Space tourism: The arguments in favor

Space tourism: The arguments in favor

To its many detractors, space tourism amounts to nothing more than joy-rides for the global super rich that will worsen the planet’s climate crisis.  But the nascent sector also has supporters, who, while not rejecting the criticism outright, argue the industry can bring humanity benefits too.

More research opportunities

The first argument is that private spaceflights, in addition to their customers, can send to space scientific experiments that require microgravity environments. In the past, national agencies “it used to take quite a long time to work within government grant channels, get approval, get the funding, get picked to be among the very select few that could go,” Ariel Ekblaw, of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative told AFP.

By contrast, it took Ekblaw just six months from signing a contract to sending her research project to the International Space Station on board the private Ax-1 mission, which blasted off Friday thanks to the private entrepreneurs paying for the trip. Her experiment, called TESSERAE, involves smart tiles that form a floating robotic swarm that can self-assemble into space architecture—which might be how future space stations are built.

An earlier prototype was flown to space for a few minutes aboard a Blue Origin suborbital spaceflight, paving the