Last week’s crash of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, killing one test pilot and seriously injuring the other, was a new setback for commercial spaceflight. Still, the prospect of space tourism seems quite real.
Would you want to be a space tourist?
In the Op-Ed “Not a Flight of Fancy,” Sam Howe Verhovek writes:
… In recent years I have interviewed a wide array of people involved in the private space industry, including both pilots involved in the crash on Friday. Almost universally, they viewed themselves as pioneers at the dawn of an era of exploration whose apogee is beyond our generation’s imagination. Just as the Wright brothers did not have a precise image in mind of jumbo jetliners ferrying people around the world so routinely and so safely at more than 500 miles per hour that we have long since stopped considering it a miracle, we can’t really know where we’re headed in space.
But, they insist, we certainly need to go there. “I think it is actually very important that we start making progress in extending life beyond Earth and we start making our own existence a multi-planetary one,” Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX (its goal: “enabling people to live on other planets”) once told me. He called the venture a “giant insurance policy” for the survival of our species. Seen in this light, the first round of space tourism is simply seed capital for something much grander. It’s possible that tomorrow’s budget-minded space travelers will thank today’s 1-percenters, just as you can credit early adopters of expensive, behemoth mainframe computers for your $250 desktop.One could argue, of course, that space tourism is more grandiose than grand. After all, one of the enduring ironies of the initial space age is that we spent all those billions of dollars to produce, among other things, magnificent and iconic remote photographs of Earth that fired the environmental movement to focus on protecting our lonely, beautiful, fragile blue island of a planet.
And as a general matter, we are less excited about the possibilities of space exploration than we were a half-century ago. But if we are ever to reach Mars, or colonize an asteroid or find new minerals in outer space, today’s work will prove to have been a vital link in the chain.
Students: Read the entire article, then tell us …
– Would you want to be a space tourist? Why?
– Is space tourism a frivolous endeavor? Is it a waste of money and human ingenuity, plus dangerous to boot? Or, is it a worthwhile venture, much like the pioneering efforts with early flying machines many decades ago?
– Does last week’s crash of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo sway your opinion about space tourism in any way?
– Will space tourism ever become a reality for anybody but the superrich?
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