James Millar: Space travel can be big business but it’s a dangerous debate

SNP MP Philippa Whitford does a Vulcan salute in the House of Commons, during a space debate (PA Wire)

It wasn’t the funny name, the affairs with weatherwomen and second-rate pop stars or even just being a Liberal Democrat that did for his credibility (though none of the above helped much).

It was the insistence on badgering the Government at every opportunity about asteroids.

Opik was convinced life on earth would be wiped out by a space rock.

Luckily Lembit’s political career was wiped out by the electorate in 2010 – his latest venure is stand up comedy – so he never got near the levers of power to do anything about his out of this world obsession.

Thing is, as anyone watching Professor Brian Cox on Stargazing Live last week would know, there is a real danger from meteors.

But the lesson of Lembit is that politicians confronting the final frontier are ripe for ridicule.

So it was brave of the SNP to schedule a debate on space last week. It was however timely given the good news story of UK astronaut Tim Peake’s spacewalk and the bad news story of David Bowie’s death.

Bowie never actually seems to have professed any actual interest in astronomy, only writing songs about being a spaceman and pretending to be an alien – possibly informed more by pharmaceuticals than physics – but that was enough to see him quoted extensively during the debate.

And it gave Bob Stewart the opportunity to claim his Beckenham constituency is the coolest in the country because it’s where Bowie lived and performed, a claim immediately undermined by the fact it’s elected a Tory. Cool Conservatives are as rare as extra terrestial life.

Yet a debate on space saw lots of members make pop culture references in an effort to look hip.

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Unfortunately they chose achingly uncool things to reference like Star Trek and Toy Story. Even Star Wars, currently king of the cinema box office, only got one mention.

Though the preference for Star Trek may have been down to George Takei, who played Sulu, and Captain James Kirk himself, William Shatner, tweeting their support.

The SNP trumpeted this without apparently noticing that both men are actors and had never boldly gone anywhere further than a film studio.

On a more down-to-earth note, the debate was a chance to try to publicise the UK’s space industry.

At least one enterprise in Glasgow makes components for Nasa and is pioneering satellite technology, yet these cutting edge companies are unfairly unheralded.

Inevitably, the talk of space age technology in the 19th Century surroundings of parliament lent proceedings a somewhat surreal air.

That and the weird things people kept saying.

Hartlepool’s Iain Wright made the bold claim that he’s walked on the surface of Mars.

Kilmarnock’s Alan Brown basically said that he hates space, an unusual position to take, akin to a disdain for air or a loathing of weather.

Cornwall’s Sheryll Murray talked of Goonhilly Downs, which sounded decidedly unparliamentary.

In fact it’s a space facility in her constituency, Murray was making the case for Newquay as the UK’s first spaceport.

The Government is running a contest to choose a site where spaceships can blast off from Britain.

Three of the shortlisted sites are in Scotland and while every other site had someone to make the case for it in parliament on the day it was disappointing that Campbeltown – local MP Brendan O’Hara – did not.

Talk of spaceports conjured images of the Millennium Falcon blasting off and alien immigrants.

And here MPs were completely at home. Upon seeing the most famous spaceport of them all, Mos Eisley in Star Wars, Obi Wan Kenobi said: “You’ll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.”

He could’ve been talking about Westminster.