A business trip to space

This is the only openly invented piece in the project, and the site said so up front: Heikki Haapavaara “tells an imaginary story of Liisa Li’s trip into the space here but he will travel there himself in 2012.”

The aside is worth pausing on. Haapavaara, a journalist and chairman of the Finnish Association of Aviation Journalists, had a booking to be among the first Finns in space aboard a vehicle then being developed by EADS Astrium. That programme was shelved, and the flight did not happen. The confidence of the parenthesis is itself a document of what 2008 expected.

The story

Liisa Li checks in at the Helsinki Space and Airport on an ordinary Monday morning. She throws her bag onto a compressed-air conveyor and rides a levitation track to the north traffic terminal, slowing to a walk at her gate and trotting aboard a small 150-seat shuttle.

The detail Haapavaara chooses to make the future ordinary is that the flight is a commute. The blue-and-white vessel is almost completely full, “as is typical of a Monday morning”, and everyone aboard is going to the Station for a normal work shift. Liisa greets acquaintances, takes a window seat, locks her belt in the weightless compartment and switches on a palmtop, which shows her the week’s administrative work as plain text. She does it immediately. Beside her a man runs holographic models and appears to be a chemist.

Then she orders tea and watches the safety presentation again, because that is what you do on a route you fly often.

The shuttle waits briefly: a Finnair wide-body is departing from the gate above on an outer-space route over the Atlantic, a service whose timetable produces the crew’s standing joke, “We’ll be there before we left.” Fusion engines then push the small craft along the runway and up into the northern sky, wings and rudders folding into the fuselage as it goes, until from outside it looks less like an aircraft than a rocket.

Then weightlessness, and the one moment the story allows itself to stop being routine. “A peek out of the window. How could anyone ever get tired of this!”

Why the mundanity is the point

Almost every prediction in this project describes a machine. This one describes a Monday. Its claims are about behaviour: that orbital travel becomes commuting, that the interesting thing about weightlessness is that people stop noticing it, that safety briefings survive into the space age because passengers keep needing them.

That is a well-observed guess about how technology actually settles. The mobile phone did not stay remarkable. Neither did the jet engine.

What it gets wrong, and how

The infrastructure did not arrive. There is no Helsinki Space and Airport, no orbital station commute, no fusion-powered shuttle. Suborbital flight became a real business but a very small and very expensive one, closer to an experience purchase than to a Monday-morning service.

The office details, oddly, are the ones that dated fastest. A palmtop presenting the week’s administrative work “in 2D text” reads as a 2008 device, and the distinction between two-dimensional text and the neighbour’s holographic models is exactly the sort of contrast that stops making sense once screens become good and holography does not.

The transport gadgetry has fared unevenly. Compressed-air baggage conveyors remain unbuilt. Magnetic levitation is real, operating in commercial service in a handful of places, though not as airport people-movers.

The joke about the Atlantic

“We’ll be there before we left” is a time-zone gag, not a physics claim: a fast enough westbound flight lands at an earlier local clock time than it departed. Concorde did this routinely on London-to-New York services, arriving at a local time earlier than its London departure.

Which makes the line a piece of nostalgia rather than futurism. Haapavaara wrote it in 2008, five years after Concorde’s retirement, and gave it to a crew flying an orbital route over the same ocean.

Questions about this section