Dialogue: A pretty expensive way of getting some holiday snaps

By JOE BENNETT

Mr Tito is the first paying astronaut. He is also the first astronaut called Dennis. He tried for years to get on a space mission but was always turned down, perhaps because of his name.

But now he has made it and the world is goggling.

Dennis has floated weightless. Dennis has seen the planet floating nonsensically in nothing. He has eaten beef stroganoff from little suck-up packs and I presume he has also learned how astronauts defecate. I have long wondered about that. Both the space suit and the weightlessness seem to me to be problems.

I still don't know how they do it but Dennis does. The knowledge cost him $20 million.

Dennis is happy. "I love space," he said in an authentically crackly transmission as his comrades in nowhere slung him around like a polystyrene sausage.

Dennis also apparently threw up. I doubt if he loved space when he was throwing up. It is hard to love anything when throwing up. If beside the porcelain at my house there was a button marked Instant Death Option, I would have pressed it many times.

But I presume there wasn't a button in the Russian rocket. There probably wasn't porcelain. I just hope Dennis didn't get his lunch on the inside of his visor.

The Americans wouldn't let Dennis fly but the Russians have a different moral standard. It's called poverty. Dennis was allowed to pay his way and everything was daffodils.

But now the Russian rocket has docked with the American space station and the Americans are sulking. They want to insist that what they are doing is very serious science and that Mr Tito is Dennis the Menace.

In its best scientific language Nasa has warned Dennis that if he breaks anything, he'll have to pay for it. I suspect Dennis will smash an insignificant dial just to see if Nasa sends him the bill. And if it does, I bet he'll frame it. I would.

But then I am childish. Dennis is not. Dennis is a 60-year-old squidzillionaire (though being a Californian squidzillionaire he looks about 40).

What I would like to ask this serious man is why he wanted to go into space. I know lots of little boys will envy him but the point about little boys is that they are not grown men.

My question, I suppose, is the same one as is thrown constantly at mountaineers. Their standard response is "because it's there." But that response is barred to Dennis. Space is not there. Space is nowhere. Beyond our atmosphere "there" has no meaning. Space is a boggler.

Nor when Dennis returns can he claim to have "knocked the bastard off."

Space is a big bastard. Dennis will merely have nibbled at the edge of something which has no edges. Nor will he even have Neil Armstrong's satisfaction of bouncing around in an alien sandpit. He will just have gone up (though "up" means nothing either), floated a bit and then come down again.

Many people have remarked that this is the ultimate in tourism. Well, cobblers to that. Ultimate it is not. It is merely more tourism. It has the stamp of all tourism. It is the frantic quest for novelty when you have the money to pay for it.

Indeed if the odyssey of Dennis serves any purpose, it is to illuminate the nature of all tourism. Dennis has gone nowhere, and circles there with people he barely knows.

He will come back with some photographs. He is also hermetically sealed from the realities of the place he is visiting, just as the visitor to New Zealand is protected from the reality of living here.

The tourist is presented with a highlights package, a parallel and parody New Zealand. If Dennis wants the reality of space, he should strip off his dinky suit, open a hatch and dive into the black truth. But he won't do that.

Our Den is obviously a man of ambition. I partly admire him. Before he went flying, he fulfilled the dream that many of us hold on Earth by becoming ridiculously rich. By his own efforts he won Lotto. But Lotto has not satisfied him. He has gone in search of bigger and better. He has certainly found bigger but I am unsure whether he has found better.

I find myself wondering whether he is travelling in the right direction in search of better. I wonder whether he would be wiser to look in instead of out. I wonder if there is some wisdom which escapes the wandering Dennis, something not dissimilar to Blake's "eternity in a grain of sand."

I would like to think there is but I don't profess to know. And, meanwhile, I hope Dennis has had a lovely holiday.