We are fascinated by space. Rockets and space shuttles are the stuff of our dreams. But the dream is rapidly turning to nightmare and we may justifiably wonder where it is taking us. Strangely, questioning the merits of space activities seems shocking, excruciating, outrageous. How can that be so if the spark of human genius is to be found uniquely in space activities? Perhaps we need to move beyond or debunk the myth of space. Without engaging in nihilism or provoking bitter controversy, we need to conjure another relationship with the idea of space.
Although far removed from the fairly abstract concerns of cosmology or astrophysics, the issue of borders has arisen with the conquest of space. Not in the sense that borders have been pushed back, for that is not the case, but rather in terms of their having finally disappeared from the Earth’s surface. It is quite striking that many astronauts have commented on how artifical our state borders seemed when they looked at the Earth from space, which makes them sound almost naïve given how obvious that is. It was strange to hear how astonished they were by the idea of national borders being invisible from space.