To boldly go... to eternity and beyond?

‘These are difficult times when there’s not that much good news. And I think this is one of those things that is universally good. No matter where you are on planet Earth, this is a universally good thing.’

Those words were delivered earlier this summer. So quick quiz (without cheating and looking down this column for answers): who said them, and about what?

Answers: Elon Musk (founder of the American aerospace company SpaceX), about the successful return of their Dragon Capsule from its manned test mission to the International Space Station. As I write this, SpaceX are due to launch their first proper mission with four astronauts in late September.

Different days

I follow space-related news more closely than I would otherwise because my housemate Anna works in a space lab. This means that our answers to the question ‘How was your day?’ over dinner on a Tuesday evening are very different. A bad day for her is when the cyro pump in the vacuum chamber malfunctions. A bad day for me is when an author… well, I’ll say no more. Anna follows the media announcements of the Chinese space agency with the same level of interest as I read about Crossway’s forthcoming releases. (Did you know that they landed on the dark side of the moon last year? China, that is, not Crossway.)

August’s SpaceX landing was significant in safely bringing to conclusion the first commercial-crewed mission to the International Space Station. The mission launched at the end of May, and it was easy to think that the astronauts on board had chosen the ideal two months for checking out of planet earth, with Covid-19 continuing to lurch us from one uncertainty to the next. But the juxtaposition of the widespread hardship caused by the virus, and related economic shutdowns, with the huge cost of space exploration made it hard not to be sceptical about Musk’s claim to have achieved something ‘universally good’ for humankind.

But, my housemate tells me, this actually gets to the drive behind so much space exploration at the moment, including the Mars rover that her lab has been working on for the last two years. ‘A lot of it is about trying to find an alternative planet,’ she says. ‘There’s this underlying idea that we’ve screwed up this one so badly that we need to look beyond it and find somewhere else; that the future of humanity is not with planet earth.’ I’m not anti-space exploration (and neither, obviously, is she!). There’s something Genesis 1:28-ish about the human desire to explore and lay claim to and utilise what is currently ‘unsubdued’ in the universe. But might there also be something Genesis11-ish about the human desire to come together to build a tower/spaceship so high/powerful as to escape the boundaries God has set for us?

If we could just start again...?

But the real problem, Anna points out, is that ‘deep down, many of my colleagues have this dream that if we could just start again somewhere new, if we could just get a fresh start, everything would be okay. Personally I think that’s pretty futile. Plus, if we haven’t done what we should have done with this place, why do we have the audacity to think that we would make a better job of doing it elsewhere? Even if we found a new planet, we’d take all our problems with us. We’d still be human.’

What a contrast, then, with the truly universally good news of the gospel. A gospel that affirms that, yes, there is something deeply wrong with our world, and it’s beyond our power to fix it. But a good news that says the solution is not in escape, but in redemption. The Bible promises a new creation, filled with human beings who are new creations too – an actual fresh start, with fresh hearts. Not on an arid planet where it’s a struggle to survive; but on a radically renewed – a ‘new’ – planet Earth. Our home, restored to how it should be.

Good luck to you, Musk. But the future of humanity is with planet Earth.