Will Space Tourism Really Change Anything or Simply Be the Ultimate Thrill Ride?
Millionaut Richard Garriott (lower left) aboard the International Space Station.
There’s always been an intriguing question about the perpetually two-years-in-the-future era of mass space tourism:
Will it create a new generation of the super wealthy who, having viewed the world from above and seen no borders, will dedicate their lives and fortunes to forging peace and saving the Earth from the environmental catastrophes it faces?
-OR-
Will they simply want to spend another small fortune to go back like….immediately?
The answer will be key in determining whether space tourism will be a transformational experience its boosters claim or something else entirely.
The first outcome is an article of faith among some within the NewSpace community. Richard Branson and his crew over at Virgin Galactic like to point to this future as a key benefit for humanity of literally burning rubber to send tourists on $200,000 joy rides into near space.
It’s a wonderful vision, suggesting a growing community of hundreds and then thousands of wealthy people who will suddenly become the world’s most enthusiastic environmentalists and put their money where their heart are. Perhaps even green projects like the ones that Branson funds.
However, evidence to date points to another possible outcome. Just ask millionaut Gregory Olsen:
“I’d go in a heartbeat,” Olsen said of a second space visit. Of particular interest would be an orbital trip around the moon on a Soyuz spacecraft. No space tourist has yet traveled beyond low-Earth orbit, but Space Adventures is working on offering such an excursion.
“I just have to sell another company” to afford the trip, Olsen said. And private space travel to orbit may be getting more expensive…
If Olsen does manage to make it back to orbit, Olsen won’t be the first repeat customer for Space Adventures. The fifth-ever space tourist, American billionaire Charles Simonyi, revisited the space station on a second mission in March 2009, two years after his first flight. Both trips were booked through Space Adventures.
Simonyi paid $35 million for his second space tourist trek. His first trip in 2007 cost about $25 million.
Ah, yes. What Branson and every other space tourism operator needs: repeat customers who will bring all their rich friends along with them. Which is great for space tourism. It’s perhaps not so great for funding green projects, although it doesn’t rule out people shifting their other investments toward those areas. Or supporting green public policies.
One aspect to consider is that we have barely begun to scratch the surface in terms of commercial space. There will eventually be space hotels and resorts on the moon. All that will require massive amounts of private investments for decades that may well come from early space tourists.
Again, great for space development. But, where does it leave the whole let’s save the Earth by sending rich people into space argument? Will the law of unintended consequences prevail?
Perhaps. We shall see.
4 responses to “Will Space Tourism Really Change Anything or Simply Be the Ultimate Thrill Ride?”
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I’ll tell you where it will leave that, it would inspire people to perhaps start building on the moon, perhaps eventually people would start farming in large orbital farms meaning more land would be open to nature on Earth and possibly may be a catalyst for people moving off-earth and thus bringing the population down. Let’s not forget if factories get built off-world pollution would drop dramatically killing the main problems ruining this planet.
Space tourism will change everything especially if a Space Lotto system is started to give average Janes and Joes a chance to travel into space.
I make my living in the travel and tourism industry, and my parents (and later, some of their children) made their living in teaching skills that were mostly related to recreation and entertainment. Call me frivolous, perhaps, but my attitude is: if it’s just fun, so what? Doing and selling things that are just fun might be half of any modern economy. It would be 99% of what people do and sell in the economy of anything I’d call Utopia.
There’s nothing inherently ignoble about making people a little bit happier, for a little while. Doing that is mostly at 90 degree angles to environmental and social problems on Earth — there’s hardly any major category of tourism that would disappear if it had to be done in a more environmentally or socially sound manner. To the extent that commercial human space travel spurs innovation and commerce and relieves some rich people of some of their money, that’s more money available to solve problems on Earth (albeit less directly, through added tax revenues to governments.) Do well-intentioned rich people really spend their save-the-world budget more effectively than governments and institutional charities and foundations? For all we know, the most efficient way to siphon off their wealth to pay for saving the world for the rest of us is getting the rich *addicted* to space travel.
If the rich get a powerful Overview Effect, that would be great, I’d love it. But I suspect we got about 90% of all the global Overview Effect we’ll ever get just from having excellent color photographs of the Earth. After all, when you look at the potential influence that astronauts *could* have had (over and above what they already *do* have), well … at this point, about 99% of all the people who’ve been to orbit could already have changed the world with their mind-blowing revelation that We’re All One, We’re on Spaceship Earth, I See No National Boundaries from Orbit, etc., etc. If a tiny minority of high-profile individuals (astronauts) haven’t already evangelically transformed our perspectives and institutions, what’s the likelihood that a tiny minority of a tiny minority (those few rich people who will choose to go to space) will have much greater impact, even if that fraction of a fraction grows to dwarf the numbers of astronauts we’ve had in government space programs?
Incrementally, over decades, maybe there’s something socially transformative in all this. For the time being, why not just let it be fun? (And job-creating, don’t forget.)
Having fun is some serious business! The tourism industry, world wide, is a $950 billion a year business.