Risk Is Our Business

For most of my life, I’ve been a space buff. I wish I could say that it all began when I witnessed Armstrong and Aldrin landing on the moon in 1969, but I was just five at the time, and if memory serves, I was more interested in how the people around me were reacting to the event than in the event itself. What really hooked me was a daily diet of “Star Trek” (the original series, of course), followed by a deep dive into the books of Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and a few other luminaries of postwar American science fiction.

By my early teens, I knew my destiny lay on the bridge of the starship Enterprise, or at least on the first NASA mission to Mars. Less than stellar math grades, an early fear of flying and a few other astronaut disqualifiers ultimately forced me back down to Earth and onto a different career path, but I’ve never lost my enthusiasm for the final frontier.

In the decades that followed, however, it wasn’t always easy to be a space enthusiast. Yes, there were the space shuttle, the Mars rovers, the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station, all of which were (and in the case of the station, still is) amazing. But after the moon landings, these achievements felt rather small, like a fairly entertaining but uninspired sequel to a great film. Every once in a while, some administration or other would clear its throat and briefly mention plans to send American astronauts to Mars, only to shelve things quietly when the cost estimates started coming in.

I still followed what was happening in the field, and I still hoped for the U.S. to commit itself to something big and bold in space, but I slowly came to accept that NASA might remain an underfunded and uninspiring federal jobs program that was fated to do little more than send people into low Earth orbit and occasionally fire off a probe to a nearby planet.

That all began to change about a decade ago. As regular readers of this column know, I’m a big fan of SpaceX. That’s because this one privately held company has literally put the United States back on track to becoming a great spacefaring nation. With the reusable Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, SpaceX has singlehandedly revitalized America’s moribund launch program, most notably by resuming manned flights to the International Space Station on American rockets, a job that had been outsourced to the Russians after the Space Shuttle retired in 2011.

Just a few weeks ago, the company completed the Polaris Dawn mission, in which four privately funded astronauts traveled farther out into space than all but the Apollo crews and conducted the first private spacewalk. SpaceX also now dominates the international commercial launch market and is the source of more than half of the world’s orbital launches each year.

Best of all is the company’s still-teething Starship, the biggest, most powerful rocket ever built—and, like Falcon, fully reusable. Once Starship is operational (which, if the Federal Aviation Administration doesn’t get in the way, may happen as early as the end of this year), SpaceX will have the ability to put 150 tons of payload into orbit, much more than any other existing rocket. But Starship isn’t being designed and built just for bigger orbital missions: Its true purpose is to transport human beings to the Moon and to Mars and then to seed the first human colonies there.

If all this sounds fantastical, that’s because until recently it was. Amid the technical feats, probably the most important thing SpaceX has done is to restore hope that humanity will finally begin exploring our solar system — and in person rather than by probe. And this hope hasn’t inspired only space nerds like me. Given what it has already accomplished in the slightly more than two decades since it was founded and what it likely will accomplish in the next two, SpaceX has ignited a new space race, this time with private as well as public entities. Other private companies, such as Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin (which sent Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, William Shatner, into space for the first time in 2021) and Rocket Lab, are working to catch up, which is all to the good. And it’s hard to imagine that other spacefaring nations, particularly China, aren’t also trying to emulate what SpaceX is doing.

Recently, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk made news when he set an ambitious timetable for getting to Mars. “The first Starships to Mars will launch in two years,” he said, noting that these will be uncrewed test missions. “If these landings go well, then crew flights will be in four years,” he added. As for the colony that Musk and his company want to build on the red planet, he predicted that it would not only happen but would swell to one million souls in 20 years.

Musk has a habit of making overly optimistic predictions. For example, in 2017, he predicted that SpaceX would first land Starships on Mars in 2022. But when it comes to accurately predicting the future, space travel is a particularly tough nut to crack. That’s because space exploration is very hard, and very hard things have a tendency to run into delays, unknown problems and even catastrophes.

Space is an unforgiving environment, and when things go wrong, people can easily die. The fact that we’ve lost only seven people in space so far (when the space shuttle Columbia broke up in 2003 as it tried to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere) is probably mostly due to luck and the fact that human space travel has, up to now, been relatively rare and financed by deep-pocketed governments. Musk himself has predicted that “a bunch of people will probably die” trying to get to Mars.

In an excellent recent Discourse essay on space travel, Michael Puttré points out that in addition to physical dangers, expanding the human footprint in space will also involve a lot of psychological challenges, especially as we begin to make long journeys to desolate places and then attempt to live there. He writes:

The final frontier sounds expansive, but it won’t feel that way for those who make a life in it. True, the universe is endless, and vistas may be magnificent on the other side of the glass (or polycarbonate or transparent aluminum). But the fact is, there will always be a barrier between you and the great outdoors, even on planets other than Earth. Unless you go back to the homeworld on vacation, you will never feel a fresh breeze on your face again.

