I’ve admitted on here before many times that I’m a huge fan of Star Trek First Contact. Ever since it came out in 1996, it has been my favourite Star Trek film. I find much of the writing and acting in it brilliant. Yet, lying in bed last night thinking about it, it struck me that you have to admit that the whole premise of First Contact is rather silly. It’s a film in which a lone maverick inventor – who just happens to be from Montana – manages to build his own rocket, launch it into space, then somehow fly faster than the speed of light before returning safely to Montana. He does this all with the help of just a single assistant, and we do not see any of the detail about how he designed or constructed his spacecraft, or how he got back safely to Earth.

Yesterday, of course, NASA had to call off / postpone the launch of the first Artemis flight due to technical issues. I had been looking forward to writing something on here about it; about how incredibly exciting it was to watch, and how it marked the dawn of a brilliant new period of space exploration. Yet technical problems are technical problems, and the guys at NASA quite rightly won’t go ahead until they are sure everything is safe. Hopefully we’ll watch the launch later this week, yet it rather puts my favourite science fiction film into context: thousands of people from all over the world have worked on Artemis; it has taken years to get to this stage. The spacecraft is one of the most complex systems they have ever constructed; and it’s only an initial trial run, before we get anywhere near putting boots back on the moon. The idea of a lone maverick inventor coming anywhere close to achieving something similar suddenly seems rather absurd.

Of course, fiction is fiction, so we shouldn’t read too much into it. First Contact is essentially just a fantasy story, at the end of the day. Lying in bed last night though, thinking about what had happened at NASA and how much work they had apparently had to put into creating their new rocket, it just suddenly struck me how silly such films are. Science fiction films such as those in the Star Trek franchise have a tendency to gloss over reality sometimes, and to make things look far easier than they actually would be.I suppose events like yesterday make that all the more clear.