The Economist: Spacemen are from Mars
Half a century of space exploration has actually served to illuminate the Earth.
FIFTY YEARS ago the Soviet Union launched the world's first artificial satellite. Sputnik burst into orbit on October 4th 1957, in the midst of the cold war. It was a surprise to the world, a shock to many Americans, and the starting gun for the space race between the superpowers. Thereafter, America vied with the Soviet Union for supremacy in aerospace's equivalent of “mine's bigger than yours”, as successively taller rockets lobbed larger payloads further afield.
The legacy of all this posturing is a view of space travel as a macho, gung-ho affair, all about the conquest of the solar system by men with shiny suits and very big rockets. In the 1950s many people imagined that in the decades to come the new frontier would be beaten back by pioneers bent on interplanetary colonisation. By the end of the millennium there would be a moon base at the very least. Probably, there would be hotels in orbit, frequent missions to other planets and mines on asteroids extracting metals considered rare and precious on Earth. To extend John Gray's metaphor about men and women: space was from Mars. …
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