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Am I the only person on earth who doesn’t want to go to space? Unlike Paris Hilton, Philippe Starck, Sigourney Weaver and seemingly the rest of the world all excited at the thought of climbing aboard Richard Branson’s spaceship, I couldn’t care less about it. It’s not just the $200,000 (about £103,000) price tag - although admittedly this is a bit of a barrier.
For a start, it’s all going to be a massive disappointment. The folk at Virgin Galactic clearly know this, because the package you get when you sign up for a flight includes three days of being brainwashed into believing how brilliant your adventure is going to be.
You will be “approaching sensory overload, and the more that can be simulated beforehand the better the real thing will be”, it says in black and white on its website, which sounds a bit like forcing someone to read the script of Seven Samurai in Japanese in order to make watching it seem less stupefyingly dull.
I know space will be a disappointment because this is the Google Earth generation. And because you won’t be able to zoom in, do a flyover, or use that ruler tool to see how much bigger your garden is than your neighbour’s it’s all going to seem a bit, well, flat. That’s if you can spot our precious planet at all. What you’re actually going to see is some cloud, a fug of greenhouse gases and maybe a sliver of Africa. Which will just look a bit orange.
What Branson is selling is actually a $200,000 trip to nowhere. Everyone knows that the most boring thing about travelling is the travelling, and yet your six-figure layout buys you a vacation where you don’t even get off the plane. No sun, no sangria and zero chance of a dance with a drunken American backpacker - and you don’t get to bring home any mementos, apart from some digital snaps of you being all weightless, which quite frankly a 12-year-old could knock up in Photoshop.
So I’m afraid I disagree with the American writer Jill Dobson who thinks that space travel is sexy. She says that Dave Navarro, the former Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist, is going to be even more of a catch once he’s been to space (he’s fanatical about space travel, evidently). In fact all that will happen is that he’ll become even more boring than he already is, swapping some tired old stories about drugs and groupies for something about “being at one with God” - and then talking about it for the rest of his life.
To get an idea of what the flight into space will really be like, you have to extrapolate from the experience of riding on one of Beardie’s Virgin trains. They’ll have closed the buffet before you even arrive in space and then the craft will be kept in a holding stack for four hours before you can land, during which time the air-conditioning will be switched off and the air will smell like the steam from a pressure cooker full of cabbage. Then, when you write to Branson at Necker Island to complain, you’ll get an automated reply from the customer services department in Slough.
The one person on earth who could convince me that space travel is desirable is Morgan Freeman. If Morgan, in that trustworthy, authoritative voice of his said: “It gives me the greatest of pleasure to announce that space travel is officially excellent,” then I’d be mildly tempted to go - but only if he was running a rival service.
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