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‘Ad Astra’, Spaceport America, and the Future of Space Travel

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An inside look at 'Ad Astra' and space travel innovations in the coming years. (Photo Credit: Ad Astra / Twitter)

New Mexico is big. When you’ve spent most of your life in cities and suburbs, you don’t realize the extent to which those environments restrict your view of them, how small they make them feel. Houses, hills, and skyscrapers create walls obstructing the fullness of a place.

In Albuquerque, New Mexico and the surrounding deserts, there are no such hills. The ground stretches for miles and doesn’t stop until it hits the mountains in the distance or the skyline. To the ignorant, it probably looks like a whole lot of nothing. Ultimately though, that’s kind of the point – you can’t launch a spaceship from the middle of a city.

So maybe I shouldn’t have been so caught off guard when I found out Spaceport America wasn’t actually in Albuquerque but, in fact, two and a half hours outside of the city in the middle of the New Mexico desert. A spaceport requires, well, a whole lot of excess space as it turns out.

For those who aren’t familiar, Spaceport America is a spaceport that serves as the (literal) launching pad for spaceship launches from companies like Virgin Galactic and Boeing. It is, for all intents and purposes, ground zero for the future of commercial space travel. Ships like Virgin Galactic’s White Knight Two have launched from its runways and there are more to come in the near future. Unfortunately I must inform y’all that space travel was not on my docket for the day.

I traveled out to Spaceport America to tour the facility, attend a panel featuring experts in the field of space travel, and maybe ride a moon buggy. It was all tied together to commemorate the upcoming home media release of Ad Astra, James Gray’s existential space crusade starring Brad Pitt. The film features depictions of densely-researched space tech and travel and I leapt at the opportunity to travel out to Spaceport and learn more about what went into the film’s creation.

Have you ever seen an astronaut in person? It’s a crazy thing. They look like normal people and talk like normal people and one of the astronauts on this panel (Leland Melvin) even has an Instagram full of pictures of his dogs just like a normal person might. Even the way they go about discussing space travel, perhaps the single most fantastical accomplishment mankind has achieved in the last century, the way an ordinary person might go about describing their day job.

But there comes a moment when you are in the presence of an astronaut where your mind hits the eject button and you step outside of your corporeal form for a second and realize that the person standing in front of you, that physical form, that has been to space. That person has done something that, by the account of experts, the human body is not designed to do: leave the planet. They have not only left the planet and seen Earth from beyond the confines of our atmosphere, but they have also come back and lived to tell the tale and in some cases gone back to space again. It is one thing to recognize that astronauts exist and another entirely to see a body ten feet from you that has left this planet and returned in one piece.

Perhaps that’s why what followed on the panel surprised me so much. Maybe it shouldn’t have – we were all there to, ultimately, talk about a movie – but I still found myself taken aback when much of the dialogue revolved around the role that science fiction has played both in the personal journeys of the men and women who have made interstellar travel their job and in the development of technology over the last hundred-plus years. One of the first observations on the panel was that visionary sci-fi author Jules Verne wrote about man traveling to the moon eons before the possibility of doing so in real life had ever been considered.

From there, the astronauts and space-tech experts (which included astronauts Leland Melvin and Ellen Ochoa, Spaceport CEO Daniel Hicks, and Ad Astra technical consultant Robert Yowell) talked about their origin stories as space travel professionals, which had similar pop cultural roots. Yowell’s beginnings came from a G.I Joe play set that came with a 45” record of astronaut John Glenn. Hicks credited The Jetsons as well as Star Trek, which was also cited by Melvin and Ochoa as a huge inspiration.

We tend to think of properties like Star Trek, and Star Wars, and the like inspiring people in conventionally creative fields. I’d be lying if I said they weren’t a major source of inspiration for me as a writer from a very young age. Perhaps because these stories deal in the fantastical, in fiction, we fail to consider the extent to which they might serve as inspirational to people who work in fields of tech, science, and engineering. As Melvin observed, “Art imitates life, but life also imitates art.”

In Ad Astra, we see a world that is technically fictional (it takes place in the undefined near future) but feels so authentic that, much like The Martian, you could easily mistake it for being inspired by a true story. That adhesion to reality is no accident, as the panel soon turned to discuss the film and whether or not some of the tech seen in it might be a reality in the near future. Ad Astra features Brad Pitt’s Roy McBride making the trip to Neptune in a matter of months. It also features commercial space flights and a fully operational Mars colony.

The panel was asked how close we are to making some of the tech featured in the film into reality. Ochea spoke up and stated that her belief was that deep-space travel, the kind that would be viable for civilian space travel, wouldn’t be possible until we moved past chemical propulsion as the primary manner of launching spacecrafts. She suggested nuclear propulsion as a possible stand-in, but there’s no certainty as to which method might work best.

An attendee then asked which technological advancements popularized by science fiction the panelists would like to see in their lifetimes. Melvin immediately brought up the teleportation technology seen in Star Trek, noting that we already more or less have the communicators seen in the show. Hicks said that he dreams of warp capability, but that may be too distant a possibility to hope for so he’s going with hyper-point travel (that being travel similar to that being developed by Elon Musk that would allow for high-speed travel from, say, New York to Hong Kong in a matter of an hour or two).

As the panel wound down, I found myself returning to something Hicks noted in response to a question, the context lost in my jet-lag addled brain: human beings are the only species on the planet that possess the ability to be awestruck. I firmly believe that the future of our species resides beyond the confines of our planet, but that’s a future I don’t see coming in my lifetime (despite our panelists insisting that it’s a great time to be excited about the future of commercial space travel). In order for that future to come, it’s imperative that we travel to the stars.

But beyond that future, I couldn’t help but think that it’s just as important for humanity to reach into the sky and try to see what the world looks like outside of our planet for that simple reason: we are able to appreciate it. We are able to be awed by it, and that privilege should not be taken lightly.

It occurred to me to take the advice myself, even if I didn’t have plans to travel to space any time soon. So on the bus ride back to our hotel, I put on a pair of headphones and a favorite album and looked out the window at the vast, endless desert that surrounded us. I took in the vastness of it all and allowed myself, for a few minutes, to appreciate the fact that I was capable of appreciating it at all.

Ad Astra is available on digital, blu-ray, 4K, and DVD now.

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