STAR SAILORS

At the end of July Jeff Bezos, the second richest man in the world, will achieve another second, following Richard Branson into orbit in a billionaire space race. Bezos’s announcement prompted a satirical global petition asking him to stay there. If the history of human space exploration ends there, it would be a bathetic endpiece to a remarkable story that began with Nazi weaponry and has encompassed arguably the greatest achievement to date of human civilisation.

It is nearly 50 years since people last walked on the moon – the moon! – in an age with no internet or smartphones, driven there in tin cans at unimaginable speeds by controlled explosions. Boosters