Expensive intergalactic toys!

A spaceship is designed to travel in space and may be launched from Earth by a launch vehicle. It may carry a payload to accomplish a mission with or without people and return to Earth.

A spaceship can be of nearly any construction, shape or purpose. Depending on the type of game, spaceships can be the central quest hub for players or just function as a classy way to get around. Space Simulation games go a step further and make the ship the central part of the game play experience.

It was the first rocket-powered test flight of Richard Branson’s SpaceShipTwo, a snazzy-looking thing designed to take (rich) tourists on quick trips to space to float around in zero gravity and see our planet as a ball.

Sweet, I thought, and went back to reading Ringworld.

Ringworld is a classic sci-fi novel set in 2850. Two humans and two aliens travel light years in days to explore an artificial world shaped like a ring around a sun, with the habitable surface area of 3 million earths.

I made it a couple sentences before the contrast hit.

I know better than to compare science fiction to reality — honest. Just appreciate the progress, I tell myself. Enjoy the story. But the gap is too wide and the possibilities too exciting not to stop every now and then and ruminate. It’s not sadness that I feel. It’s not even frustration.