My dad and I are driving home from the grocery store, Bluetooth-assisted iTunes providing a nice backing track to the journey. The song changes, and my dad points at the car radio display. The tune playing is “Magic Carpet Ride” by Steppenwolf.
“You know what this song is?” He asks.
“What?” I reply, rolling my eyes because the joke he’s about to make is one that he rang the humor out of a long time ago. “This is the song that Zefram Cochrane will play when he conducts the first ever human warp speed flight on April 5, 2063.”
I suspect that I probably lost the majority of the reading audience with that last sentence. Zefram Cochrane? 2063? Warp flight? What could I possibly be going on about? And what does it have to do with space tourism? Well, let me give you some context. What my dad was referencing is an extremely pivotal scene from the movie “Star Trek: First Contact,” the eighth “Star Trek” feature film and the second to focus on the “Next Generation” crew. After an encounter with the Borg, the Enterprise gets transported back in time 300 years to the mid-21st century. They realize that the date is April 4, 2063, the eve of one of the most important events in the “Star Trek” universe: the aforementioned first warp speed run. They deduce that that is why the Borg are here, to prevent humanity’s ascension before it ever begins by stopping Zefram Cochrane from performing his test flight.
Quite a lot of hullabaloo over one puny starship right? Well, in the “Star Trek” universe, the hullabaloo is certainly warranted. The reason that this moment is so important to the timeline is because, just by chance, at the exact moment that Conchrane will conduct his test flight, a Vulcan surveyor ship will be traveling through Earth’s solar system. If they don’t spot Cochrane’s warp signature on their scans, they will potentially never know that humanity has evolved and developed to a point where they can handle first contact. If the Borg prevent Vulcan first contact, that means humans will never learn they aren’t alone in the universe. If the Borg prevent Vulcan first contact, the Earth will have no hope of recovering from the ravages of World War III. If the Borg prevent Vulcan first contact, extinction is nearly inevitable. This means that the optimistic, utopian future that is quintessential “Star Trek” will never come to pass.
Luckily, with the help of the Enterprise, Cochrane is able to succeed in his mission even despite the Borg’s best efforts. He plays “Magic Carpet Ride” at the launch, he learns about the wonders in store for humanity, and he facilitates the first first contact with the Vulcan delegation.
From that explanation of just a simple dad joke, it’s probably obvious that I’m a massive “Star Trek” fan. A Trekkie, one might even say. I can quote monologues from memory, identify episodes from just a single frame, and explain the nuances of the Kirk vs. Picard argument before ultimately convincing you that the real MVP Federation captain is Benjamin Lafayette Sisko.
You know who else claims to be a huge”Star Trek” fan, though? Jeff Bezos. He’s talked extensively about “Star Trek’s” impact on his life and the ways in which the franchise’s vision of humanity has inspired him as an innovator through the years. He’s such a big fan that when an opportunity arose in 2016 for a cameo role in “Star Trek Beyond,” he jumped at the chance. He happily offered himself up to the makeup chair and the hours-long prosthetics process all for one five-second shot. That’s certainly dedication to the craft, I’ll give him that.
In terms of his professional career, his love for all things USS Enterprise is most obvious in his involvement in Blue Origin, his space technology company. Founded in 2000, Blue Origin has only really started to gain traction in the past eight or so years. Currently, they operate the suborbital New Shepard rocket and the heavy-lift New Glenn rocket while also working on collaborations such as the Blue Moon human lunar lander for NASA’s Artemis program. The company is most well-known for their manned space flights, which more often than not are envoys of the rich and famous rather than engineers or pilots. Blue Origin’s shuttle craft have had the honor of lifting up a wide variety of customers, from the entrepreneurs and VC darlings (Glen de Vries, Jim Kitchen, Sara Sabry, Mario Férreira), the sports and television personalities (Michael Strahan, Jaison Robinson, Coby Cotton), to the one and only Starship Enterprise Captain James T. Kirk himself, William Shatner.
Despite a storied and well-established legacy of sending wealthy folks 100 kilometers above sea level, the most recent Blue Origin outing seems to have been the straw that finally broke the camel’s back. This 10-and-a-half minute barely-actually-in-space wonder has sparked more outrage, debate and hot takes than all of the company’s previous space flights combined. Katy Perry, Kerianne Flynn, Amanda Nguyen, Aisha Bowe, Gayle King and Lauren Sánchez made up this intrepid crew, with the deposit per person alone costing upwards of $150,000. Each woman had her own reason for being there, from the obvious—if slightly nepotistic—motivations of Sanchez, to the fairly touching pledge from Nguyen to be a symbol for the progress of Vietnam, to Perry’s bizarre statement that she was undertaking the flight for “Mother Earth” … only to then try galvanizing the media storm into a promotional bit for her upcoming world tour.
What was originally billed as a ballad of female empowerment took a much more pessimistic turn when pundits pointed out the hypocrisy of sending a group of women to space when there still exists so much standing in the way of female success down here on Earth. It feels tone deaf to make the case that the NS-31 launch was the first step for womankind when the $28 million price tag attached could have been put towards causes that have actual, measurable impacts on the lives of female-identifying individuals.
Although there are many directions that you can take the discourse of this failed girl-pop anthem (I personally found the memes of Katy Perry kissing the ground to be particularly entertaining), my question is this: if Bezos claims to be such a massive “Star Trek” aficionado, a follower so devoted that he started an entire company in pursuit of the stars, how is it possible for him to have missed literally the entire point?
