(In which Manual Scan/Lemons Are Yellow vet Paul Kaufman re-evaluates his prospects for space tourism.)
Here’s the first in a short series of examples of how my young self was Dead Wrong on some major issues of our time.
If you had asked me as a 15-year-old what I wanted to be, I would have had no firm idea. But as a five-year-old, the answer was certain: an astronaut! It was 1969, and when I wasn’t listening to my well-worn copy of Yellow Submarine, I was reading about the Apollo missions and constructing home-made Command Modules out of cardboard boxes.
The future seemed obvious to me — we were just beginning to travel to space, and in the future, this would steadily become more and more of our daily lives, as had air travel, electricity, telephones, TV, et al., right? Soon we’d be booking commercial flights to distant planets, choosing among the tasty, reconstituted, colorful foods from the hip flight attendant, just like in 2001: A Space Odyssey. This would be the new frontier, and Americans are always drawn to frontiers.