Trajan's Space Walk

They say that when Trajan led Rome to war against Parthia, he conquered modern-day Iraq and wept. They were not tears of guilt for the dead, nor pride at being the first Roman to really beat the Parthians, but the tears of coming second best. Alexander had already led the Greeks here, and he had gone so much further - through Persia and into India, into the very jewel of the world. Now in his sixties, Trajan knew that Iraq was his limit.

I mention this because a billionaire named Jared Isaacman funded his own spacewalk last month, an achievement that was first realised by the public sector in 1965. There has been no hint of Trajan's self-reflection, far from it - Isaaacman is being cast as the prize cock in a hen coop. All over technology-focused media, him stepping out of a SpaceX rocket is being touted as a new phase of humanity's relationship with space.

Not in a technological sense. Nobody has had the hubris to claim that this was an advancement in space exploration. Instead, another term is being promoted - space commercialisation. And there is something to that, to be honest. A private citizen, albeit a phenomenally wealthy one, bought a rocket trip and an excursion outside of it, opening up the possibility that prices might one day drop. Ordinary folk might be able to follow Isaacman in the same way that air travel, once the preserve of the rich, is now affordable. Space might be commercialised - and economised - to the point that many people can reach it.

And, hand on heart, if my budget ever extended to a space trip, I'd fight a grizzly for a place in the queue. I'd hand my money over, climb aboard, walk in space and... come back to Earth, I suppose. What else? There is nowhere to go in space that doesn't confine you to cramped living quarters or the inside of a space suit (that you can't unzip for a pee when you need one) and I imagine that after I'd been to space once, I'd never feel an urge to repeat the experience.

But one time trips won't stop space tourism from being phenomenally profitable. There may only be so many billionaires willing to pay a king's ransom for their single trip, but if economies can be found fast enough, cheaper space trips could be offered to millionaires next, the sub-millionaire wealthy after that, and so on. With around one billion people living in the "rich world", there are plenty of customers. And beneath the headlines, tourism isn't the only way to commercialise space, nor even the goal - Isaacman's much-publicised trip was really an early step towards something much bigger.

Just past Mars lays the asteroid belt, a ring of resource-rich rocks estimated to contain enough stuff to build 3,000 Earth-sized artificial habitats, or to be worth several million times global GDP. Every scrap of it is currently out of reach, and even with the most optimistic view of humanity's future progress, almost all of it will remain so for a very long time. But the prospect of tapping into only the tiniest slice of that wealth would make every gold, diamond, and oil rush look like lemonade stands. Making space accessible - even if only to billionaires like Isaacman - could lay the foundations for the enormous investment required to develop technologies that might lead to crewed missions beyond Mars.

And there is a philosophical battle mixed into this. The people driving space commercialisation are overwhelmingly committed to the idea of private enterprise as the engine of progress, to the idea that it is companies, not governments, who build the future. The trouble is that the vast majority of the modern era - computers, rocketry, nuclear tech, the internet, the web, and, of course, space technology - was forced into existence with government money and direction. And the lion's share of that came from the bafflingly maligned and once phenomenally effective government of the United States. It is beyond ironic that large sections of America - not least those in Silicon Valley’s space movement - have grown dismissive of Washington's ability to get big things done.

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