The beauty of space exploration in “Star Trek” is its selflessness. As Counselor Deanna Troi so eloquently explains to Zefran Cochrane in “First Contact”: “[space] unites humanity in a way that no one ever thought possible … when they realize they’re not alone in the universe. Poverty, disease, war … they’ll all be gone within the next 50 years.” Starships are supposed to be anything but the line between ultra-rich and everybody else. They are a sign of how far we’ve come collectively as a species, a testament to our constant drive to seek out the unknown. More importantly, the humans in “Star Trek” only began to reach seriously for the cosmos once they had already conquered the problems that plagued them at home. In the 23rd century, racial bias has been eliminated, climate change conquered and all orange potato faces sent out to sea. In this utopian (if saccharinely optimistic) world, starships are the coveted jewel in the crown of diversity, equity and inclusion, with all of the peoples of Earth setting out together, on equal footing, to discover the galaxy.
This was tantamount to Gene Roddenberry’s original vision for “Trek” all the way back in 1966. He conceived of a crew representing every panel of the globe and beyond. Mr. Spock, most conspicuously, was an alien, a representation of the as yet unknown friends that humanity might make as they flew into the future. The helmsman, Hikaru Sulu, is named as such to represent how the Sulu sea touches every country in East Asia. The navigator, Pavel Chekov, was one of the few sympathetic Russian characters gracing television screens at the height of the Cold War. The Chief Engineer, Montgomery Scott, was the Enterprise’s European stand-in, and forming the American cohort was Captain James Kirk (played by William Shatner, as alluded to above) and Ship’s Surgeon, Dr. Leonard McCoy.
There is one more key senior officer aboard the NCC-1701 who I wanted to highlight especially. The Communications Officer, Nyota Uhura, who in the tapestry of the bridge crew was the ambassador for Africa. She represented the integrated future promised by both the Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation movements. If you watch any episode of “Star Trek: The Original Series,” you’ll understand that actress Nichelle Nichols imbued Uhura with the kind of presence you rarely see on film. Although often relegated to a side character position, she was never just there on the screen, she was there, actively listening, holding her ground, standing up for herself, being treated in her job—a job that was not gendered nor racialized in the way that so many female African-American roles were at the time—just as seriously and just as respectfully as any of her counterparts. And she did all of it while wearing perhaps the most famous symbol of women’s empowerment: the mini skirt. A deliberate clothing choice that, while provocative and certainly there in part to boost ratings, sent a message: yes, women will go to space, but they’re going to do it on their own terms and in excellent style, too.
She whose name translates to “freedom” was an inspiration to those who grew up watching “Star Trek.” Whoopi Goldberg became an actress because she saw Uhura on TV. Martin Luther King Jr., when he met Nichols, told her that he was her biggest fan, and that her show was the only one that he let his children stay up late to watch.
When “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country” (the last “Trek” movie featuring the original cast) wrapped, Nichols pivoted. She used her name and image to help NASA recruit more female and African-American astronauts. Her efforts resulted in the onboarding of Guion Bluford, Ronald McNair and Dr. Frederick D. Gregory, the first African-American male astronauts. In 1987, Nichols made history again when she helped to select African-American woman Mae Jemison as a mission specialist for the “Endeavor.” The first Black lady in space for fake had found the first Black lady in space for real. Now that’s what female empowerment on the final frontier really looks like.
How would Nichelle Nichols feel if she knew that her efforts indirectly lead to Katy Perry teasing her Lifetimes setlist? Or that her advocacy laid the groundwork for Gayle King to clap back at her critics by telling them that they would never understand the importance and necessity of space travel since they had never been to space themselves?
Referring to space travel in the modern age as “important” and “necessary” is ridiculous. Democracy, climate change, healthcare, worker protections, government accountability, abortion rights, immigration reform, A.I. ethics, grocery prices … these are the issues that the average American would tell you are important and necessary to pay attention to. These are the issues that a man like Jeff Bezos is important enough to make the necessary moves on. But he doesn’t seem to have retained any of the actual lessons of “Star Trek,” just the very bare bones of “cool spaceship go brrr.”
In my opinion, the only particularly important or necessary thing to have come out of Blue Origin’s space flights is the self-reflection that it inspired in William Shatner. He transcribes his thoughts on his brief sojourn in his autobiography “To Boldly Go,” where he discusses the mission and grapples with the vastness of the world beyond our planet.
“The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness.” He writes. “Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.”
This excerpt underscores all of the reasons that “space tourism” is the exact last thing that humanity needs right now. We don’t know if the Vulcans are coming in 2063. We don’t know if Zefram Cochrane is going to play “Magic Carpet Ride” on the first human warp speed flight. We don’t know if there’s a vast cosmos teeming with life out there or if we’re truly alone in the universe. But what we do know is that this is the only planet that we’ve got, and we need to take better care of it before we can earn the stars. Aliens or no aliens, there is absolutely nothing stopping Jeff Bezos from speeding the progress along. With unlimited wealth and resources at his fingertips, he has the potential to bring the world of “Star Trek”—a world that he so clearly admires and wishes to emulate—closer to our current reality. But he would rather sit in his spaceship, surrounded by other rich tycoons who refuse to think about what their extravagance symbolizes to the 99.9% of the world that could never dream of being where they are.
I’ve always been baffled by the name “Blue Origin.” It’s certainly cute, a nice homage to Mother Earth that still implies upward mobility. But why would you treat your home planet, your only planet, with such disdain? Earth is not just our point of origin. Earth isn’t just the place where a group of amino acids in a little pond of goo three billion years ago combined to form the first protein. It isn’t just a blue sphere that we are destined to part from as soon as we outgrow it. Earth is our lifeblood, the place where we evolved, where every single human who has ever lived laughed, cried, yelled, bled, and persevered. To hear “Star Trek” tell it, that truth will stay the course into the 23rd century and beyond. After all, Sulu was born in San Francisco, Uhura in Kenya, Chekov in Russia, Scotty in Scotland, McCoy in Georgia and Kirk in Iowa. Space was only ever just their day job. Earth was always their home.
