He’s the best-known Briton ever to have boldly gone into area: the primary to board the Worldwide House Station, the primary to hold out an area stroll. Main Tim Peake even ran a marathon whereas in orbit. So why do I wince each time I hear his identify?
After I was rising up, shortly after the Apollo moon touchdown, the portentous language of that mission – ‘The Eagle has landed’, ‘One small step’ and so on – had permeated world consciousness. So when area journey was depicted in standard tradition, in music and movie, it was usually with the environment of an existential psychodrama – in House Odyssey (Kubrick), House Oddity (Bowie), ‘Rocket Man’ (Elton). Even extraterrestrial animals had this haunted ‘It’s lonely out in area’ high quality, as within the Swedish bildungsroman My Life as a Canine (1985), which held on Laika the Soviet canine alone in doomed orbit.
