Lift off
It was a fine spring evening in New York City, and the Goldberg brothers were at an event to consider the proposition of traveling to space. They had tippled a few cocktails, their mood was convivial, and, from their posture of repose on the fifth floor of the private club Zero Bond, the notion sounded very tempting. “The idea of being able to see the world from afar is pretty interesting,” Eric Goldberg said. “I do think there is an appeal to it,” Mike agreed. “Going to space is fucking cool. I don’t want to sound obnoxious, but you can go to a lot of places on Earth—not everybody gets to go to space.”
It wasn’t just the exclusivity of spacegoing that enthralled them, though. The real allure was the possibility of transcendence. As though describing a hallucinogenic trip, the terms used by explorers and astronauts to recount reaching the limits of the atmosphere depict something like experiencing the sublime. “I floated out of my seat and over to the window, and there was the coast of Africa coming up over the horizon,” the former astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman told me by phone a few weeks after the Zero Bond event. “I saw the curvature of the Earth and the thin blue line of the atmosphere. You’re looking back at Earth from an environment that doesn’t support any life. That’s when I really started to appreciate how wonderful Earth is.”
What Hoffman described is what has been called the Overview Effect, a phenomenon chronicled by astronauts to describe a sudden
