from the first sub-orbital passenger flight. This seems to be something that has made relatively little impact on the general news media; my source was Scientific American's RSS feed. But for the life of me I can't understand why this isn't making headline after headline. We seem to have become so blasé about air and space travel in our generation that the birth of a commercial space service almost fails to register.

The birth of powered air travel in 1904 dominated the news for months, and the exploits of pioneers such as Louis Bleriot, Allcock and Brown, and Charles Lindberg were equally hot topics. The arrival of jet-powered commercial airliners spawned not only a new mode of travel but a new lifestyle: the Jet-Set. Even Concorde captured the headlines.

Our pioneering space programmes drew the world together in awe and excitement. Over half a billion people watched the Apollo 11 moon landing, and when Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert were in peril aboard Apollo 13, the whole world held its breath.

So where has the excitement gone? Where is that childlike wonder that held everyone enthralled as they followed the exploits of those incredible pioneers who pushed the limits daily, in the same routine way that most of us push paper. Has the age of heroes passed? Are we now so pessimistic about the future of our world that we can no longer feel the thrill and excitement that our grandparents and great-grandparents experienced?

Climate change, terrorism, and global recession are all problems that need addressing, of course, as are poverty, human trafficking, exploitation of cheap labour markets, the destruction of the rain forests, and a hundred other issues.

But part of what makes us human is the drive to always look over the next mountain, round the next bend in the river, across the next desert. When the frontiersmen struck out west across the vast wilderness of north America, what kept them going, pushing on across the plains, the deserts, picking routes through towering mountain ranges? They had no idea what they would find. They couldn't have known that they would eventually reach the "promised land" of California. Yet on they pushed, through bitter cold and blistering heat. That essential, instinctive human drive to explore, to expand our horizons, to see and understand our world, maintained them when surely they must many times have felt like turning back, or staying put.

We need our pioneers. Branson may be an unlikely hero, and certainly his sub-orbital passenger aircraft will be the work of thousands of individuals, rather than he alone. But Branson is the one making it happen. He had the vision, he had the opportunity, and he had the financial position to turn the vision into reality. In the next couple of years, it will be possible for anyone (with the necessary fare) to travel to the limits of outer space. Barely a hundred years since Wilbur and Orville's maiden flight, and only fifty since Sputnik 1, the first man-made object to orbit the earth, ordinary men and women will travel at twice the altitude of commercial jet airliners. There is little doubt that within twenty years, space-travel will become as routine as air travel is today. That, regardless of the thousand ways we are failing to use our unique abilities to solve the world's problems, is a truly remarkable achievement.

There are many reasons to be pessimistic about the future of humanity, but let us not lose that pioneer spirit that has brought us so far. I think we're going to need it.