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ONLY the shallows of space are open to visitors. We’ll never be able to reach
the neighbouring stars in the Milky Way before we die. So why bother pouring
money into what is essentially a day trip when we could spend less and get a lot
more by flying the mind, not the flesh, out of Earth’s gravity well? There are
practical problems in doing that as well, of course. NASA’s Stardust spacecraft,
for example, left in February 1999 to sample Comet Wild-2. In early autumn, the
engineers found themselves struggling to unfog the optics on its navigation
camera from Earth.

Mitchell Begelman has taken the next step: fly the imagination. But this is
different—he’s not a writer of wild science fiction, he is a professor of
astrophysical and planetary sciences who is based at the University of Colorado
at Boulder.

He has woven together the stuff we know about our bit of the Cosmos in Turn
Right at Orion (Perseus, $25, ISBN 073820207X), a guide for interstellar
tourists. He hits the tone perfectly: that mild persistence in telling you a bit
more than you want to know is familiar to anyone who has had holiday snapshots
and tales inflicted on them by a friend. But his descriptions of grand
episodes—my escape from a black hole, how I nearly died in a mess of
pre-planetary debris—are gripping.

Yes, I’d sign up for the mind trip. And if we could only solve that minor
detail of how to survive travelling at just under light speed, I’d be packing my
suitcase too.