Lately, billionaires and private companies have been taking short flights to space to further interest in and accelerate the development of space travel. Companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin are some of the major names in this development. Although personal space travel is predicted to benefit the economy, provide opportunities for space colonization, and discover new materials, these are advantages that will not appear for a long time. I believe that space travel’s investments can be used for more beneficial purposes and that it worsens climate change.
Large quantities of money have been spent to fund and promote recent test flights and excursions to space in the past couple of years. According to Kevin T. Dugan, a writer for Fortune, billionaire Jeff Bezos spent about $20 million on a 2019 Super Bowl advertisement for Blue Origin, his private space company. The advertisement never aired, and the $20 million were wasted instead of being put to good use. Also, Bezos spent about $5.5 billion to start Blue Origin in 2000 and poured in more money over the last 20 years to fund the company. This incredible sum of money could be used to solve many problems that our world faces today, such as poverty, hunger, sanitation, and climate change. Organizations such as the World Food Program, The Hunger Project, charity: water, and CARE could use this money to help end humanitarian crises around the world. According to Joe McCarthy, a writer for Global Citizen, $6 billion could save 41 million people from starvation. Space-faring billionaires like Bezos and Elon Musk could donate and provide millions of meals to people in need. $6 billion is about 1.8 percent of Elon Musk’s net worth and about three percent of Bezos’s according to Forbes’s Real-Time Billionaires List, so it would not make a significant decrease in their wealth.
While these private companies claim to have intentions to fight climate change, the benefits will not manifest fast enough. According to Eric Berger, a writer for Ars Technica, when Bezos created Blue Origin in 2000, his goal was to create solar power farms by using materials from space. It is now 2021 and neither Blue Origin nor SpaceX has made any progress in actually putting some new technology into space. Almost all space companies are looking to make money rather than make environmental progress. Even just developing this technology and determining how to send it to space will cost a lot of resources and money. Climate change is quickly becoming irreversible and we need solutions fast. According to a report in August 2021 from a U.N. climate panel, global warming is very close to getting out of control and will impact us for decades, if not centuries. The supposed solutions from space are too slow to be of use. Ironically, these space flights will also contribute to climate change. According to Eloise Marais, a physical geography professor at the University College London, if you launched yourself in one of these commercial space rockets, your carbon footprint is about 100 times that of a regular long-distance flight. Space tourism would only add to the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, accelerating the effects of climate change.
Commercial space travel and tourism can be worked on, but it should not be as much of a priority as it is now, even if there are possible long-term benefits. Space travel should be focused on bettering the condition of our planet right now, not in the distant future.
