Why would you even come here?

Whenever I hear Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, instantly evoking Stanley Kubrick’s ground-breaking film 2001: A Space Odyssey, my mind travels back to the 1960s. I picture leaving the cinema awestruck after seeing this epic movie based on an Arthur C Clarke story.

I was working hard at school, with the aim of becoming an astronomer. Exploration of space was a decade old. We expected the wonders we saw in the film to be a reality by 2001. And, of course, some were. Multiple BBC TV stations born of futuristic technology made movie audiences laugh back then; BBC 2 was new in those days, but proved prescient. What about Pan Am flying in space? Who would have guessed that by 2001 Pam Am would not exist and everyday spaceflight be no nearer?

Two decades after seeing 2001, I was in Australia where I met a real astronaut heading for Mars. It has been nearly 30 years since he told me about his coming mission – and yet, in