“Those who attack may not realize how space represents hope for so many people”. From the Twitter stage, the words are from Elon Musk. The owner of SpaceX spreads them, immediately comforted by a quarter of a million appreciation, last July 13 and addresses them to those who, like Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, had pointed out that before feeding space utopias the billionaires like Jeff Bezos would have been better off paying their taxes. Here on Earth.
Criticisms that Bezos himself, immediately after the successful suborbital launch a week later on board his New Shepard, had recognized a good dose of legitimacy. Interviewed by CNN on 20 July, a few hours after crossing the Karman line, by convention the door of the sidereal immensity, he admitted: “We have to do both. We have many problems here and now on Earth, and we have to work on it. . But we must always look to the future. “And he, to the future, has always shown that he looks good at us, at least as much as Musk or Richard Branson, the other space billionaire of the moment and the first that, on July 13, jumped the thermosphere fence riding his own vehicle, the SpaceShipTwo “Vss Unity” spaceplane.
Space
With Jeff Bezos begins the era of space tourism: the next flights of Blue Origin already in the fall
by Bruno Ruffilli
The problem, according to critics, including those 200,000 who signed two online petitions to propose to Bezos to stay there forever, in space, arise precisely from the kind of future imagined by the space rich, accused of wanting to replicate the terrestrial hegemony founded on the pillars of the internet and the exploitation of (human) resources beyond the atmosphere.
Establishing who is right would be possible only by knowing how to read the future. Therefore, to get an idea of what is happening on Earth thanks to the activities carried out beyond its sky, it is much more sensible to rely on the plans made explicit by the new stellar entrepreneurs and on what has been done so far, because there is no doubt that the space billionaire race is revolutionizing a sector that has remained armored and identical to itself for over half a century. The original space paradigm, completely public during the Cold War, aimed at achieving the strategic-military objectives of the United States, on the one hand, and the Soviet Union, on the other, and therefore characterized by a slow technological evolution guided by ‘high, has been overturned: today private individuals stimulate development, the innovation process starts from the bottom and space activity, “democratized”, is also carried out, if not above all, for profit. It is a paradigm shift of which space tourism is only a window, albeit the most observed of the moment.
Blue Origin
Because the Bezos rocket has the shape it has, well explained
by Emanuele Capone
Let’s start looking from here then, from the window: founded in 2004 with the aim of “opening space to everyone”, Branson’s Virgin Galactic today is worth about 11 billion dollars and sells tickets for its suborbital travel at $ 200,000 each – in the beginning it was 250,000. In 2019, shortly before the stock market listing which paradoxically lost 14% of its value the day after the launch of 11 July, the company declared that it already had 600 buyers and another 700 on the waiting list.
For his part, after the flight on July 20, Bezos clarified that Blue Origin trips are affordable and, although the price is not known, the founder of Amazon guarantees that the requests are numerous and that the 100 million dollars are a company goal already achieved.
Faithful to his dream of transforming humanity into the first interplanetary species, Elon Musk instead organizes tours far beyond Karman’s line: next autumn he will be aboard his Dragon shuttle that four space tourists will become the first to orbit the Earth with a totally private mission, renamed “Inspiration4”. Among them also Hayley Arceneaux, a survivor of bone cancer and today an assistant at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, the facility where she was treated as a child and to which the proceeds raised by the mission will go today. Musk’s taxi spaceship that Tom Cruise and Doug Liman will fly to the International Space Station in 2022 to make an action movie in microgravity (not the first, given that on October 5 they will be preceded by Russian star Yulia Peresild, who will depart on a Soyuz from the spaceport of Baikonur, Kazakhstan). That wasn’t enough, for 2023 SpaceX has already sold a trip around the Moon to Yasaku Maezawa, the founder of Zozotown, Japan’s largest online clothing store. After the announcement of the mission, called “dearMoon”, SpaceX’s value jumped from 25 to 74 billion dollars.
