Why is space tourism a waste?

As one of the richest people on earth, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos recently entered the earth’s suborbital space. He thus became the second billionaire to make such a trip in July 2021. Previously, on July 12, British Richard Branson took a one-hour space journey on Virgin Galactic’s “VSS Unity” space plane. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk will also fly into space on Branson’s Virgin Galactic space plane. In the past year, the title of the world's richest man has changed hands several times between Musk and Bezos.

If these billionaires get their way, there will be more space flights like this in the future. Virgin Galactic said it has received $80 million in advance payments and that all proceeds from sales will be used for future flights. Bezos, Branson and Musk, these three billionaires are working hard to make "space tourism" a reality, but on the other hand, this also imposes huge costs on other people on earth.

For the super-rich, as they spend a few minutes experiencing weightlessness and overlooking the Earth's curved surface, humanity's carbon pollution bill grows larger and larger. It also reflects the growing unsustainable inequality and concentration of power that, combined with the impacts of the climate crisis, will ultimately lead to the suffering of billions of people. So this is nothing to celebrate.

Neither Bezos nor Branson seem particularly concerned about the impact of space flight on the environment. But that's exactly the problem. The initial impact of a single space tourism flight on the climate may be relatively small, but these effects will accumulate over time. Every flight was a sign of worse things to come.

In fact, the impact of these flights could be significant, in part because space planes emit pollutants directly into the stratosphere. Research shows that these pollutants deplete the ozone layer that protects us from harmful UV rays. The world has been trying to restore the ozone layer for the past few decades (Blue Origin claims that their spacecraft will have a minimal impact on the ozone layer).

In addition, we also need to worry about greenhouse gas emissions. Branson's VSS Unity space shuttle uses a mixture of nitrous oxide and hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene (HTPB) as fuel. HTPB is made from butadiene, a byproduct of cracking oil or natural gas with steam to convert it into ethylene. Producing butadiene is a polluting process that releases toxic and greenhouse gases.

Bezos’ New Shepard rocket, built by his company Blue Origin, is fueled by a combination of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. While neither emits carbon when burned, the process of producing liquid hydrogen typically does. The compression and liquefaction of oxygen is also an energy-intensive process that can also lead to carbon pollution if renewable energy is not used.

Refining and burning these fuels is not simply equivalent to burning gasoline in a car, or even necessarily to using aircraft fuel to fly across the ocean.

“Virgin Galactic’s space plane carried six passengers to an altitude of 53 miles (85.3 kilometers), and from information provided by Virgin Galactic, we can estimate that passengers emit approximately "We need more research to understand the full impact of these flights on the climate," said Peter Kalmus, a climatologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. >

These space flights will undoubtedly increase the carbon footprint of people like Bezos and Branson. Of course, given their ongoing habits, such as regularly flying private jets, their carbon footprint is already staggering (one private jet trip emits nearly twice as much carbon as the average American emits in a year). But despite the dissatisfaction of many, not many space planes are currently in the air, so their overall impact on the environment is not that great.

Nikolaus Learpoulos, a doctoral student engaged in sustainability research at the University of Tokyo, Japan, said when talking about the impact of space travel on the environment: "The contemporary push for suborbital and orbital space tourism So far, space tourism using vehicles to travel to and from orbit has had limited impact on society and the environment.

However, the likes of Branson, Bezos, and Musk hope to change that in the near future. Branson’s Virgin Atlantic wants to “open space to everyone.” Bezos’ Blue Origin wants to “increase access to space.” Musk's SpaceX company goes one step further, claiming to "make humans a multi-planetary species."

At first glance, these companies may sound like they are for the masses, but their price tags suggest otherwise. For example, an unnamed person recently paid $28 million to be a passenger on Bezos' space trip (later due to scheduling conflicts, the 18-year-old son of an investment company CEO was take over this position).

It is also reported that Virgin Galactic’s future flight prices will be between US$200,000 and US$250,000.

In fact, the rich already bear an unshirkable responsibility for disproportionate carbon emissions. One percent of the world's population is responsible for half of the world's commercial flight emissions, and that doesn't even count the elite few who can fly private jets.

