If there’s one collective lesson gleaned from the COVID pandemic so far, it may be the shared difficulty of being isolated in one’s own home—whe

The Spacefaring Paradox

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2021-05-26 06:00:05

If there’s one collective lesson gleaned from the COVID pandemic so far, it may be the shared difficulty of being isolated in one’s own home—whether alone or with family members or roommates. The stresses of quarantine included crushing mundane routines, personal habits hypostatized, and all too familiar views (stove range, bathroom mirror, that solitary tree outside, changing while nothing changed). As Amanda Mull wrote in the Atlantic, after working from home for a year, her “wallpaper has begun to yellow.” When space closes in, humans tend not to thrive. It can drive us to the brink of craziness.

I’ve been thinking about this problem in relation to SpaceX and its rapid advancements throughout the pandemic, including the most recent successful launch and landing of its largest rocket, Starship. This was a prototype of the ship that Elon Musk intends to travel to the Moon, to Mars, and eventually beyond. In “crew mode” it will be able to carry up to 100 passengers. As Marina Koren reported for the Atlantic, Musk suddenly seems a lot closer to his goal of making humans “a multiplanetary species.” If there was something vaguely cathartic or even inspiring in Musk’s tenacious drive to perfect the SpaceX Starship, especially during the pandemic, it may have been the fantasy of more space, out there, beyond the constraints of Earth, which were felt so heavily in 2020.

Before SpaceX will take passengers to space, the company plans to offer “Earth to Earth transportation.” These would be ridiculously quick rides around the world—for instance, London to New York in a half-hour. The idea is to launch the rocket with paying travelers above Earth’s atmosphere, then speed around the globe and land promptly at the destination. As the SpaceX website boasts, “Imagine most journeys taking less than 30 minutes with access to anywhere in the world in an hour or less.” (Of course, this “anywhere in the world” really means major urban centers with an appropriate landing pad and equipment to service the rocket, but we’ll let the hyperbole slide.)