Guilt of a lunch
How Musk and Bezos took different paths in the space race
by Giacomo Barbieri
Seen this way, space tourism is, de facto, a whim from Uncles Scrooge’s with extraterrestrial itches, or the amazing result of some initiative driven by social intent and finances (such as Inspiration4). It is a market that the Swiss bank UBS estimates could exceed three billion dollars within nine years, not a few if we consider that the business is only a few days old; very few if you consider that the space sector, open to private initiative and commercial interests, from a market of about 380 billion dollars (2017 figure) according to Morgan Stanley could exceed one trillion by 2040. A pessimistic estimate according to the investment bank Merrill Lynch, for which space, in 2040, could move as many as 2,700 billions.
It is in the light of these data that one should reconsider the whole issue of space tourism and understand why, understanding it as the most exclusive of businesses, is misleading: space will be the next frontier of the economy not only and not so much because sooner or later , as Musk, Bezos and Branson promise, many will be able to take an extra-atmospheric trip. Space will be the economic future of the Earth because, also thanks to tourism, the orbits around the planet can be exploited for commercial purposes, will allow the exploitation of extra-atmospheric resources, or the relocation of industrial chains. The flight dynamics and (reusable) means exploited by Branson and Bezos already today promise to train future professional astronauts, to test the science and technology of laboratories and universities that until yesterday could not afford the long and therefore expensive process to have own experiment on the International Space Station.
“The concept of space exploration is changing – explains Vincenzo Giorgio, managing director of Altec in Turin, a partner company of Virgin Galactic – we pass from observation and research to the possibility of exploiting everything around the Earth as a resource. After all, the new space economy it expresses the ability to create a contamination between what is space in the traditional sense, that is, the people and companies already involved in the economy beyond the atmosphere, and a world that has not yet operated in the sector ”. An approach of which tourism is only one of the declinations, a window in fact. “I prefer to talk about suborbital flights – adds Giorgio – because there are many activities that can be carried out in this area: it is not excluded that these flights can be used for scientific experimentation or for training of pilots, even imagining, in the future, suborbital trajectories that allow the connection of geographically distant points. The ambition is simple: to extend the number and range of people who can operate at altitudes above 100 kilometers. If today we counted how many have done so, we would not arrive at 600 names. The idea is to allow ten times more access to the suborbital ”.
It is no coincidence that in 2020, reports the analysis firm Bryce Tech, seven billion dollars were paid into space start-ups, double compared to just two years earlier. And least of all it is accidental that Chiara Pertosa, president of Sitael, the largest private space company in Italy and another partner of Virgin Galactic, sees in the flights of the past few days “the premises for reconfiguring civil aviation, allowing to drastically reduce the duration of longer flights “.
An idyllic future, then?
Skeptics fear the opposite, that is what the New York Times has already renamed the “Amazonization” of space, the revival in orbit of terrestrial economic hegemony, with giants like Facebook, Google and, in fact, Amazon acting as “Masters of the Universe “. What was promised in 2019 in a famous speech by Bezos, that is the desire to deport humanity beyond the sky to transform the Earth into a nature reserve, could give reason to those who do not see only an ecologist inspiration in the intent. As already written here, in weightlessness, heavy industry and trade could become much cheaper: imagine putting together an oil tanker with a welder, but moving gigantic weightless steel sheets. Which competitor could oppose the production in microgravity of airplanes, ships, cars, or even just furniture, made with ridiculous costs and without polluting the beloved native planet? And, above all, what (further) immense wealth would be accessed by those who were to control an industry with these sidereal abilities? Other than the precious spice of Dune, the science fiction masterpiece by Frank Herbert that soon, directed by Dennis Villeneuve, will return to cinemas: the treasures of Arrakis are within reach, to be precise a few hundred kilometers above our heads.
While aiming for Mars, Musk finances himself by launching his Starlink satellites into the sky, dozens at a time, the promise of an ubiquitous internet without terrestrial infrastructure, capable of guaranteeing access to anyone, once fully operational. And in the meantime, it also exploits them forhigh frequency trading, i.e. banking transactions carried out in fractions of a second. For this reason, tourism is today only the most observed spatial porthole. The horizon it overlooks is wide but vague. Like everything that is barely glimpsed, it may turn out to be a land of new opportunities, or yet another territory of conquest. More likely, both. It remains to be hoped that Musk does not betray his own Tweet: it is true, those who attack space today do not understand how much the extra-atmospheric possibilities represent a hope for so many. Elon, Jeff, Richard, remember that.
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