Why on Earth Did Shatner Go to Space?
Despite what Amazon’s PR department almost desperately tries to make us believe, William Shatner did not go to space. The Kármán Line is the lowest common denominator or space, a definition based on the ratio of air lift versus Keppler force for the legal purpose of delineating the heavens during the escalating megalomania of the Cold War. Shatner went to a place that we could call SpacePrime™, which simulates whatever people imagine space is like without the enormous costs of actually leaving Earth and without the much less popular and most likely catastrophic risks of leaving the ionosphere. The black skies of unscattered sunlight, a feeling of weightlessness produced by rapid parabolic descent, and a visibly curved horizon – but no cosmic radiation firing protons at nearly the speed of light from the hearts of dying suns, no gamma ray bursts of unimaginable magnitude being hurled from the shattering crusts of neutron stars, no unpredictable solar eruptions sending billions of tons of plasma crawling through the baffling emptiness of interplanetary space. SpacePrime™ is to space what the World Showcase at Epcot is to travelling Europe – a controlled, marketable and idealized simulation.
Now, this shouldn’t be a problem if we ignored the blatant inequality, the almost comical levels of labour exploitation or the sheer neoliberal hubris at play here – or should it? If we don’t care about the environmental damage caused, surely we could just congratulate someone who went from cornering the book market to blasting billions through rocket engines?
