Experts weigh in on the billionaire space race, and who might win.
It took just 59 minutes for Sir Richard Branson to fulfil his childhood dream. On Sunday morning, at the Spaceport launch station in the New Mexico desert, the 70-yearold British billionaire climbed aboard the VSS Unity. His cheeks puffed as the rocket blasted through a cloudless sky, reaching a high point of 55 miles above the Earth’s surface. At the top, Branson and his five fellow astronauts floated around for several minutes in a state of weightlessness. They would have been able to see about half of America’s land mass, including the white snow-capped mountains of the Rockies, plus the striking blue of the Pacific Ocean — a view that “sticks in your soul,” according to American astronaut Beth Moses, who was also on board.
Then he returned, touching down to cheers from a gathering of fellow entrepreneurs. “What a day, what a day,” he said. “I (have) dreamt of this moment since I was a kid, but nothing can prepare you for the view from space.”
It fired the starting gun on what analysts are calling a new “billionaire space race.” The rocket took off just nine days before Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the world’s wealthiest individual, sets off on an even more ambitious mission aboard his New Shepard rocket, which will propel him 62 miles away from the Earth’s surface. Also joining 57-year-old Bezos is his brother, Mark; and pilot Wally Funk, who was denied the job of an astronaut in the 1960s because she was a woman.
If the first space race was driven by Cold War competition between superpowers, this iteration is driven largely by private entrepreneurs looking to make money (and, yes, perhaps a dash of male ego, too). And as with any space race, this one is getting dirty.
An argument has already broken out over whether Branson’s expedition even counts as space travel. The exact boundaries of space have been contested for years. A popular demarcation pinpoints the beginning of space about 62 miles (100 kilometres) above sea level, a point known as the Karman line, where the Earth’s atmosphere is no longer able to support vessels flying slower than about 25,000 miles per hour. Branson’s flight fell short of this imaginary barrier by seven miles — a detail that Team Bezos was quick to point out; if all goes to plan on July 20, Bezos’s jet will slightly break the Karman line. “(The Branson expedition didn’t involve) flying above the Karman line, and it’s a very different experience,” said Bob Smith, CEO of Blue Origin, Bezos’s space company.
NASA considers the formal boundary of space to be even higher, at 76 miles. Under this definition, neither Branson nor Bezos will pass the test. However, confusingly, NASA considers you to be an “astronaut” if you have reached just 50 miles (in its books, Branson is an astronaut who has never actually been into space). Indeed, that’s what qualified him to receive a set of ceremonial NASA wings to pin to his suit after touching down on Sunday, handed over by Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield.
But some experts remain skeptical over whether such expeditions offer much scientific value. Perhaps it is more accurate, they say, to see Branson’s space flight as an extravagant PR stunt. “I watched it live and thought it was great,” says Prof. Andrew Coates, deputy director of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London. “But for me, while this is an amazing achievement, it is not really space exploration.”
Coates points out that Branson’s rocket only scraped the ceiling of the mesosphere, the layer of the Earth’s atmosphere between 30 and 55 miles above sea level. It didn’t go anywhere near the thermosphere, the ultrahot layer in which the ISS orbits.
In Branson’s rocket, Coates adds, “you get some weightless flight for a few minutes ... but, of course, you can do that with lower plane flights.”
Not that either billionaire will be particularly concerned. Branson is clear that his ultimate ambition is commercial; he envisions a thriving space tourism industry. In a few decades, some predict, a holiday into space could become the new status symbol among the global ultrarich, a group that has swelled in size during the pandemic. According to Virgin Galactic, about 600 would-be citizen astronauts have already booked tickets for Branson-style flights, priced at about US$250,000 each; eventually, they hope to reduce the ticket price to US$40,000.
Branson’s competitors are even more ambitious. Bezos revealed in 2019 that Blue Origin is developing a moon lander that could, he claims, deliver astronauts and cargo to the lunar surface by 2024. His ultimate aim, described in soaring terms that wouldn’t feel out of place in a scifi film, is to build a lunar colony — a new home for our species.
Not to be outdone, Tesla founder Elon Musk, CEO of Spacex, announced last year his own plan to populate Mars with a million humans. Settlers will initially live in a colony of “glass domes” to protect themselves from the Red Planet’s brutally cold climate. Musk, the world’s second richest individual (behind Bezos), has previously said there is a “70 per cent” probability that he will personally travel to the Red Planet, even though he is not a trained astronaut, hinting that he might join Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa on a trip around the moon in 2023.
Another company, Axiom, revealed plans earlier this year to build a US$2 billion private space station with a luxury hotel; Tom Cruise is rumoured to have bought tickets.
It’s easy to see all this as a grandiose exercise in ego-massaging, and scientists remain skeptical about whether any of it will happen.
Coates is particularly disturbed by Musk’s suggestion of taking humans to Mars. He says scientists could be tantalizingly close to finding out whether life has ever existed on our nearest planet, a question that would transform our understanding of the universe more broadly (if we find life on Mars, the first planet we properly examine, then there’s probably life all over the place).
This is the central task of NASA’S Perseverance probe, which landed on Mars in February. But bringing humans to Mars could ruin its pristine environment, he says, hampering these scientific efforts. He’s also worried about commercial rockets polluting the “delicate chemical balance” in the mesosphere.
There’s also a question of how many ultrarich tourists will really tolerate the inevitable risk. “When you hop on something that’s got explosive fuel in it, you’re putting your life at risk, to a certain degree,” Clayton Anderson, a former NASA astronaut who spent 167 days in space, said last week. For many explorers, a trip into the great beyond means a nasty appointment with a vomit bag; those who stay longer than a few hours could experience problems with their heart, lungs, blood flow, urination, and balance. “I never had a kidney stone until after I became an astronaut,” says Anderson.
It sounds to an untrained ear like an awful lot of bother, with much that could go wrong. But as Coates points out, the billionaire astronauts will at least get “an amazing view.”
WHAT A DAY ... I HAVE DREAMT OF THIS MOMENT SINCE I WAS A KID.