Do you agree with Clarkson? Is space travel worth another World War Three? Have your say in the box at the bottom of the page?

Thirty years ago, the Voyager spacecraft were launched. Their mission was to head straight out from Earth into deep space, where they would broadcast songs by whales, messages from Jimmy Carter and directions to Earth, in the hope than an alien culture would drop by for tea and biscuits.

The little ships are doing well. Voyager 1 is around 9.6 billion miles from the sun, doing just over 38,000mph through the termination shock region between the edge of our solar system and interstellar space. Voyager 2 is way beyond Pluto, forging a path through the myriad tiny ice planets that cling precariously to the sun’s gravity. It’s all just too excellent for words, the notion that we’ve sent a message in a bottle out there and now it’s just a question of waiting for Mr Spock to land in Hyde Park.

But, unfortunately, the Voyager craft do quite a lot to undermine the whole business of space travel. You see, by the time they get to the next solar system, the next place where life might be found, Jimmy Carter will be dead, whales will be extinct, the sun will have burnt up, Earth will have been sucked into a black hole the size of a grapefruit, and anyone dropping by for some cucumber sandwiches is going to be pretty cross they made the journey for nothing.

What’s more, the Voyagers demonstrate clearly that we’re never ever going to be whizzing around space seeking out new life and new civilisation, because it’s all just too far away. Think about it. If we’d put a 20-year-old man on Voyager, he’d now be 50 and he’d still be in our own solar system. By the time he reached our next-door neighbours, he’d be about 6 thousand million billion. Or, to put it another way, dead.

What’s to be done, then? Do we just give up? Do we just say: “Oh well, the world’s big enough for our purposes and, all things considered, it’s fairly cosy. So let’s build a shopping mall at Cape Canaveral, turn Baikonur into a museum and I’ll see you at the pub on Saturday”?

No. Don’t you want to go to the termination shock region? It sounds like a ride at Alton Towers but it’s better than that. It’s where the sun’s influence ends, where the solar winds drop from 1.5m miles an hour to nothing, and the bow of our solar system forges a path through the interstellar gases. Don’t you want to know what that looks like? What it sounds like? What it feels like to be standing on the prow of a solar system as it smashes through space at tens of thousands of miles an hour? I do. And I don’t think we should give up on the dream because of something trivial like the laws of physics. In the same way that 16th-century man built ships to see what was on the other side of the ocean, we must build technology to get round the problem of being too slow. We cannot pack in the idea of exploration because we can only do 38,000mph. We have to find a way of proving Einstein wrong. We have to peel away our Gatso mindset, our obsession with avoiding risk, and build a machine that will take us up to and beyond the speed of light.

We’ve explored our own world. We’ve been to the top of it (well, I have) and the bottom. We’ve climbed the highest mountains, explored the harshest deserts and plumbed the deepest oceans. And now it’s time to quench our thirst for knowledge by moving on. By which I mean up.

I should explain at this point that I’m a space nut. When I see photographs of gas clouds taken by the Hubble telescope, they are, to me, like pictures of faraway beaches in travel brochures. They are an invitation to come and see for myself. When I lie on a tropical beach on a clear night, the hairs on the back of my neck rise as I grapple with the concept of infinity, the idea that somewhere out there is another Jeremy Clarkson lying on a tropical beach on a planet exactly like Earth, thinking exactly the same thing at exactly the same time.

And that it’s a mathematical certainty that there’s another Earth, exactly like ours except that Wales is the shape of a sperm. And another that is exactly the same except that their Fiona Bruce has yellow hair. Every possible permutation of our world must be out there, and that’s before you get to every possible permutation of every other imaginable world.

Are we alone in the universe? Of course not. Not if it’s infinite. And we’re not going to find out whether it is by going to the pub and getting all excited because our mobile phone has a new ring tone. Sadly, that is precisely what we are doing. You may think, as you look at the satellites whizzing hither and thither in the night sky, that much is being done behind our backs. Well, sorry to disappoint you but while there are hundreds of thousands of pieces of space junk in orbit round the world, there are only 800 active satellites, and most are boring. Sixty-six per cent were put there so you can speak to your kids during their gap-year in Belize. Seven per cent sit there helping you find a street in Reading. Six per cent are used for military espionage, 5% for predicting weather, and a similar number waste their time looking at polar bears and melting ice. In total, 760 are pointed at Earth. Just 40 are for looking outwards. At the rest of the universe.

So what of the International Space Station?

Well, so far as I can tell, it’s nothing more than a ramshackle garage where astronauts spend their days fixing bits of equipment that have gone wrong. What’s it for? I’m afraid I haven’t a clue. Hubble? Brilliant pictures. Glad it’s there, but when all is said and done it’s just a big Nikon.

All we ever hear about space now are a few hopefuls claiming that they’ll soon be running tourist flights to the cosmos. Richard Branson said in 2004 he’d be taking paying customers for a God’s-eye view of the planet in their jeans and T-shirts by 2007. But he isn’t, yet. The first attempt to put a cheap and reusable spacecraft into orbit was aborted after the pilot heard a long bang. The second nearly came to grief when the plane that is used to take the craft up to 47,000ft went into a dangerous spin after separation.

