Part of the backlash about the Blue Origin flight is like SpaceX. It used to be that high technology and flying cars and shit were cool because they were the future and they’d be available to everyone. Now spaceflight is like having a private jet or yacht and there’s no pretense about it being anything but. Flying in space doesn’t just grab the imagination all by itself.

Really space is very boring. Enormous expanses of nothingness punctuated by globs of mass and radiation formed and moved into place by blind unthinking gravity and nuclear synthesis. No gods, only structure. I’m more Hawkwind than Star Trek in this. Space is deep. Space is bleak.

Have uou ever done an aerial flyover of Antaectica or the southern Indian Ocean on Google Earth? Or the Empty Quarter, these places where nothing lives? That’s some bleak stuff.