Blue Origin all-female flight: Is space travel really worth the hype?

Blue Origin’s all-female spaceflight has created history. The New Shepard rocket took American pop star Katy Perry, journalist and billionaire Jeff Bezos’ fiancee Lauren Sánchez, CBS presenter Gayle King, and three other women to the edge of space and back on Monday (April 14).

The spaceflight which lasted around 11 minutes cost $150,000 (Rs 1.3 crore) for the deposit alone. This was the first time since 1963 that an all-women crew went to space. While the star-studded flight attracted eyeballs, space tourism is criticised by many for its exorbitant cost and harm to the environment.

Let’s take a closer look.

What is space tourism?

Space tourism is the latest craze among the wealthy. It entails private individuals paying money to go to space for fun.

Most space travellers reach the Kármán line, the globally recognised boundary of space that lies 100 kilometres above sea level. The female crew on Bezos-owned Blue Origin’s sub-orbital flight crossed this line, allowing the six women to experience weightlessness for a few minutes before the rocket descended.

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The orbital spacecraft takes passengers aboard much above the Kármán line, with astronauts usually spending a couple of days to more than a week at an altitude of roughly 1.3 million (13 lakh) feet.

Space tourism is different from space exploration. While the former’s main purpose is to take normal people to space, the latter was conducted by government space agencies like Nasa to better understand space and develop useful technologies.

The major private companies offering space travel include Elon Musk’s SpaceX, British entrepreneur Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Amazon founder Bezos’ Blue Origin.

Why space tourism is not all bad

The attention received by Blue Origin’s all-woman flight underscores the growing interest in space tourism. Valued at $848.28 million in 2023, the industry touched $1.3 billion last year, according to a report by Research and Markets.

It is projected to increase at a rate of 31.6 per cent between 2024 and 2030, projected to reach $6.7 billion in the next five years. Supporters of space tourism say it will renew interest in space exploration, bringing more investment to the industry that will aid innovation.

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“We have gotten a lot of products that are safe in a space environment that we copy in a safe way for the benefit of people on Earth ,” Annette Toivonen, a space tourism lecturer at Helsinki’s Haag-Helia University of Applied Sciences and author of Sustainable Space Tourism: An Introduction, told DW in 2021.

Some of the technological innovations may likely lead to the discovery of more sustainable fuel sources. “Now, there’s a lot of money for trying to create alternatives for fossil fuels. Then they might discover some kind of hydrogen fuel system that could be copied for airplanes,” Toivonen added.

Bezos, who was on the maiden flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket in 2021, defended the mission, telling CNN that it was about “building a road to space for the next generations to do amazing things there, and those amazing things will solve problems here on Earth”.

Promoters say that space tourism is also inclined towards developing technologies.

Space tourists are taking part in experiments, such as studying the effects of microgravity on human health, plant growth and material properties, as per S_pace.com_.

Why space travel draws flak

Space tourism costs at least a million dollars, which makes it only for the uber-rich of the world. Critics argue the high price makes it unaffordable for the general public, is highly wasteful and does not add to our understanding of the space .

Passengers on a Virgin Galactic spacecraft have to pay about $450,000. Blue Origin has not shared its full prices for a seat on its spacecraft. Elon Musk’s civilian-only trip to space in 2021 cost $55 million per seat.

Blue Origin’s all-female flight has been condemned for its environmental impact, given the short amount of time it remained in space.

One of the critics is American actor Olivia Munn. “It’s so much money to go to space,” she said. “There’s a lot of people who can’t even afford eggs… I think it’s a bit gluttonous.”

Munn questioned the point of this space travel. “Space exploration was to further our knowledge and to help mankind. What are they going to do up there that has made it better for us down here?”

A major criticism of space tourism is its contribution to pollution. It is well-known that launching rockets into space damages the environment.

Rockets pollute the higher layers of the atmosphere – the stratosphere which has the ozone layer protecting us from the Sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation. Nitrogen oxides emitted during rocket launches can deplete the ozone layer by converting ozone to oxygen.

“The aspect that has been most focused on is the depletion of ozone in the protective stratospheric ozone layer. The advantage, at least with the Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin rockets, is that they don’t have chlorine, but they do have other components that can produce nitrogen oxides. And when that’s released into the stratosphere, that can contribute to ozone depletion,” Eloise Marais, an associate professor in physical geography at the University College London, told DW.

Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo uses a hybrid engine that burns rubber, leaving behind a cloud of soot. “Hybrid engines can use different types of fuels, but they always generate a lot of soot,” Filippo Maggi, associate professor of aerospace engineering at Politecnico di Milano, Italy said, as per Space.com.

Blue Origin’s rockets are fuelled by a combination of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, which does not cause that much pollution. However, Marais told DW both will impact the environment. “Hydrogen and oxygen can produce water and water released into the dry stratosphere can influence the climate.”

Carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas causing climate change, is also a big worry.

Speaking to Space.com, Dallas Kasaboski, principal analyst at the space consultancy Northern Sky Research, said a single Virgin Galactic suborbital spacecraft that lasts about an hour and a half can produce as much pollution as a 10-hour trans-Atlantic flight. “Even if the suborbital tourism market is launching at a fraction of the number of launches compared to the rest of the [tourism] industry, each of their flights has a much higher contribution, and that could be a problem,” he said.

Some also say that experiments by space tourists have not majorly helped take human spaceflight forward.

According to scientists, there is a lot unknown about the harmful effects of space tourism. With space travel set to increase exponentially, there is not enough data to know when rocket launches will begin having a significant impact on climate.

“The amount of fuel currently burned by the space industry is less than one per cent of the fuel burned by aviation,” Martin Ross, an atmospheric scientist at the Aerospace Corporation told Space.com. “So there has not been a lot of research, and that makes sense. But things are changing in a way that suggests that we should learn about this in more detail.”

With inputs from agencies