Space has stalled. And to get it going again, I’m afraid we need a war. War has always been good for humankind. Obviously, it’s not so great when you’re on the battlefield with a big leak in your torso and an arrow in your eye, but, truth be told, battlefields have very little to do with the eventual outcome of the conflict. That’s rarely decided by the soldiers and the generals. It’s decided by the tools they’re given. Charging a machinegun nest advances you and your men 3ft while, back at home, scientists are advancing the whole world by 300 years.

The world’s first electronic computer was built at Bletchley Park not so some spotty youth could spend his afternoon shooting his mates in the face but to crack German codes. Jet planes were built not so you could go to Tenerife but because Germany needed a faster fighter. Radar was developed not so you could land more safely at Heathrow but because we needed to find

U-boat periscopes in the middle of the Atlantic. Almost everything we take for granted today came from war. And the war that gave us more than anything else was the 50-year standoff between Russia and America.

When Russia launched Sputnik 50 years ago, it was nothing more than a small radio, but the beeps it transmitted, when translated, told the listening world: “This is Russia and we’d like you all to know that our German scientists are a hell of a lot better than America’s German scientists.” Or, in English: “You’re going home in a f***ing ambulance.”

Duly insulted, America set up Nasa, found billions to finance it, and embarked on a programme that would prove the Russians, er, right. Having been the first to orbit the world, they became the first to put a dog up there, and then a man. They were also the first to the moon (no, really) and the first to Venus.

The space race became what really ought to have been known as “the ego war”. And it was brilliant. Because unlike in other wars, casualties were restricted to just 22 astronauts and 70 ground personnel, and the benefits to the rest of us were immense. As America’s German boffins struggled to outdo Russia’s German boffins, we got golf clubs made from metal that can remember what sort of shape it’s supposed to be. And people with heart defects got a small vascular pump based on the fuel pumps used in the shuttle. We got the ability to track hurricanes, we got satellite navigation, we got live football matches played on the other side of the world, we got scratch-resistant lenses in our sunglasses, we got solar panels and flat-screen televisions. When a doctor takes your blood pressure, he uses a system devised by Nasa for monitoring the heart rate of its first man in space, Alan Shepard.

The cold war and the space race that resulted were fantastic. It was the greatest lurch forward since Victorian England decided that it could use coal to get itself an empire.

And then the Russians decided to give up, so now it’s all gone wrong. Nasa’s astronauts have stopped pushing the outside of the envelope and keep busy instead by getting drunk and trying to murder one another. Space is run by the infernal health-and-safety industry, which won’t let a brave young test pilot go up there if there’s even the slightest concern that he might not come back again. Space exploration is for the benefit only of shareholders, and programmes are run and operated by the lowest bidders.

As a result, the magic of space exploration has gone. Instead of getting up at 3am to watch a fuzzy man bouncing around a sound stage in Nevada, we turn over and go back to sleep. We look today at the space shuttle and think of it as an ugly and outdated lorry that blows up when it takes off and disintegrates when it comes back again. I don’t. I see a machine that generates 37m horsepower but produces nothing from its exhausts except water. I see a fabulous creation that lights up the night sky with its power and is doing 120mph by the time its tail has cleared the launch tower and 17,500mph by the time it’s cleared the atmosphere. I see a machine that could get from Florida to Spain via space in 20 minutes, and can deal with the furnace of re-entry. A furnace that burns three times hotter than the surface of the sun. And best of all, I see a machine that glides back to Earth with no power, somehow kissing the runway at exactly 211mph.

And I always think to myself: that’s brilliant. But where would we be if Russia and America were still at one another’s throats? The termination shock region, probably, where, who knows, they might have come back with a cure for the common cold, an easy-to-wire plug and iPod earpieces that don’t get all tangled up.

I listened three years ago to George Bush’s vision for our future in space, and I have to say that it made a deal more sense than his vision for our future down here on Earth. He talked of building a new long-distance space exploration vehicle to replace the shuttle, which will be retired in 2010. He spoke of establishing a permanent manned base on the moon from where all deep-space missions could be launched. And it wasn’t like he’d been watching Star Trek the night before either, because he reasoned that moon launches would not have to overcome as much gravity as they do on Earth. He even revealed that the moon’s “soil”, as he put it, contained elements that could power rockets and even be used to manufacture breathable air. “We do not know where this journey will end,” he said, “yet we know this: human beings are headed into the cosmos.”

There was much cheering and whooping from the audience when he made these remarks, but none from me. Watching an idiotic president promising a bunch of space geeks that they’d have a moon base and ray guns and warp speed to the Andromeda system was all very well, but without impetus it was never going to happen. That’s why I’m delighted to see Russian bombers back in Nato airspace and radioactive poison all over the restaurant tables in London. And it’s why I’m delighted to note that Russia, buoyed by its new wealth and power, has announced plans to build a moon base for missions to Mars.

It means we can go back to the good old days. It means we can go to the stars.

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