Happy Nice Mall

Okay, so it’s a new era – but what does that mean? Do these raids represent a future where even the average person can book a celestial flight and enjoy the splendor of Earth from above? Or is this just another way for the ultra-rich to squander their cash while simultaneously ignoring our existential problems and making them worse? Nearly all these 2021 escapees were the result of the efforts of three billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson. Branson is just a single-digit billionaire, while Bezos and Musk have fortunes measured in the hundreds of billions.

“The drastically unnecessary impact of wealth in this country — it seems to me, is at the heart of my problems with space tourism,” says Linda Billings, a communications researcher who advises NASA and writes more about the societal effects of space flight. more than 30 years. “We are a long way from making this available to your so-called average person.”

Each point on Virgin’s suborbital spaceplane, currently the cheapest way to reach space, will set someone back $450,000. A single seat in Blue Origin’s first suborbital launch sold for $28 million at auction, and the undisclosed price tag for SpaceX’s entire civilian Inspiration4 mission, which spent three days in orbit before splashing out on the Florida coast, is estimated at $50 million. per passenger.

Not only are these types of flights ridiculously out of financial reach for the average person, but they don’t achieve any real goals—far from ideal given our problems of terrestrial inequality, environmental collapse, and a global pandemic, Billings said. “We don’t really learn anything,” he says. “The people involved in these space tourism missions don’t seem to have a lot of thought or conscience.”

Laura Forczyk, owner of space consulting firm Astralytical, thinks it’s wrong to focus strictly on the money aspect. “Story [last year] “They were billionaires in space, but so much more than that,” says Forczyk, who wrote the book. Being ExtraterrestrialPublished in January, where she interviews both government and private astronauts about why they go to space.

Forczyk sees flights as great opportunities to conduct scientific experiments. All three commercial tourism companies have conducted research projects in the past, studying things like fluid dynamics, plant genetics and the human body’s response to microgravity. And yes, the wealthy are the target audience, but SpaceX’s passengers of Inspiration4 include artist and scientist Sian Proctor and data engineer Chris Sembroski, who won their tickets through competitions, as well as St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Hayley Arceneaux (trip). helped raise $200 million for the hospital). Blue Origin gave free trips to aviation pioneer Wally Funk, who was banned from being an Apollo astronaut as a woman, and Laura, the daughter of NASA astronaut Alan Shepard.

Forczyk also mentions Anousheh Ansari, an Iranian space tourist who flew to the ISS in 2006. [the flight] It helped him see the world as connected,” says Forczyk.

Billings considers such references to be rather undervalued. “All these people are talking to the press about how great the experience was,” he says. “But listening to someone else tell you how exciting it was to climb Mount Everest doesn’t convey the real experience.”

As with hiking Everest, there is a risk of death to consider. Historically, the death rate of spaceflight has been just under 4% – about 266,000 times more than commercial aircraft. Virgin suffered two major disasters during testing, killing a total of four employees and injuring four more. “A high-profile accident will come; this is inevitable,” says Forczyk. But even that won’t end space tourism, he predicts. He states that despite the danger, people continue to climb Everest.