The Committee to Nuke Elysium

Seafaring ships of the great age of exploration were largely wooden, and — with the aid of their human crew — self-repairing; subject to the availability of raw materials, there wasn’t much aboard a 16th or 17th century sailing ship that couldn’t be made on board. Aside from carpentry, the inhabitants of even a relatively small port could make the necessities to keep a ship at sea on a voyage of years — a smithy, a pottery, a glass-blower, weavers of sailcloth and makers of hardtack. Shipbuilding was by no means easy (it was an economic activity born on the backs of the large numbers of peasant farmers and fisherfolk it took to provide the surplus to feed the workers in the shipyards) but it wasn’t anything like the Apollo project, which sucked up the labour of a third of a million skilled engineers and technicians for a decade. The word ship therefore comes freighted with connotations of autonomy and sustainability that are inappropriate to space travel as we know it today. And one of the most perfidious, misleading, damning, unconscious associations of the word “ship” is the word “destination”.