Even walking on the surface of Mars, with the sun in a marmalade sky and a beckoning horizon, a person is in a wrapper. If anything, spacesuits are even more confining than artificial space habitats. You are in an MRI machine with a window, or a screen. You can’t scratch your nose.

All true. Much as I hate to admit it, space travel won’t resemble “Star Trek,” where the crew traveled great distances on what was essentially a luxury liner to planets with breathable air and attractive people who spoke English. Still, I doubt Musk and SpaceX, the American government or any other credible space power will have trouble finding volunteers for the cramped, nine-month trip to explore and colonize Mars, for the same reason 5,000 men applied to join Shackleton on the HMS Endurance for its 1914 journey to Antarctica.

We human beings are a restless, curious, thrill-seeking bunch. Or, to quote Captain Kirk: “Risk is our business.” Moreover, hardship has never been an impediment to exploration, not to the pioneers who explored and settled our continent nor to the Polynesians who island-hopped their way across the Pacific in rickety rafts. Taking big risks and suffering hardships to reach and tame the next frontier is how we roll.

Will we make it to Mars on Musk’s ambitious timeline? Given all the knowable and unknowable challenges associated with deep space travel, predicting that we’ll land people on the red planet in four years is probably way too optimistic. But it doesn’t matter, because it will happen—if not in 2028 or 2038, then soon after. And although it seems likely right now, it may not even happen on a SpaceX rocket, which also doesn’t matter. Even if NASA or Blue Origin or the Chinese get there first, we’ll have SpaceX and Musk to thank for sparking this most recent surge in innovation and investment that made it happen. And while many of Musk’s predictions may not turn out to be accurate, here’s one that is: Getting to Mars, he says, will be “an arduous and dangerous journey where you may not come back alive,” but it will also be “a glorious adventure.”

Meanwhile…

What I’ve been listening to: During a recent trip to New York, I had a chance to see one of my favorite bands, Electric Light Orchestra (ELO), live at Madison Square Garden. ELO was founded in Birmingham, England, in 1971 by a number of musicians who wanted to fuse rock with classical music. Inspired by the Beatles’ use of strings in songs like “I Am the Walrus” (John Lennon loved the band, calling them “son of Beatles”), ELO quickly found their groove under the leadership of singer-songwriter Jeff Lynne and began a decade-long run of platinum-selling records and hit singles. The band ended up selling more than 50 million albums worldwide and notching 20 Top 40 hits in the U.S. alone, including “Evil Woman,” “Telephone Line,” “Livin’ Thing,” “Mr. Blue Sky” and “Don’t Bring Me Down.”

I first saw ELO in 1981, when the original group was still together, and they were wonderful. Due to a string of deaths and creative differences among surviving members, the current lineup consists of Lynne and a 13-piece backup band. Jeff is now in his late 70s and clearly slowing down. Still, his voice remains strong, and his bandmates did an amazing job of recreating the multilayered sound that made the band so famous.

I’ve been listening to ELO almost every day for nearly 50 years, and I still find their music thrilling and fresh. That’s because Lynne can write everything from soaring ballads and pop confections to driving rockers and prog rock anthems with equal skill and panache. All his music is peppered with clever melodic hooks and enhanced by extraordinary instrumental arrangements and vocal harmonies, as well as innovative studio production. It’s no wonder that after the band broke up in the mid-1980s, Lynne went on to produce and often co-write albums with George Harrison, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison (all of whom joined him in the supergroup, Traveling Wilburys), as well as artists as different as Paul McCartney, Randy Newman, Bryan Adams and Regina Spektor.

Someone recently asked me to name my favorite ELO tune, and after stammering for almost a minute I came up with an answer that I immediately began questioning. There are so many great ELO songs, and my favorite is often the one I happen to be listening to at that moment. But let me recommend two that I think are a good place for the uninitiated to start: “Can’t Get It Out of My Head” is an achingly beautiful ballad and one of the band’s first big hits, and “Do Ya” is a rock anthem with wonderfully odd lyrics and a simple but terrific power chord riff. Enjoy!

And while I’m at it: ELO has enjoyed quite a renaissance in recent years, as their music has appeared in everything from feature films to commercials. Their songs have also been covered by a variety of different artists, from Def Leppard to Weezer. Recently a close friend (who’s also long loved the band and who attended the show at the Garden with me) sent me Duran Duran’s cover of one of the band’s signature hits: “Evil Woman.” Good covers should imbue the original with a different and fresh take on the song (think of Earth, Wind & Fire covering “Got To Get You Into My Life,” and you know what I’m talking about). Otherwise, why bother? Duran Duran (which, like ELO, was also founded in Birmingham) delivers here, infusing the song with an infectious 1980s dance groove.

Finally: If anything you’ve read in this column or in Discourse in general has sparked a thought or question, feel free to drop me a line at [email protected]. I’d love to hear from you. Meanwhile, we’ll be back next Sunday with another Editor’s Corner. Until then, take care and have a great week.

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