Claire Lakewood, senior legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity, a non-profit organization, said: "For the airline industry, in terms of passenger numbers, private jets are fuller than economy class. A regular plane would be much worse, since a private jet with fewer passengers would cause something orders of magnitude worse to happen, degrading the carbon footprint of those who already have the largest carbon footprints. The footprint is getting bigger."

Globally, the average person in the richest 1% already contributes 175 times more greenhouse gas pollution than the poorest 10%. . If space tourism develops, these disparities may become even more severe.

Of course, there can be good reasons for developing space travel. Without the development of space exploration, there would be no satellites to help us track severe weather and climate change. Understanding other planets is also important, not just for the sake of understanding the planets themselves, but because they help us understand our home planet. Observing Venus and Mars, for example, can help scientists better understand the climate crisis on Earth. If we do not launch probes into the solar system, we will not be able to search for life beyond the earth. Space exploration can even help us understand the origins of the universe and give us a better understanding of our place in it.

However, space exploration is different from space tourism. The former has a valuable goal of understanding what lies beyond Earth's atmosphere, while the latter only serves the ultra-rich who want excitement and creates profits for the companies that provide these services. This is one of the clearest examples of rising inequality. What's more, space tourism could exacerbate the climate crisis. When the rich take selfies in space, the gap between different classes widens and the Earth's climate is affected, harming those most vulnerable to climate disasters.

Even if we could one day create truly clean fuel and use it for space tourism, it would still be unsustainable. The billionaires running these businesses will get richer, increasing the concentration of wealth and power, which is not a good thing for the planet.

So, can space tourism be the beginning of space colonization? If the climate crisis makes the Earth uninhabitable, can the development of space tourism help us find an ideal new home? Those billionaires really want us to think that. SpaceX wants to colonize Mars as a space outpost after Earth's ecosystem collapses. Bezos wants to build colonies in Earth orbit that could support billions of people. But simply put, these proposals are quite unrealistic. They probably won't achieve anything, and certainly won't create a sustainable alternative to Earth. We already have a planet capable of supporting all living systems, and if only billionaires would stop their wasteful behavior, things might change a lot.

"We will not be able to establish a sustainable large-scale human civilization on Mars anytime soon, certainly not on any time scale relevant to halting climate breakdown," Kalmus said. It’s much easier to stop climate collapse on Earth than to build a massive civilization on Mars, which doesn’t even have breathable air.”

Compare that to the International Space Station. For the past few decades, at any given time, there have been humans stationed aboard the International Space Station in low-Earth orbit. Unlike Mars, the International Space Station is a relatively protected segment of space, located firmly within the Earth's magnetic field, which makes it relatively safe from radiation produced by gamma and cosmic rays and the damaging solar wind. But in order to maintain the lives of these few people, thousands of staff are still needed to work on the earth and regularly launch spacecraft to replenish supplies for the International Space Station.

"We cannot even consider the International Space Station to be an independent system. It is protected by the Earth's magnetic field and personnel can easily travel to and from the Earth, but life there is still difficult. We cannot cut off the international space station. "The connection to the space station allows astronauts to live there without constant supplies," said Canadian geophysicist Micah MacKinnon. "The idea that we can colonize other planets is just nonsense. Earth itself is a simple model. And we can't even maintain habitable conditions here."

Some climate scientists have made it clear that if humans are to try to repair the planet's deteriorating environment, we must reshape the fabric of society. As Sarah Diamond, an assistant professor of biology at Case Western Reserve University in the United States, puts it, this will require "a profound collective shift in individual and shared values ??of nature."

This means that we cannot waste the earth's resources on meaningless things that only serve the rich. It also means that we cannot allow society as a whole to be organized in such a way that a few people can accumulate huge wealth while others cannot. suffering from economic and ecological disparities. Humanity should be focusing all of its efforts on ensuring a livable future on this planet, rather than celebrating the flashy indulgences of billionaires on the fringes of space.

(Ninten)