To Alfred, Lord Tennyson

“Let us alone” – begged the Ithacan sailors, with lips numbed down from eating lotos fruit.“Is there any peace / In ever climbing up the climbing wave?” They sailed, they fought, and then, they went no further. They were the stuff of odes, but chose to be no more. They would retreat from greatness, be idle, and forget.

Three thousand years on, embarked upon a space Odyssey, crammed not into Trojan horses but into space pods, sailing not in Athena’s name but in Apollo’s, the sailors of the new ocean were brought – against their will – onto the same land of the lotos eaters. Clio, the muse of history, has a potent spell: those who forget their past, shall live it once again.“We will not wander more” – the powers that be decreed. With “half-shut eyes”, the heroes of the space Odyssey were made to fall “asleep in a half-dream”, flying in circles with half-broken wings. Narrates not Homer, but Charles Krauthammer:
“Ours was the generation that first escaped gravity, walked on the Moon, visited Saturn – and then, overtaken by an inexplicable lassitude and narrowness of vision, turned cathedrals of flight into wind tunnels”.

It all seems lost. Yet Tennyson, and Homer, and the Gods, are merciful It takes a Ulysses to cut the roots that keeps one bound to land. “I cannot rest from travel” – says the king. “How dull it is to pause, to make an end”. How dull it is to sail, or fly no more: “Tis not too late to seek a newer world”. ‘Tis not too late to break the lotos spell. “My purpose holds / To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths / Of all the western stars”. Ulysses’ quest, beyond the gulfs of earth-bound seas, is, too, a quest for knowledge. And here, Tennyson foresees not only heaven-bound ships, but, even more. “To follow knowledge, like a sinking star / beyond the utmost bound of human thought”. Ulysses’ launch into the boundless space is, too, a launch towards the verge of the Singularity.

And what would lie near the edge of the “utmost bound of human thought”? Explains Lord Tennyson, having “dipt into the future, far as human eye could see” and having witnessed “the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be”. Ulysses’ wanderings carry his crew from Homeric past into the future, when one can see “ the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails”, and “Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales” – in other words, air and space commerce and industry.

These two activities – trade and manufacture – go together under the name of entrepreneurship. Indeed, the concept of using a “mothership” like White Knight to get to orbit in two stages is a perfect metaphor for space entrepreneurship – as the “first stage” of launch without which one cannot reach escape velocity. And other terms used to describe industry in Tennyson’s day remain powerful today: The “costly bales” carried by the spaceships of tomorrow may be priceless passengers on the ride of a lifetime—or on their way to destinations “beyond the sunset.” They may be guided through the strata of the atmosphere and beyond by “pilots of the purple twilight,” but ultimately are made possible by the “captains of industry,” like Richard Branson and Elon Musk.