In Space There Are No Native Craftsmen

Space tourism seems destined to take its place among the other varieties of getaways, and for good reason.

First, mapping out your route is a breeze. A quick review of the literature suggests that you go up then you come back down.

There may be a certain amount of orbiting in order to say you have done it, but for all practical purposes the passage through space and time is no more complicated than drawing a line on a piece of paper upward from one dot to the other and then tracing it back down to the first dot.

This is impossible with terrestrial travel.

As a matter of city planning and suburban development, there is no such thing as a straight line from here to there.

If your starting point is, let us call it Point A, your first series of steps will be to take the Business Bypass till it runs into the Outer Loop, follow that until that big roadwork kicks in, narrowing a full city’s traffic down to half a lane, break out of that stretch and pick up the old boulevard system that cuts you across town, take the turnpike over towards your old neighborhood, get off on 13th, 15th, or 7th Street – any odd-numbered street will do in fact – until you hit the cobblestone sections that then give way to the ancient Western Trails, still scarred with wagon ruts from the era of Manifest Destiny…well, then you are ready to start.

Note that you are still at Point A, but it has done your heart good to mark Point B on the map just as though you are going to get there someday. But no, you haven’t really even left town yet.

And you’re out of gas now.

By contrast, it is awfully hard in the space tourism business to incorporate detours, lane narrowings, speed limits for work zones, merging traffic, or an empty fuel tank, all on the fly. In fact these would be most unwelcome, and would probably bring an abrupt end to the journey.

No, research suggests that someone on the ground more or less lights a big fuse under the rocket, runs as fast as they can in the other direction once it starts to sizzle and spark, and the rocketship correspondingly rises up into the air with you inside it.

It would be a quiet journey inside the capsule I have to think. There wouldn’t be a lot of finding license plates from all of the states along the way, or stopping at every rest stop known to man, or getting punched in the upper arm by someone yelling ‘slug bug!’ each time you passed a Volkswagen Beetle.

At the speeds you are traveling you would expect that the father, when asked by fellow travelers from the back seat if we are there yet, could almost always answer honestly, ‘yes. Yes, we are.’

What good is supersonic space acceleration and warp speed travel through space if it doesn’t allow you, a few seconds after the journey begins, to say, ‘well, here we are!’

I speak of these fine people, most often younger specimens, along for the journey in the back seat.

Charming children! I say nothing against them! And they say nothing against me!

Because the G-force of the liftoff and acceleration has pressed their mouths back towards the vicinity of their ears, making it difficult to complain of the terrain going by, the quality of the food at the last rest stop, the age and stylishness and repair status and color of the vehicle they are traveling in. It is a opportunity for young people to observe and reflect, and perfect their character.

In listing the benefits of this means of travel I would say too that there are no hand-carved cherrywood salad bowls in outer space.

There are no t-shirts, coffee mugs, native gems and stones, dried flower arrangements of the local flora, nature videos, snowshoes, backpacks, little globes that you turn upside down and shake to make snow fall upon the town you are visiting, paperweights, pen sets, candles, canned specialties of the pickled variety, wristwatches, earrings, necklaces, or jewelry of any kind.

There are on the star maps no outlet stores, nor outlet store malls, nor entire town devoted to outlet store malls as a group, making outer space the only place in the universe absent of them.

Though the price of the space vacation is hefty when viewed as a lump sum, the mere absence of these things to buy ought to strip ten thousand out what you otherwise would have spent driving down to the lake for the weekend.

There are no theme parks, no thrill rides, no water slides, no water cannons, and there are no people dressed up as frontiersmen, cowboys, butterchurners, gunfighters, schoolmarms, feuding clans, candle makers, or blacksmiths.

There are certain things no longer on the journey that you might regret the absence of, such as reptile farms, aquariums, two-headed calf exhibits, roadside produce stands, and the occasional county fair, but against that must be put the relief of not having to visit The Root Vegetable Palace simply because you happen to be driving within 700 miles of its location. As the crow flies.

There is no temptation, nor any campaign raised, to go visit the Aunt Bess side of the family while you are in the same hemisphere, as they have always been tetchy that way and take it to heart when people do not at least drop by for a cup of coffee and Bessie’s golden brownies.

As far as my research has revealed there are no such things as flat tires, snow tires, bald tires, or chains for your tires on rocketships, nor have there been any reported incidents of the windshield wiper fluid reservoir springing a leak and coming in through the air conditioning vent right into the driver’s eyes.

The space vacationer retains his customary popularity back home as there is no place to send a post card from to show where you are, and there are no pictures worth setting into a slide show since at 120,000 a second, near anything you fix your viewfinder upon will be blurred.

The space traveler does not come back bound and determined to tell one and all the best place to eat in Buenos Aires, the best place to drink tea in London, or the best place to people-watch in Rome. He does not come back with a lei around his neck, a flowery beach type shirt unbuttoned to that point just below his chest where his stomach starts globing out like a basketball, or a new way of speaking that reflects the way the common people talk in those regions where tourists ordinarily don’t go.

The space traveler, if truth be told, at some point is simply glad to return in one piece.

Rounding off the attractiveness and cost-saving benefits of space travel, there are no time shares in space, nor are there real estate bulletin boards placed at every corner of every street advertising houses that are designed to contain every charm of the town and its natural setting, and which you could just afford if you had a rich aunt that you didn’t know about that for some reason has left you a bundle in her will, if additionally you stumbled upon gold nuggets once a week in your wanderings among these rustic settings, and if additionally still one of you begged on a street corner as a kind of part time job three days a week.

There’s none of that in space.

So I think it’s going to catch on, this space tourism, with a lot of winners among the range of stakeholders. I take it for granted that there’s no bars up there charging $20 for a simple gin and tonic, so that right there is a step away from the madness.