Tycoons turning space travel into a theme park ride? We cannae take any more, captain!

FeW fictional characters are as embedded in earthlings’ collective psyche as Captain James T Kirk. We quote – or misquote – him and his enterprise shipmates all the time.

Kirk’s phrase ‘to boldly go where no man has gone before’ is only marginally less celebrated than Neil Armstrong’s ‘one small step for man…’ soundbite. It is also the bestloved split infinitive in the english language.

The Captain never once told his (supposedly Aberdonian) chief engineer to ‘Beam me up, Scotty’, but who cares? He said it in spirit.

Nor, in the original series, did Spock ever tell his commanding officer ‘It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it’, yet in our mind’s ear, we hear him say the words and glory in their quest to explore new worlds.

‘Phasers on stun’, ‘warp speed’, ‘dilithium crystals’ – we are familiar even with the imaginary minutiae of space travel thanks to this invariably thoughtful drama serial whose cardboard sets and polystyrene planets never once shattered the illusion that these were pioneers of the Great Beyond, on the day job, light years from home.

No, it took a 90-year-old William Shatner to shatter it in the year 2021.

Look at the Captain Kirk actor this week, giddy as a youngster on Christmas morning, pure stoked to be spending three minutes in suborbital space.

Clock the innocent joy as he experiences weightlessness for the first time and peers, eyes like saucers, through the window at our blue sphere a mere 66 miles away from the nose on his face.

Compare the silly wee capsule in which he scratched the outer surface of the final frontier to the vast, galaxytrotting Starship enterprise – a 60s design classic – and tell me that, somewhere in his marrow, he did not feel just a tad underwhelmed.

Back in the day when Shatner played the captain of this beautiful vessel, Nasa was preparing to send men to the

Moon. The logical extension of that Apollo 11 mission was more ambitious voyages, more worlds bagged like Munros by intrepid, real-life Captain Kirks. Indeed Star Trek could not have come at a more opportune moment in the history of space travel.

It posited a future, some 200 years on from those baby steps on the Moon, when explorers would whizz around the Milky Way with impunity.

Considering the brief timeline between the first Wright brothers aircraft and the first space rocket, it did not seem such a stretch.

What happened? Fifty years closer to the first entry in Captain Kirk’s log, man has conquered no new ground whatever, been nowhere.

Misadventure

We are a cowed bunch, chastened by misadventure. Today, we explore our universe largely through telescopes and unmanned craft remotely operated from terra firma.

Yes, the planet has a space station but there are just seven people on it and it is closer to home soil than I, in Glasgow, am to Birmingham.

There was bold talk a few years ago about a pioneer community setting up camp on Mars for the rest of their natural lives.

Indeed a young Scot, Hannah earnshaw, was among the final 100 candidates.

They were due to be setting off on the seven-month journey some time in 2024. I am guessing that they are behind schedule.

Up north, meanwhile, Scotland has its own space race. The name of the game is to find the best deserted outcrop from which to ping tiny unmanned rockets into the black yonder to deliver bits of electronic kit into orbit.

Think of those spacecraft as a kind of taxi service for minuscule satellites which monitor not what’s going on out there in the universe but back here on the ground.

Unst in Shetland, Scolpaig in North Uist and the A’Mhoine peninsula in Sutherland are all vying to be the first to launch these commercial, inner space minicabs.

It is not exactly Star Trek. More, I fear, it is an exercise in adding to our planet’s orbital litter.

For those of us who grew up watching re-runs of Gene Roddenberry’s seminal space series, who packed the cinemas in 1977 for Star Wars and grew into darker science fiction franchises such as Alien, there is a sense, surely, that space exploration has failed to deliver on its early promise – that it is, in 2021, something of a damp squib.

The beginning of the end of the great adventure was perhaps the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986 when all seven crew members – including a high school teacher – were killed in an explosion only 73 seconds into the mission.

Another seven lost their lives in 2003 when the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry to the earth’s atmosphere.

Unmanned missions became the space exploration method of choice: safer, more practical, cheaper, faster – and, for obvious reasons, considerably less thrilling.

Filling the void are a clutch of ‘space tourism’ magnates such as billionaires Jeff Bezos and Sir Richard Branson, signing up passengers willing to pay six-figure sums for a few minutes’ experience of being what they laughably term ‘astronauts’.

There is the slenderest shred of nobility, I suppose, in their enterprises.

It is in our nature as humans to explore, push against and break boundaries. I am sure Captain Kirk said as much. Besides, we don’t have that much time – only another five billion years or so – to find alternative accommodation before the sun becomes a red giant and vaporises our planet. We have to start somewhere in dipping our toes outside the comfort zone.

But really? Space tourism? It is akin to taking one small step beyond our garden gate and telling folks we’ve been out exploring Scotland.

Prince William is right, then, to question the wisdom of insanely rich men styling themselves as space tycoons when, in fact, there are many more useful things they could be doing down on the ground.

Fairground

‘We need some of the world’s greatest brains and minds fixed on trying to repair this planet, not trying to find the next place to go and live,’ said the Duke of Cambridge as Shatner plopped back down to earth.

Where the Prince is wrong is in the suggestion that Bezos and Branson are trying to do any such thing. They are not space explorers in any meaningful sense but fairground ride operators to the superrich. Roll up for an out-of-thisworld adventure, they say – and deliver a few minutes of weightless tumbling around. It’s a bouncy castle for overgrown children.

I don’t doubt for a minute that William Shatner had the time of his life up there.

Sure, it was moving, even fitting, to see the nonagenarian who fired our imaginations about worlds beyond our ken finally make it into space.

But part of me wishes he had turned the offer down. His fictional character commanded an entire ship, encountered aliens, extended the hand of friendship and, only when he absolutely had to, turned his phasers on them.

He knew what he was about, did Kirk, and, from what we know of the character, treated the five-year mission to seek out new life and civilisations with the utmost seriousness.

How seriously would the Captain have taken a man like Jeff Bezos turning space into a funfair? I am sure Mr Shatner is too polite to say.