Jack Tame: Would you go for a space flight?

Saturday Morning with Jack Tame

Can you play Bananagrams in space?

Something tells me that with the whole gravity situation, they perhaps don’t recommend anything with lots of little parts. Anything that’s hard to keep as a full set on Earth is automatically disqualified from the International Space Station.

No Bananagrams. No Monopoly. No scrabble, either.

But Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are gonna have to find something to fill their time.

An hour from now, the Boeing space vehicle that transferred them up to the space station is going to undock, propel itself into the Earth’s atmosphere, and hopefully for the sake of Boeing’s ever-sinking share price and diminished reputation, land safely in a New Mexico desert. Butch and Suni will be stuck with no way home, orbiting the Earth at 28 thousand kilometres an hour.

I love space. I love the mind-melting distances, the extremes of energy and heat. I love the endlessness of its unknown. Supermassive black holes. I love the maths, even if I don’t understand it. And given human life gets its richness from relationships, meaningful work, and diverse experiences —you can put that on a tea towel— I would love to go.

Suni and Butch felt the same way. And when they took off in Boeing’s Starliner on June 5th, they thought they’d be back on Earth just eight days later. But of course, that’s not what has happened. Three months on, Boeing has been humiliated. Its first crewed mission has had problems that can’t be fully solved remotely, and the capsule will return to Earth, empty. Butch and Suni thought they were going to space for eight days. By the time they’re flown back in February next year, they will have been orbiting the Earth for eight months.

What’s the longest flight you’ve ever been on? Mine was about 17 hours. Obviously, a commercial passenger flight is more cramped and less interesting than a few laps on the International Space Station. But in this smart phone age, nothing has more thoroughly convinced me that I don’t have the attention span or temperament for long stints in one place, like a 12-hour stopover in a lower tier international airport. So. Boring. Newsflash: Jack Tame would struggle in prison.

The good news is Butch and Suni can talk to their families. They can do a bit of exercise and socialise with other astronauts. Presumably NASA stumps for a Netflix subscription. But the one thing they can’t do easily is return to Earth. You can imagine that even for the elite-or-the-elite, it’s the kind of situation that does funny things to your head.

So would you do it? Would you go, knowing a week on the space station could become the best part of a year or longer? Would you leave your family? Leave your life? Leave your cat, and your goldfish and the lawns to someone else’s care? No wind in your hair. No smell of fresh rain. No scrambled eggs that didn’t come in a packet.

I would. I’d do it. I’d leap at the chance. Still, I reckon once might be enough.

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