All I ever wanted was to go into space. From the time I was a little boy, I was surrounded by science fiction—Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, 2001, Robotech—that romanticized interstellar travel. Well, it romanticized space, but it also made space seem normal: Here were whole civilizations that had made getting off one planet and over to another one an everyday activity. You didn’t just go to space—you worked in space! Sure, there were still challenges, like running out of dilithium crystals or encountering asteroid-dwelling space worms or discovering your own father was the galaxy’s biggest bad guy, but that was what made the work fun. Adventure was a de facto element of everyone’s lives; they were all explorers. In space, no one can hear you scream with joy.
For a while, it seemed like Earth might go that route. We had landed on the moon just five years before my birth, and the U.S. space program was developing shuttles so astronauts could more easily go up and down the gravity well. The Voyager probes were launched in my lifetime, carrying with them the “golden record” of sounds and messages representing our small planet—who knew who or what might one day find them? Cosmos was on TV; Skylab existed. It did not seem crazy to want to be an astronaut when I grew up.
It would be easy to say the Challenger disaster of 1986 put an end to all that. But there were other factors. When I was 11, I started wearing glasses, and I realized my poor eyesight, not to mention my lack of physical prowess and my anti-military attitude, would put the astronaut training program out of reach. And in 1989, the scientific world thought it had cold fusion within its grasp—and thus a safe, reliable power source for space exploration, among other things—only to discover it was junk science. With the end of the Cold War, the space race was shut down for lack of competitors. The dream of decades, if not centuries, died in just a few short years.
To be clear, I am very, very angry about this. Humanity mostly gave up on the coolest thing it had ever achieved, leaving all of us stuck here on this one planet, with no way out and nowhere to go, anyway. There’s just one crummy space station—no moon bases, no refueling points between here and Mars, just the infinite emptiness of the universe.
Which I would gladly head out into! Send me up now: I’ll get Lasik! I’ll lift weights!
As angers go, this is a lesser one, oscillating down into disappointment most of the time. What could I have done, what could any of us have done? We’re not just fighting history and its accidents—we’re doing battle with physics. Getting off the planet is a challenge. Moving through space is a challenge. Recycling air and water, repelling radiation, staying healthy and fit in the absence of gravity—these are not simple problems with simple solutions. And while some scientists and companies are trying to solve them, it doesn’t feel like enough to make space travel, or living in space, a reality within my lifetime.
And that’s where the oscillation begins to rise up into fury. Because there are real people, and real companies, who are trying to bring humanity into space. And they are, by and large, complete assholes. Egomaniacal, unserious assholes whose monstrous fortunes allow brilliant scientists and engineers to pursue my dream on their behalf. How dare they! I wished, I fantasized, and I gave up on it, holding onto just the thinnest, most innocent, naive wish that one day before I died it would come true, and one of the top five worst people on the whole planet waltzes in with his billions to claim it for his own? What monkey paw was I holding that this might be the granting of my heart’s desire?
It leaves me torn: Should we become a space-faring civilization with credit going to the schmucks? Or should we remain earthbound out of spite?
Rather than indulge in such pettiness, I try instead to maintain the fantasy. I watch shows like For All Mankind, which cleverly reimagines the past 60 years of space exploration based on the idea that the Soviets reached the Moon first, and The Expanse, which takes place a few hundred years later, when human colonies span the solar system. Both transform space travel into a commonplace, accessible to the masses and mostly safe, but still fraught with risk and excitement. The shows are excellent partly because they adhere to principles of reasonable scientific accuracy and progress (i.e., there’s no magic) but also because their stories revolve around conflicts we understand: between friends, frenemies, family members, and co-workers, between groups, institutions, and nations competing for the same goals, and among very human beings just trying to survive in more or less hostile environments.
These are the basic units of all good drama, and you can surely get them in your media diet without needing to go to space. We got plenty of that right here on earth, both fictional and all too damn real. But what these shows add is a constant sense of wonder, the chance for any and all characters to pause their struggles and glance out the window at an alien landscape, or simply at the blackness without end, and feel a deeper magic at work in their souls. They are part not just of a story but of the story—the grand narrative our species has a chance to write but has been reluctant to start typing.
And that’s all I want! I don’t need escape from my troubles here on Earth—I’d be bored without them. But I crave that constant reminder of how wonderful our collective achievements are, a hopeful counterpoint to the pain and frequent disappointments of 21st-century life. Living in New York City helps, of course: To look at the skyline, to inhabit the messy streets, to observe and listen to individuals as numerous and distinct as the stars in the sky—even after all these years, I’m awed. And when New York grows dull, there’s the whole rest of the planet to encounter.
Still, none of that is space—the final frontier. Will I reach it—will we—in my lifetime? I hope so, but I’m a realist. We might not. But if not, I want to make this one last wish: Forge for me a space coffin, like the one they put Spock in at the end of Wrath of Khan, and launch me into the vacuum, out of the Earth’s orbit and, if possible, beyond the edge of the solar system, into the even emptier folds between stars. Let my body freeze and dry and slowly crack its way to dust as it journeys across the cosmos to an ending none of us can imagine. And embed with me my own golden record, inscribed in every human language with these words: He lived, he died, he tried. Is that too much to ask? 🪨🪨🪨
