For a small boy growing up near Glasgow in 1969, the appearance on a flickering television of a man with a Scottish Borders name taking one small step for man was, to put it mildly, a seminal moment. Yet ever since NASA's Apollo programme ended in 1972, discussion of space travel in the United States (and Europe) has been dominated by arcane arguments about whether human space flight is really cutting-edge science'. For this child in 1969, space travel, discovery and science were all much the same thing. Odd that it should take a film, the glorious Gravity, to remind me that they still are. And that the United States and Europe have - partly at the insistence of their scientific communities - dropped ambitions for human space flight and surrendered the field to China and India.
展开▼
