Happy Nice Mall

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about a fungus called Pilobolus. It lives mostly on manure from cows and horses, happily nibbling, enriching the soil until it runs out of manure to eat. Then something magical happens: The fungus stops eating and rearranges itself into a giant stalk with a ball of cells (a sporangium) on top.

This device can detect sunlight. Osmosis, when the pressure gets high enough, essentially inflates the stem until you sneeze. The sporangium is launched with a force equivalent to 20,000 times gravity towards a nearby lawn where another horse or cow can graze.

Our mushroom astronaut clings to a stem of grass. Once eaten, the sporangium passes through the animal’s digestive tract and is expelled in a rich dung pile, whereupon the cycle of consumption and escape begins again.

This is scary for me. How do individual fungal cells know when to abandon their anarchy and engage in purposeful action together? Do the fungi collectively know something that neither of them individually know – when and how to attack for a new territory away from the worn-out manure?

I can’t help thinking of the behavior of the low-level Pilobolus as a metaphor for the space program: a species that responds to impulses it doesn’t fully understand, trying to leave the compost pile. What do we not know about ourselves?

This is not to diminish the achievements and ambitions of today’s space-going moguls. Pilobolus brothers Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and Jeff Bezos, after three generations of astronauts and cosmonauts, have put their money where their science fiction dreams are.

Last week, four people with no astronaut identity, including their leader, a tech billionaire Jared Isaacman — He circled the Earth for three days on Inspiration4, a mission in one of the SpaceX Dragon capsules carrying people and supplies to the International Space Station. Mr. Isaacman will not reveal how much he paid for the flight, only that one of his passengers, Hayley Arceneaux, was once treated for cancer and is now a patient at St. He says he hopes to raise money for Jude Children’s Research Hospital. physician assistant.

Since 2001, a handful of wealthy and tech-focused people have been on the brink of bankruptcy since Dennis Tito, an engineering-turned-invesment guru paid $20 million to spend eight days aboard the International Space Station. this world experience, some more than once. This summer, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos each drove their own spaceships to the edge of space, several dozen miles up.

The final velvet rope gets crowded around.

Two years ago, NASA announced that anyone could visit the space station for $35,000 a day, without factoring in the cost of getting there again and again. It is said that Tom Cruise wants to shoot a movie there. Mr. Musk has famously said he wants to die on Mars, but not yet. Alan Stern, head of New Horizons’ mission to Pluto and beyond, has now signed up to conduct space exploration on a series of Virgin Galactic flights, each costing $250,000 and paid for by the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. Works.

What does he plan to do with four minutes of weightlessness that he will enjoy with every shot? Quite a lot, certainly not billionaire Dr. Stern said in a recent phone call.

Among other things, Dr. On her maiden flight, Stern will wear a biomedical harness that will record her body’s response to spaceflight and zero gravity, and take pictures of star fields to measure the quality of the spaceship’s windows. Over the next decade, he said, hundreds of space tourists will wear the harness, giving scientists and doctors a wealth of data on how ordinary people—unlike fit and well-trained astronauts—react and adapt. Space.

Dr. Other topics on the agenda could include searching for asteroids very close to the sun, Stern said.

Dr. The price of the Virgin Galactic seat has since risen to $450,000, but it’s still a bargain, Stern said. Suborbital spacecraft like Virgin Galactic’s Spaceship 2 or Mr. Bezos’ Blue Origin can fly more often and cheaper than conventional rockets that NASA uses to lift precision instruments above the atmosphere, but costing $4 million or more per flight .

Dr. “I think it will bloom,” Stern said of the suborbital business.

We’ve heard all this before. Forty years ago the space shuttle would make space travel routine and inexpensive, almost as uneventful as a transatlantic airplane flight. Then 14 astronauts died.

Now the next generation of rockets, engineers, scientists and explorers are ready to attack the skies. We shouldn’t be surprised that rich people are at the forefront. Space could be the new playground for the wealthy like Maui and Aspen. Of course, the one who pays the piper always chooses the melody. Do we want science – for humanity – set the agenda by a club of rich, white men? (Yes, they were all white men until now.)

All their money and enthusiasm fueled innovation and excitement as well as jobs for scientists and engineers. And when things go wrong, like in early September when private company Firefly exploded on the first launch of its new Alpha rocket, it will be shareholders and venture capitalists, not taxpayers, who have to pay the bill.

Historically, the space program has served as a kind of loss leader, drawing people to science creating new semiconductor chips or inventing new ways of imaging the brain. These are things that both political parties say they want.

It’s fitting that most of the money supporting this renaissance was made in the tech sector by people in the 1950s and ’60s benefiting from a tidal wave of government-sponsored research, particularly in defense and aerospace.

There is also the issue of what they will find there. We may encounter a life more alien than even sci-fi writers can imagine, an impossibly desolate land, or simply the unsettling beauty of brutal nature. Or perhaps a biochemical clue to our own beginnings.

Who knows if Elon Musk will eventually die on Mars? But one day, someone will probably go down in history as the first person to perish on the Red Planet. In the story of Arthur C. Clarke “The Crossing of the WorldAn astronaut is stranded on Mars and travels to the desert to die, listening to classical music so his microbes can sustenance in the new world anything that can use them. Houston, Pilobolus will have landed.