Space tourism is emerging as the latest luxury for the ultra-wealthy, positioning space as the final frontier not just for exploration, but for an exclusive form of leisure. Companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic have ignited public interest by promising the experience of space travel to those who can afford the astronomical price tags. For many, this marks a new chapter in humanity’s relationship with the cosmos—a chance to venture beyond Earth’s atmosphere and experience the wonder of space firsthand. Yet, this pursuit raises serious ethical and environmental questions, particularly in the context of the ongoing climate crisis.
Critics argue that space tourism, while technologically impressive, is emblematic of the increasing gap between the super-rich and the rest of society. As billionaires spend vast sums of money to become “billionauts,” their actions highlight a stark contrast to the struggles faced by billions of people dealing with the consequences of climate change on Earth. The resources allocated to these ventures—both financial and material—could arguably be better spent addressing urgent global issues such as reducing carbon emissions, conserving biodiversity, and promoting sustainable development. The notion of searching for a “Planet B” while our own planet faces environmental degradation can seem out of touch with the immediate needs of humanity.
Moreover, space tourism itself is not without environmental impact. The rockets used for these flights generate significant carbon emissions, contributing to the very problem that threatens the habitability of our planet. As the world grapples with the imperative to reduce greenhouse gases, the idea of expanding human activity to space for recreational purposes raises questions about the responsibility of such endeavors. Should we prioritize the exploration of other worlds when our own is in such dire need of care and restoration? The excitement of space tourism must be weighed against the broader ethical considerations and the urgent need to focus our collective resources on preserving and sustaining life on Earth.
Tech billionaire and pioneering space tourist Jared Isaacman is back and he is on a mission to boldly go where no tycoon has gone before. After commanding the first all-civilian space flight in 2021, Isaacman will soon take off on the even more daring Polaris Dawn mission which will enable its crew to venture further into space than any private citizens have travelled before and the furthest for any human in half a century.
Polaris Dawn will orbit in the hazardous Van Allen radiation belt. With a view to pushing the boundaries of commercial space flight, Isaacman and a colleague will embark on a spacewalk without an airlock, exposing all four crew members and the capsule to the radiation and void of space. The spacewalkers will be wearing spacesuits that lack a Primary Life Support System, relying for oxygen on a long hose known as the umbilical.
Whether the risky experimentalism of sending private citizens into space on a high-risk mission with technology that has been untested in space is bold adventurism or the latest example of reckless billionaire folly depends on your perspective, and the eventual outcome of the mission.
Flights of folly
The haughtier ambition of Polaris Dawn notwithstanding, Isaacman is part of a growing trend of megarich space tourists, a phenomenon which began to take off at the dawn of the millennium, when US entrepreneur Dennis Tito visited, in 2001, the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz spacecraft. Other what I call billionauts have included South African tech tycoon Mark Shuttleworth, Iranian-American engineer and entrepreneur Anousheh Ansari (the first female space tourist), Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and others.
But is space tourism responsible conduct during a climate emergency and given the myriad other problems facing our home planet?
While the carbon footprint of an economy-class passenger taking a long-haul flight is in the vicinity of 3-5 tonnes, the emissions for a space tourist are astronomically higher, as much as 100 times higher per tourist, according to one estimate. Just how high depends on the type of trip, the spacecraft used and the number of passengers.
Creating the necessary thrust to reach the escape velocity required to break free of Earth’s gravitational pull requires the burning of a phenomenal amount of fuel, as anyone who has witnessed the takeoff of a spacecraft can attest.
The Falcon 9 launcher that will propel Isaacman and his crew into space releases nearly 28,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases, while SpaceX’s Starship, the largest vehicle ever to fly, emits 76,000 tonnes, according to one analysis. And this only covers the actual flight. It does not, for example, include design, manufacturing, testing and disposal.
Sooty footprint
Space travel has other adverse effects on the climate and environment. The hot exhaust produced by rocket thrusters actually alters the physics and chemistry of the surrounding atmosphere as it passes through it.
Rockets release a huge amount of water vapour into the atmosphere, and this occurs at considerably higher altitudes than with aeroplanes. While water sounds harmless, high in the atmosphere, where there is almost no water, it has a potent warming effect.
The high temperatures generated during launch and re-entry transform the nitrogen naturally in the air into nitrogen oxides, potent greenhouse gases.
Some two-thirds of the exhaust from rocket launches is absorbed in the stratosphere (second layer of the atmosphere) and the mesosphere (third layer). Scientists do not yet fully understand the long-term effects of pollution so high up in the atmosphere, with some dubbing it the “ignorosphere”. However, scientists are now attempting to penetrate the fog around the climate impact of rocket launches.
In addition to their warming effects, nitrogen oxides and water vapour pumped into the stratosphere deplete the ozone layer by converting ozone into oxygen. This could, in future, threaten the recovery of the ozone layer that has accompanied the decades-old phasing out of chlorofluorocarbons.
“Routine space tourism launches may undermine progress made by the Montreal Protocol in reversing ozone depletion in the Arctic springtime upper stratosphere,” one study warned.
Although a rocket launch releases on average a seventh of the carbon dioxide emitted by an aeroplane, it emits hundreds of times more carbon soot particles than a plane.
carbon soot, also known as black carbon, absorbs light from the sun and then releases it as thermal energy, warming the surrounding air. In the atmosphere, soot falls back down to the ground in a matter of weeks. However, in the stratosphere, it can hang there for up to four years, prolonging its damaging effect. This is reflected in the fact that even though rocket soot represents only 0.01% of soot emissions, it was responsible for some 3% of the global warming effect caused by the soot humanity pumps into the atmosphere, according to one estimate.
