For clarification, I did not say “a $55 million dream home,” although that in itself would have stretched the limits of my personal cost-benefit analysis, as well as my money-imagination skills ($55 million one-dollar bills would create a stack almost 4 miles high). At least you’d receive a tangible object (nothing like an NFT) after your purchase and be able to enjoy it for years to come — assuming it was built well.
No, three men each just paid that amount for a planned 8-day vacation in space. But what a deal: because of “dicey” landing weather, they didn’t return for 15½ days and weren’t charged extra for their extended stay!
Canadian investment firm head Mark Pathy, 51, always wanted to travel into space, but not with “some sort of Mickey Mouse travel outfit.” But research into the space travel company Axiom showed “they were the real deal. It was really possible. And that moment where you think, ‘Holy cow, this is something I could actually do,’ it’s a bit of a surreal moment.”
It’s a bit of a surreal moment for the rest of us, too, especially those who celebrated the triumph of a “giant step for mankind” by the US in 1969 as a national success. We happily beat the Russians to the moon, even knowing it was an artificial race created for propaganda purposes. The flags seen on the puffy astronaut suits and the stiff one flying in the nonexistent breeze of the moon’s surface were symbols of a country divided in many ways, but with enough unified force and conviction to outshine our chosen international rivals.
Today, I had to do considerable research to identify the players involved in the most recent space adventure, all of them privately owned. Axiom is the tour director for the vacation trip, contracting with another company, SpaceX, for the transportation, accommodations, food, etc. at the ISS (International Space Station) about 250 miles above earth. Together, they have several more trips planned and fully booked, with longer ones in the concept stage.
Somewhere along the way from the moon landing to the present, the U.S. lost its appetite for space travel and exploration, reinforced by the loss of civilian astronauts like Christa McAuliffe in the 1986 Challenger disaster and the 2003 deaths of seven more when the Columbia space shuttle disintegrated.
But Aristotle noted that “nature abhors a vacuum” and private entrepreneurs quickly stepped in, most without allegiance to any specific nation. Elon Musk continued his capitalistic conquests in 2002 by establishing SpaceX, now the dominant provider of a regular shuttle to the ISS and back until it is purposely crashed into the Pacific Ocean in 2030.
NASA explains that allowing private companies to be in charge of space technology allows it to purchase “only the goods and services the agency needs” (sounding eerily like the emu-insurance ads on TV) and helps it focus on its more challenging missions, like landing on Mars.
But who will guide the international companies as they negotiate the Wild West of outer space? In 1984, President Reagan signed an amendment to the law that established NASA, stating that it should “seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space” for “the general welfare of the United States of America.”
Pardon me if I’m skeptical that “the general welfare” of the U.S. will coincide with “the fullest commercial use of space.” All we need to do is look around us at the environmental devastation that has been created by the “fullest commercial use” of the earth, from Appalachian mountains destroyed by strip mining to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP) in the midst of the Pacific that covers an area three times the size of Texas.
In a recent New Yorker article describing an attempt to protect natural waterways from further destruction from human development, one lawyer notes that as long as “natural objects” such as waterways like lakes and streams, and by my extension, outer space, are “valued only in terms of their worth to humans–‘for the use of us,’” they can “quite legally, be destroyed.”
Over the last few hundred years of the Industrial Age, humans have shown little wisdom in caring for resources required for our survival. Capt. Kirk told us that space is the “final frontier.” I hope there is a better way to manage it than our previous one.
Allen Woods is a freelance writer, author of the Revolutionary-era crime novel “The Sword and Scabbard,” and Greenfield resident. His column appears regularly on a Saturday. Comments are welcome here or at awoods2846@gmail.com.