Prohibitive prices deter common men from space tourism

Space travel these days evokes all kinds of emotions except enthusiasm. If at all it is mentioned, it crops up with profound sadness because of the Columbia disaster; or with pride by Indians since Kalpana Chawla was on board; or with greed since Richard Branson and his ilk can see money to be made.

So what really befell the great space programme' Have we lost our sense of adventure or are we waiting with bated breath for an alien like Jadu (in the movie Koi Mil Gaya) to wave back to recover that buoyancy' The waning interest is obviously due to money. The investment in these journeys could scare off even the most spendthrift millionaires. Not surprisingly, the mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa was axed by the Bush administration.

Accidents have also put us off. We are afraid to lose precious lives in their prime in search of the unknown and the uncharted.

Space exploration was like a political pep pill and to send missions in space used to be a proud announcement of a country that had arrived internationally. When Rakesh Sharma, India’s first man in space, spoke to Indira Gandhi, we were proud. Charlie Duke, Apollo missions veteran, sums up the attitudinal shift from “let’s land on the moon” to “why are we spending so much on moon' There are other problems which need attention.”

Less than a decade separated Kennedy’s swashbuckling “we will land on the moon” speech and the first landing on moon. Cheques were readily signed and more than 400,000 people worked on it. The enthusiasm was feverish. Now the enthusiasm remains, but only on screen. The Apollo missions still evince tremendous interest as evident by HBO’s forthcoming DVD release of From the Earth to the Moon (1998) produced by Tom Hanks. But actual space programmes are complete non-events.

As for civilian space travel, apart from Branson, no one is interested. And there’s a different irony there. He is quoted as claiming to create “mass market space tourism” but the recent venture, a place on the vessel orbiting the earth for a $100,000 is hardly mass appeal. Experts like Andrew Nahum, curator of aeronautics at the Science Museum in London, are also sceptical. He says “these ventures seldom make money; here we are talking about something more grand than Concorde and even that didn’t make any money.”

As for governments, space has become non-confrontational, innocent and boring ' we would rather invade Iraq than Mars. Of course, if tomorrow we were really threatened like in those movies on alien invasions, the Thunderbirds will come out once again.