Editorial: Space travel still a fearful prospect

Auckland surgeon John Dunn wiith a Virgin Galactic aircraft. Photo / Supplied

Nearly 50 years after the world watched spellbound as men first walked on the moon, space travel remains a fearful prospect for many of us. Not for the New Zealanders we feature today though, who are booked on Sir Richard Branson's rocket plane he hopes will make its first flight later this year or early next year.

The absence of a precise launch date suggests nothing is certain — except the resolve of those such as the nine New Zealanders who have signed up for flight. The older among them can recall watching the 1969 moon landings and believing, as we all did, that space travel would be commonplace before long. But not many of us thought much more about it.

Now, though it has taken much longer than imagined, the first purely commercial flights are being planned. Branson's operation, Virgin Galactic, plans to fly a winged rocket out of Earth's atmosphere to a point high enough for passengers to experience weightlessness and look down on the blue planet from the blackness of space.

All going well, the craft will then come down into the atmosphere and glide back to its launch site, "Spaceport America" in New Mexico.

So it will be a long way short of a moon trip or even the first orbital missions of astronauts half a century ago. But for many of us, perhaps most, it would be fearful enough.

Was it like this early last century when commercial air travel was in prospect? Were people reading that aircraft would be large enough to carry hundreds of people between continents, finding it too scary to contemplate sitting in something so heavy so high above the ground?

Probably. But space travel is disorienting in a new way.

Gravity is elemental to our existence, keeping us grounded in more ways than one. Air travel operates comfortably within the pull of the planet's mass. But to loosen that gravitational embrace, let alone leave it entirely, is hard to contemplate. The nightmare is to be untethered from terra firma forever.

So we marvel at those who have signed on to be Branson's passengers. And if the rocket planes come back safely we will have reason to be grateful to them. They may be pioneering a mode of travel that will be much faster between distant places on the planet.

But if they do nothing more than enlarge our comfort zone, they will have done well.