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INTRODUCTION

Welcome to Space.

As your eyes calmly flit from word to word on this page, the planet on which I presume you live is spinning on its axis at a speed of approximately 1,000 miles per hour, while racing around the Sun at 18.5 miles per second. At the same time, our solar system is also on the move, and not sluggishly either, hurtling around our galaxy, the Milky Way, at 140 miles per second. And do not think for one of those seconds that the Milky Way is stationary: it, too, is restless, racing towards the Andromeda Galaxy at 70 miles per second, the two destined to one day collide and cause humankind (if humankind has somehow managed to survive the mess we find ourselves in) all manner of problems. Put bluntly, we are part of something unimaginably huge, and all of it is moving at speed.

With that in mind, the small but perfectly formed book in your hands may feel incredibly quaint. And yet, in a way it is vast. Letters of Note: Space is a collection of thirty letters on a subject grander than us all: letters written by astronauts, cosmonauts, astronomers, engineers, politicians, parents and children. They are letters of hope, awe, warning, complaint, remorse and fear. You will read a letter from a proud father to a space-bound son on the eve of his journey, and a farewell letter from a cosmonaut to his wife and daughters to be read should he never return from space. Particularly moving is a hopeful letter from an African-American girl desperate to reach the stars and the letter from a highly qualified pilot to the US President in which she pleads for the chance to join her male counterparts high above Earth.

As well as leaving me feeling minuscule, physically, researching this book also revealed my ignorance on many matters pertaining to space. I had no idea, for example, that Pluto was half the width of the United States, or that NASA employees so carefully considered the first words to be uttered by Neil Armstrong as he stepped onto the Moon. I was certainly unaware that the man who gifted us with the telephone believed so firmly that Mars was populated by extraterrestrials.

What did not surprise me, however, was that so many people have written fascinating letters about a place visited by so few of us. A destination so close yet so incredibly far. One can only imagine – and most of us have – what it must feel like to make the journey.

In 1997, twenty-eight years after walking on the Moon, Buzz Aldrin wrote the following to a professor about the experience:

‘Someday in the future as people are mulling over their vacation plans, I hope they’ll choose to fly into space. It’s the trip of a lifetime.’

I hope so too.

Shaun Usher

2020