Did you see that thing a few weeks ago—when a rocket that had just launched a payload into orbit came back down, and, firing its thrusters from four sides to brake, made a controlled, upright landing on a barge in the middle of the ocean? Rockets blasting into space and then coming back to land upright—anywhere on a planet. That’s old-school, 1950s science fiction stuff—except it finally just happened for real. The rocket was made by SpaceX, one of the companies started by Elon Musk, the South African immigrant who’s also behind the Tesla electric car as well as the power company Solar City (no wonder some call him the real-life Tony Stark).

Just as fantastic was the payload that rocket carried—an inflatable module that’s going to be attached to a docking port of the International Space Station for an extended test. The module is made of a Kevlar-like material, and there’s every reason to believe it will be as airtight and resistant to micrometeoroids as the metal used to make traditional space habitats. The module is made by Bigelow Aerospace, founded by the Las Vegas-residing, UFO-believing Robert Bigelow, who made his fortune with the hotel chain Budget Suites of America, but whose dream it’s always been to develop places to stay in space—hence the inflatable modules, which would allow space stations to be assembled in months rather than years.

The point here is that both of these wild visions—rockets that land upright, space stations that inflate—made it through the bureaucracy and safety audits of NASA, were judged serious, and are now becoming an official part of our space program. And this brings us to a manga we’re very proud to release this week, vol. 2 of the Planetes omnibus, by Makoto Yukimura (creator of Vinland Saga). The work of companies like SpaceX and Bigelow (and I haven’t even mentioned Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s rocket project, Blue Origin) are at last bringing us closer to the dream of ordinary people being able to live in, work in, and visit space. Planetes, with its working-class astronaut characters, looks at where we might be in another three generations. It gets its science and engineering right, but Yukimura always remembers that humans in space means human beings in space—just as we don’t lose our dreams, we will also not lose our fears and weaknesses, nor solve all our problems, as we gradually make our way towards the stars. But there wouldn’t be any point in sending people otherwise.

—Carl Horn

Manga Editor