By The Landlord
“I looked and looked but I didn't see God …” – Yuri Gagarin
"Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. Let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it.” – Yuri Gagarin
“I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.” – Jack London
“I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.” – Elon Musk
“We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.” – Stephen Hawking
"When you're getting ready to launch into space, you're sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen.” – Sally Ride (NASA astronaut)
“When you launch in a rocket, you're not really flying that rocket. You're just sort of hanging on.” – Michael P. Anderson (Columbia space shuttle astronaut)
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.” – Douglas Adams
“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” – Blaise Pascal
“After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager.’” – William S. Burroughs
“Who are we? We live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.” – Carl Sagan
Shuddered sweating, heart-pace racing, polyrhythmic, twisting spasms.
Still immersed in peaks and chasms of the last song theme, orgasms?
No. I woke instead to find myself pinned down inside a cockpit.
With face-ache cheeks from take-off smash in the thrust-blast of a rocket.
Pain or pleasure? That's the measure of the great space mission.
On body, mind, it piles on pressure, distorting time, fact and fiction.
The fat push of the atmosphere rolls down like massive thighs,
Yet rocket pushes through, and then, just weightless, sighs.
Inside the ship I'm floating 'in a most peculiar way',
The rocket ship expanded, I join a strange new ballet,
Dancing with the stars, and not just those celestial,
But spaced out in a polka with the famous – aerospatial.
There's Borman, Lovell, Anders; Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin,
Fruit flies, Ham the chimp; Laika, and Gagarin.
Then comes a tap on the window, we spot it from above,
A man spacewalking out there, it's Voskhod's Alex Leonev.
We watch new Luna images, a big Space Station rendezvous,
Survey the solar system, including that small planet blue.
"Will we make it back alive?" I ask, as I throw a ball
Which Laika catches upside down though barely has to move at all.
Laika. No return postage
We choose to play some games as well as do some science,
It's cold and lonely here, and needs much self-reliance.
We do a sort of steeple chase – our version of the space race,
But it's like treading into treacle, so slow is the pace.
Then I explore the ship which morphs to different shapes,
Time and space distorts, and round and round I traipse.
Is this now the Soyez, or the Salyut? The signs I cannot follow.
Sputnik, Mir or Voyager? Artemis? Apollo?
And then things get far stranger. Was I frozen for this trip?
I wake up feeling hungry. After, what? A century's kip?
Robots all surround me, and then I'm in some shock,
Grinning on the bridge is Kirk, and standing there is Spock.
The crew of the Star Trek USS Enterprise: There may be Tribbles ahead …
Uhura, Scotty, Sulu. That crew brings much surprise.
Am I now onboard the US Starship Enterprise?
No time for Flash G. jokes now on how trips to Venus
Might also pass Uranus as well as rhymes with penis,
Things are getting serious, this is no dream in bed,
There's klingons on the starboard bow and Tribbles are ahead.
We encounter aliens shaped like massive pylons,
Their spaceships are much faster, oh god, they are the cylons!
Warp speed, captain? Useless. Our spaceship takes a bashing,
It's Battlestar Galactica. Now we're critically crashing.
Pushed like poo through a wormhole, we're seeking a new planet.
The last one we fucked up. How stupid were we? Dammit.
You can't cheat time or space, it's costly and unhealthy,
Interstellar's one fine thing, but space is for the wealthy.
I wake up in a cold sweat, utter a silent scream,
Hear chimes of the spheres, and shades of Tangerine Dream.
But now it's time to put a soundtrack to all sorts of space flight,
Journeys strange and beautiful, in darkness or through light,
Joy, and fright, and wonder, a constellation pie,
On rocket ship trips, real or fiction, let imagination fly.
The computer says no. Space Odyssey’s Discovery
So then, it’s time to take off with your own nominations, judged by this week’s guest Space Lord, the supreme Shiv Sidecar! Place your space flight songs in comments below for the final destination in time and space at 11pm UK time on Monday for playlists published next week. Click on those buttons. The pleasure is all ours.
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