How space activities could benefit all… in different ways!
To fully enjoy reading this post, listen to Money by Pink Floyd.
This blog contains many pages describing how space activities are providing benefits to the world, like Space For Earth or Space Technology Transfer pages. Looking carefully into them, you will not find a special mention for space tourism, currently a topical media item, thanks to the suborbital flights of Richard Branson (see Travel to Space for more details) and Jeff Bezos.
Does this mean that space tourism is just a whim of wealthy people? Not really, even if the appearance may lead to think so. First, we need to consider what happened around a century ago on two terrestrial activities, aviation and motoring. At the very beginning, flying on a plane or riding in a car was indeed something that only the rich could afford. They generated many deaths by accident; they contributed a lot to planet pollution directly and indirectly. Nevertheless, they enabled to achieve all the scientific and technology advancements of the last century! They are so deeply integrated in our lifestyle that it is impossible to imagine a world without them at the same level of well-being.
We can extend this concept to space tourism. The possibilities that the private development of space capabilities could enable are incredible, even unforeseeable.
An immediate benefit? Schools and universities can now send scientific experiments to space at a very low price respect to other means, allowing students and researchers to run more and more studies in micro-gravity.
Another one? The number of people experiencing the Overview Effect will increase exponentially, leading to a tremendous positive shift in the awareness of our planet and humanity.
Not enough? To be more practical, there is another advantage that the new space tourism could make available to the whole world. You can find it in the updated Outer Space Tax page, now also translated into Italian (Tasse Nello Spazio)! Have a look and let me know what you think!
Then, let’s shout the touristic Spacepolitans motto: Space For All, All For Space!