5/6/2023 0 Comments Tiny planet effectElon Musk’s SpaceX has launched seven space tourists all the way into orbit three of them spent more than two weeks living on the International Space Station. Blue Origin has carried 31 people to the edge of space and back since the summer of 2021. Unlike in Cernan’s era, however, when such trips were made exclusively by professional astronauts, today a seat on a spacecraft is available in a growing tourism industry, at least for those who can afford the astronomical fare. More than three decades later, spaceflight is not yet available to everyone, not even close. “It wouldn’t bring a utopia to this planet for people to understand it all, but it might make a difference.” “If only everyone could relate to the beauty and the purposefulness of it,” he said in 1985. Gene Cernan, one of just a dozen people to have walked on the lunar surface, desperately wanted the rest of humanity to see what he had seen. “That all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument suddenly silenced,” Collins wrote in his memoir, Carrying the Fire. Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 astronaut who flew around the moon, believed that if world leaders could experience the overview effect, intractable political differences might be resolved. “It becomes so small and so fragile, and such a precious little spot in that universe that you can block out with your thumb,” Russell “Rusty” Schweickart, who spent 10 days orbiting Earth on the Apollo 9 mission, said in a 1974 speech. “No one could be briefed well enough to be completely prepared for the astonishing view that I got,” Alan Shepard, the first American in space, wrote in 1962 after he’d made the same trip that Shatner later took.īeholding the silky clouds below, the continents, and the seas, many astronauts have seen their home planet-and humankind’s relationship to it-in a profoundly new light. These travelers saw Earth as a gleaming planet suspended in inky darkness, an oasis of life in the silent void, and it filled them with awe. Shatner appeared to be basking in a phenomenon that many professional astronauts have described: the overview effect. I hope I never recover from this.” The man who had played Captain Kirk was so moved by the journey that his post-touchdown remarks ran longer than the three minutes he’d actually spent in space. “What you have given me is the most profound experience I can imagine,” Shatner told Bezos. With tears falling down his cheeks, he described what he had witnessed, his tone hushed. Nearby, Jeff Bezos, the billionaire who had invited Shatner to ride on a Blue Origin rocket, whooped and popped a bottle of champagne, but Shatner hardly seemed to notice. The actor, then 90 years old, stood in the dusty grass of the West Texas desert, where the spacecraft had landed. When he first returned from space, William Shatner was overcome with emotion. The NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless II floats above Earth, February 1984.
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