This Side of the Pond

Have you booked next year’s vacation yet? No? Then perhaps I could interest you in the opportunity to sunbathe with a Mai Tai on the International Space Station.

As of next year, anyone with a big enough budget will be able to strap themselves into a rocket and spend a week or two relaxing in zero gravity with the professionals. If you’ve ever wondered how an astronaut sleeps without floating straight out the window or what happens to the jelly they spill from a peanut butter sandwich, now is your chance to find out.

It’s a novelty for the curious and I’ve already dug out my piggy bank, but the truth is that this is just one aspect of a significant change in the direction of the wind. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: there are few inventions as important to the collective future of humanity as the International Space Station. I believe the events of the last couple of weeks have gone a long way to proving my point.

Let’s back up and start at the beginning. In case you missed the announcement a couple weeks ago, NASA will be obeying the directive of President Trump and returning us to the moon by 2024.

I am butt-clenchingly excited about this because I am too young to have experienced the last moon shot, so I’ve been patiently waiting my turn. From the perspective of a perpetual stargazer, NASA is the best thing America has ever contributed to the world (which I’m aware is really saying something) so I can barely contain my impatience to see the next giant leap for mankind.

But going back to the moon is not even the best part of this announcement. Nor the fact that, this time, we are planning to stay. Not even the knowledge that we plan to explore it properly this time, or that we’re about to see the birth of the Space Launch System that will allow humans to go further from our planet than ever before.

Nope, it’s none of that, though the key to my excitement is handily summarized in the mission tagline. “We Go Together” is the title of this project, because this time America will not be working alone.

This time, my own continent will be lending a hand along with countries such as Canada and Japan and private enterprises, too. We will go together, boldly returning to a place we’ve only reached a few times in our history.

There, we will construct the beginnings of what could one day become a spring-off point to destinations such as Mars. We will kick start the space age, and we’ll do it as a team.

This brings me back to the International Space Station, which I believe should be given the credit. It never quite captured the public’s imagination like the moon shots of the past – but it should have.

Since it was cobbled together at the turn of the century, the space station has been quietly growing, improving, contributing to the future and making scientific discoveries we once only dreamed of.

On the International Space Station, for example, we figured out how to filter and purify water for areas of the planet where it’s tough to find a pure source. We made emergency healthcare possible in the world’s remotest areas and improved eye surgery with hardware developed for space.

We invented a robotic arm to remove tumors that were previously inoperable, figured out how to treat osteoporosis, found new ways to detect and treat breast cancer and even thought of ways to prevent mold infestations in wine cellars.

I’ve only scratched the surface of what the ISS has achieved for those of us still on solid ground, and I haven’t even mentioned what we’ve learned about space itself, but you get the idea. Though most of us barely pay attention to that hunk of metal as it shoots around in orbit, it’s been breakthrough after breakthrough.

But most importantly of all: we’ve already been going together, for all these years since the space station launched. It has been continuously inhabited for almost 20 years by 236 people from 18 different countries.

Granted, more than half those people have been American, but they have been joined by astronauts from Russia to Canada, Italy to Brazil, Kazakhstan to Malaysia and, of course, from my beloved UK. All those big brains and brave souls from all those nations, working together to make the next jump in human evolution, led by the nation that first set foot on our lunar cousin.

Human beings have been living in space, every minute of every day, for the last 20 years, and that’s an incredible claim to be able to make. We’ve done it without bickering over our differences or worrying what’s going on the other side of borders; when you’re a small team relying on each other’s expertise for everyday survival, I imagine those sorts of things don’t seem to matter.

Meanwhile, down on the planet, we’ve been struggling through a painful time in politics across the world. Old hatreds have come back to haunt us, opinions have dramatically polarized, the internet seems akin to a virtual boxing ring and many of us are fearful of the future.

I genuinely believe this moon shot could be part of the cure. In my humble opinion, our species excels when it works together towards the loftiest of goals. Freeing the world from tyranny, discovering the corners of the planet – breaking through the frontiers that once stood in our way.

It’s been a long time since we’ve come up against a frontier that collectively challenged us. Perhaps only something as overwhelming in its ambition as the launch of mankind’s space age still has the power to bring us all together, within our countries and without.

It will take many minds working on the same solutions to make it happen, but that’s the beauty of this mission. Progress doesn’t care if you were born speaking English or Japanese; it still wants your contribution whether you vote left, right or not at all.

That final frontier belongs to all of us, and we will all have a part to play. Perhaps Gene Rodenberry had it right from the very beginning: if we want to boldly go where none has gone before, we have no choice but to travel together.