Elite Traveler March-April 2015

elite traveler MAR/APR 2015 ISSUE 2 99

1972 Apollo 17, the last manned

mission to land on the Moon

"Plans for space ports are springing up around the globe"

I

glanced at the cockpit velocity dial and was stunned to see that we’d hit mach 2.4 – nearly two and a half times the speed of sound. Now we’re coasting the final few thousand feet of our journey in complete stillness, seemingly hanging above the world like a cloud.

Even fewer have witnessed the alien seascapes of the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench and no one has come close to taking a computer- generated holiday as in the movie Total Recall . Yet all of this may be about to change as we approach what promises to be a golden age of frontier travel, fit to rival the opening of the American West. In fact, it’s surprising what you can do already if you have the will and the right money. In 2002, I began research for a book called Moondust: in Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth , which described my journey to find the (then) nine remaining men who’d walked on the Moon between 1969 and 1972. What interested me about these astronauts was not their celebrity: it was the extent to which they had been forgotten. The conquest of space was in a moribund state, with NASA demoralized by budget cuts and lack of political leadership, yet retaining a stranglehold over the realm nonetheless. The ambition of the Apollo lunar program seemed – and was – a world away. A man named Rick Tumlinson first told me about the “space underground”. A founder and leading light of the exotically named Space Frontier Foundation, Tumlinson had something of the Sixties counter-culture about him; wore his hair in a ponytail and quoted Nirvana songs in speeches. And his speeches were always on the same theme, this being the need to break NASA’s control of the “space frontier”, by opening it to private enterprise. I listened rapt, but disbelieving, as he described his cadre of “activists”, most of whom had grown up in the disappointed wake of Apollo, and many of whom were now flush with tech and dotcom millions, which they were ready to throw at the cause. But with NASA and government regulators still firmly in charge, the underground’s fight looked daunting. I didn’t take Rick’s dreams too seriously. Everything changed in February 2003, when the Space Shuttle Columbia

100,000 feet is as high as a jet plane can go and both the sight and sensation are extraordinary. Below, the muted patchwork of Earth stretches away to the horizon, its clearly visible curvature accentuated by the brilliant white sheen of an atmosphere which looks tenuous enough to blow away. More fragile and beautiful still is the rhapsodic band of blue that surrounds the white, shading from pastel through cobalt to darkest night, before finally submitting to black. Space. Just 10 miles above me: a rocket thrust away, tantalizing. I try to fix the sight in my mind, knowing I’ll only be here for a few minutes and may never return. When I was a boy, we thought an edge of space encounter such as this would be commonplace by now. And that wasn’t the only thing we thought would be routine, because the Cold War and Space Race drove all kinds of exotic technologies aimed at pushing the frontiers of experience deep into the sky, sea and human mind – the latter through pharmaceuticals like LSD and computer-controlled “virtual reality”. Little known is the fact that in 1969, the same year when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people on the Moon, the US Navy sent a top-secret submarine, no less sophisticated than NASA’s fabled Eagle lunar lander, to the greatest depth ever recorded. Back then, it was reasonable to assume that this mind-blowing technology would eventually filter down to us, so it’s remarkable that in 2015, only a relative handful of civilians have been even to where I am now, with fewer than a thousand of any description having reached actual space. More shocking still, the last of only 24 ever to leave Earth’s orbit and head into deep space, did so in 1972.