More worryingly still, a rocket launch upsets the delicate carbon dioxide balance in the higher reaches of the atmosphere. Starting from around 43.5km up, a Falcon 9 – a launcher used by SpaceX, including on the upcoming Polaris Dawn mission – spews out more CO2 than is contained in a cubic kilometre of air for each kilometre it climbs, researchers calculated. At 70km, this climbs to an astounding 25 times the C02 in a cubic kilometre of surrounding air.
Meanwhile, when it comes to the growing climate impact of space tourism and the commercial space sector, our governments risk reneging on their responsibilities. Adrenaline rushes for the wealthy should not cost the Earth.
Explosive growth
At present, space flight is equivalent to at most 2% of the emissions of the aviation sector, but the plans to expand space tourism and commercial spaceflight and exploration could lead the sector’s climate footprint to explode. This would have far-reaching environmental consequences.
The soot released by increased traffic would raise temperatures in the stratosphere, deplete ozone and have a warming effect that is almost 500 times intenser than similar emissions from aircraft or surface sources, one study found.
This black carbon would also disrupt atmospheric circulation by slowing the movement of air from the tropics to the upper atmosphere, another study concluded, leading to further depletion of the ozone layer. The researchers discovered that the stratosphere is “sensitive to relatively modest black carbon injections”.
Like the early days of aviation and even more so, space tourism is only accessible to those with the very deepest pockets, the rocketset, if you will. For example, Jared Isaacman’s first jaunt into space reportedly cost the tech billionaire $200 million. A trip to the International Space Station costs in the vicinity of $55 million, while the budget-conscious traveller can fly Virgin Galactic to the edge of space and experience a few minutes of weightlessness for a mere $250,000.
These eye-watering ticket prices do not take into account the billions the tycoons involved in the billionaire space race have pumped into realising their boyhood dreams. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos alone has reportedly sunk up to $20 billion into Blue Origin, his pet space project.
And even if economies of scale and technological advances eventually bring down the cost of space travel, as occurred with aeroplanes, the environmental cost of mass space tourism would be catastrophic for the climate.
Mars attacks
Some of the billionaires involved in the commercialisation of space claim a higher, apparently more noble purpose for their space tourism. For instance, Isaacman says that his upcoming spacewalk is motivated by SpaceX’s declared mission to make humanity a multiplanetary species.
Previously, Issacman had described visiting the Starship facility as a “religious experience”.
“We were surrounded by the people that were going to help humankind get to Mars and really explore our solar system. I don’t know – it made me a real believer,” he was quoted by CNN as saying.
Elon Musk, the temperamental and controversial billionaire behind SpaceX, has been a longstanding advocate of colonising Mars, which he frames in existential terms. “The future of humanity is fundamentally going to bifurcate along one of two directions,” he speculated in an interview with National Geographic. “Either we’re going to become a multiplanet [sic] species and a spacefaring civilisation, or we’re going to be stuck on one planet until some eventual extinction event.”
Is there a Planet B?
Despite the climate and biodiversity emergencies facing the world, humanity is not at risk of imminent extinction. And the risks we do face, which we must tackle from now to mid-century, cannot be met fast enough through the colonisation of Mars or other planets.
Even in Elon Musk’s wildly optimistic estimation, which has been criticised by leading scientists, we would only be able to rehouse a million humans to Mars by 2060. The chance that we could boost humanity’s Martian population from its current level of zero to a million by mid-century is remote, but even if we succeeded, this raises the question: What about the rest of the species?
Given the hurdles that stand in the way of colonising Mars, it is neither feasible nor desirable nor ethical to attempt to colonise the red planet in such a short timeframe, as researchers have demonstrated.
This highlights the perils of privatising space exploration: it allows fantasist billionaires to set the priorities for humanity in an undemocratic process based on their personal convictions and whims. Space exploration has expanded the sum of human knowledge of the universe immensely, but it is now at risk of being hijacked by private interests for selfish ends, such as profiteering, adrenaline kicks and the economic opportunities that would be opened up by the corporate colonisation of new worlds.
In order to avoid this from happening, international frameworks that regulate commercial space activities will have to be improved, based on a democratic process that prioritises our collective interests and welfare.
Although humans are not in danger of dying out, we are in imminent danger of widespread human misery and suffering, if temperatures continue to climb and our destruction of the natural world continues apace.
This is why environmentalists and climate activists have been warning for years that there is no Planet B. And, to all intents and purposes, there isn’t. No matter how much Elon Musk and other advocates talk up Martian colonisation, Mars is simply no substitute for Earth.
Mars has a negligible atmosphere that is 95% carbon dioxide, no air we can breathe, no liquid surface water, no flora or fauna, and temperatures on the red planet average minus 60°C, with lows of minus 128°C. In addition, gravity on Mars is much weaker, which could lead to serious health consequences, such as the weakening of muscles and bones, for people who move there.
In contrast, thanks to billions of years of biological evolution, humans are almost perfectly calibrated for life on Earth, even if we are making the planet more inhospitable with time.
If Isaacman, Musk and other space billionaires wish to guard the survival of human civilisation and help us thrive, they would be far better off directing their considerable resources to climate and environmental action here on Earth.
