John F Kennedy once called space-faring “the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which Man has ever embarked”. We go to space because, he said – like George Mallory said of his reason to conquer Everest – “it is there.”
While it is truer to say that the race for space between Washington and Moscow was driven as much by cold war competition as by humanity’s pioneering spirit and the imperatives of scientific exploration, billions of ordinary people around the world recognized as much at the time and still were able to marvel at our species’ accomplishments in the heavens regardless of the flag under which they were achieved, from Sputnik to the moon landing.
And today, many more billions remain transfixed by the idea of the final frontier: they watch, spellbound, the live online footage from SpaceX’s reusable-rocket launches that are set to revolutionise space travel; pictures sent home by Martian-rover robot geologists; and black-and-white imagery from a spacecraft landing on the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, an object roughly 500m kilometres away and hurtling through space about 40 times faster than a speeding bullet – perhaps the hardest manoeuvre ever attempted by humanity.
