I am a sci fi buff, which I suppose might make me prone to such fangrrrldom, but I feel I have to admit to being more than slightly in awe of The Musk. Whereas I’m here trying to make a space for myself on this crappy ruined world, full of strife and general misery, Elon is trying to get the fuck off of it – and watching his struggle to run away from it all into outer space, just makes me feel the little bit more hopeful that the human race has a future that isn’t small and contained, sad and galactically provincial.
Elon is using all of his vast reserves of cash not to buy up farmland in Montana like Gates, or fortify himself in Hawaii like the unmentionable android-like facebook dood, no, he is spreading his wings, and trying to buy and innovate a way out of here before we all kill ourselves in a haze of Fallout style nuclear misery and pathetic little wars waged by dick-swinging psychopaths who like to wank off to watching it all burn down around us little people.
Elon said earlier on this week that the initial Mars flights would have a lot of casualties, but were going to be a great adventure. I don’t doubt it. If I wasn’t too old and disastrously unsuccessful in life due to a bad marriage that almost killed me, I would be clamoring to sign up and raise a good ole one fingered salute to Earth and all who conspire to make it a living hell upon it, as we sail off into the inky yonder like some modern day space-pioneers.
As far as the danger side of things go, this SpaceX Dragon separation “incident” involving a piece of space junk around the time of docking, had me on the edge of my seat and sweating for our intrepid astro-voyagers. Talk about a close call. I do wonder what on earth they thought was going to be accomplished by zipped up and visors down spacesuit requests if that junk had pierced a hole in the Dragon. Surely it would have been disaster? It isn’t like they can parachute down. I suppose a depressurized cabin, they might have been able to have been rescued since the space station was so close. Not even Kubrick would want to imagine them floating in space, untethered trying to get into the Space Station. I would love to hear what the plan was if it did punch a hole in Dragon.
If you haven’t seen the close miss, even if you aren’t a space fanatic, you might enjoy seeing little humans get lucky for once. Take your protein pills and put your spacesuit on, guys and grrrrls!
Well okay then. Just another piece of space litter making its way past. To travel in space, sounds like the adventure..
A little close, no?