Writing my talk for Improving Reality, the Brighton (UK) event I’m speaking at on September 6.

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And I’m looking at this phrase I noted down Saturday night.  “Vintage space.”  Or “vintage space travel,” in a clearer but less economical (or, somehow, pretty/doomy) turn.

Google tells me it’s not a new term.  First hit was Amy Shira Teitel’s blog.

It is, to me, an incredibly grim term, one I wish I’d had to hand when I wrote the foreword to ORBITER.

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Saturday night, of course, Neil Armstrong died. Soon – it is horrible to note – Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins will be gone, too, and the last of the vast team that put them on the Moon with 1969 technology.  A period that recently entered the realm of “antique.”  Hell, I think a car from 1975 now counts as vintage. In a few more generations, the likes of me will be gone, too, and there will be no-one on Earth who remembers what it’s like to have lived in a time when humans walked on the Moon.

Vintage space.  I’ll be damned.