Moon Shot: Flash Gordon Meets Jack’s Beanstalk

Posted on November 17, 2006

voyage Would you really like to be shot into space? Honest, would you take pleasure in being stuffed in an unwieldy suit (with a diaper no less), enduring cookie-tossing, face-contorting g-forces just on the outside chance that you might “touch the face of God?” I once asked astronaut Buzz Aldrin if there was one peak experience — something perhaps spiritual — that would justify anyone wanting to endure this rigmarole. “It makes a helluva story at a cocktail party,” he replied. The recent press-conference collapse of Anousheh Ansari, the latest “tourist” astronaut, alerted me to the fact that space travel is not a stroll around the Tuilleries. But then we live in the land of the brave, the home of the free-spender, the up Everest without oxygen crowd.