Is space travel the new Ayahuasca for billionaires?

A few weeks back, the media was awash with images of Blue Origin’s space flight—an event touted as a preview of the future of space tourism. We watched as six millionaires travelled to the edge of space for roughly eleven minutes, spending about four of those in zero gravity. The experience, reportedly now available to anyone willing to pay the speculative price of $25 million, was presented as groundbreaking. The passengers—six women from diverse ethnic backgrounds—were framed as a feminist milestone and a win for women's rights. To me, it felt more like performative feminism, carefully packaged for PR.

Katy Perry, the most famous celebrity among the crew, expressed upon landing:

“I feel super connected to love, so connected to love. I think this experience has shown me you never know how much love is inside of you—how much love you have to give and how loved you are—until the day you launch… It’s not about me, it’s not about us, it’s about making space for future women. And taking up space and belonging. And it’s about this wonderful world that we are seeing out there and appreciating it… You have to trust yourself on this journey, and you feel in love when you come down, for sure… so I feel connected to that divine feminine right now.” (Wall, 2025)

I may not have the spiritual depth or psychological expertise to fully unpack this, but it did leave me wondering: when did our collective curiosity about space—once rooted in science and the pursuit of knowledge—begin to morph into a vehicle for personal growth or a gateway to cosmic spirituality? While it’s understandable that such an extraordinary experience might provoke emotional or existential reflections, the rhetoric here leans close to that of a self-help seminar or a luxury spiritual retreat. 

Katy Perry also added that she “couldn’t recommend this experience more,” a statement that drew wide criticism on social media for being tone-deaf and out of touch. One tweet summed up the mood:

"Katy Perry 'couldn’t recommend this experience more,' which is useful information for those deciding between space travel and booking a basic economy ticket on Spirit that doesn’t let you carry on any luggage, so you have to wear 13 layers of clothing" (Pitchfork, 2025).

However, for the two main competitors in the space race Elon Musk the CEO of Tesla and xSpace and Jeff Bazos the CEO of Amazon and Blue Origin,  space travel will soon be accessible to the public. According to Elon Musk, his company aims to make it possible for anyone to travel to space, including destinations like the Moon and Mars (Business Today, 2024)

Space Tourism: The Cost We’re Ignoring

But what is the environmental cost of popularising space travel for all? Blue Origin claims that its reusable rocket emits only water vapour and is "fueled by highly efficient liquid oxygen and hydrogen" with no carbon emissions (Blue Origin, 2025). However, water vapour itself is a potent greenhouse gas. As Shindell (2001) explains, the abundance of water vapour in the stratosphere affects ozone levels, surface climate, and stratospheric temperatures.

The claim that space tourism produces no carbon emissions is misleading and ultimately unsustainable. As Webb (2025, p. 123) points out, even rockets like those used by Blue Origin—which rely on liquid oxygen and hydrogen—still contribute significantly to carbon emissions. This is because the liquefaction of these fuels requires extremely low temperatures (below −253°C at normal atmospheric pressure), necessitating highly energy-intensive processes for both production and storage. (Webb, 2025, p. 123)

Moreover, scientists have warned that the growing number of rocket launches may damage the ozone layer—a critical region in the stratosphere that protects life on Earth by absorbing the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation. Increased launch activity could potentially “undermine progress made by the Montreal Protocol in reversing ozone depletion in the Arctic springtime upper stratosphere” (Mu et al., 2021).

Despite these ecological concerns, the ambitions of private space companies extend far beyond simply crossing the Kármán line or offering suborbital joyrides. They frame their ventures as part of a larger existential mission: to secure humanity’s future by expanding into outer space. This vision is often justified as a necessary response to the climate crisis and the perceived limits of Earth’s habitability. When receiving the 2018 Axel Springer Award for business innovation and social responsibility, Jeff Bezos explained his motivation: “If we don’t [expand to other planets], we will eventually end up with a civilization of stasis, which I find very demoralizing” (Mosher, 2018). Similarly, Elon Musk has described the need for a “backup plan.” In his essay Making Humans a Multi-Planetary Species, Musk (2017, p. 46) predicts that the future will take one of the two forms: either humans remain on Earth forever, heading eventually toward extinction, or we become a “multi-planetary species.”

Two Visions of the Final Frontier: Musk’s Martian Ambitions vs. Bezos’s Space Settlement

While both Musk and Bezos anticipate apocalyptic scenarios and present technological advancement and space settlement as solutions to humanity’s environmental and existential crises, their visions for an interplanetary future are different. Though they agree that humankind must expand into outer space, SpaceX and Blue Origin—their respective companies—propose different models of what this multiplanetary life should look like.

For SpaceX, “The company is in the early stages of developing its Starship, a massive rocket and spaceship system that Musk hopes will ferry cargo and convoys of people across the at-minimum 30 million-mile void between Earth and Mars” (Crane, 2020). But Musk’s vision goes far beyond technological advancement—he imagines building a self-sustaining city of one million people on Mars, arguing that this represents humanity’s best chance of avoiding extinction.

While there is plenty of space to explore how such narratives of Martian colonisation are shaped by science fiction, cultural imaginaries, and climate anxiety, for the purposes of this column it is sufficient to underscore a basic scientific fact: Mars is currently uninhabitable. It is a cooled planet that has lost its global magnetic field; over time, solar wind and storms stripped away most of its atmosphere, turning it into the cold desert. A human landing on Mars without full protection would die within few minutes. The extremely low atmospheric pressure would cause blood to boil, and the lack of breathable air would result in immediate suffocation. On top of that, without an atmosphere, the surface is exposed to dangerous cosmic radiation that can cause cancer—though most people wouldn’t live long enough for that to matter because there’s no oxygen.

So even if humans manage to reach Mars, they would require fully sealed, air-tight habitats to protect them from toxic air and the deadly radiation. (Crane, 2020). Still, Musk argues that despite the frigid temperatures, radiation, and dust storms, Mars remains the most viable option for outer space settlement, referring to its relative abundance of accessible resources (Tola, 2022). Among the solutions Musk has proposed is the dramatic and controversial idea of terraforming—making Mars more Earth-like by thickening its atmosphere with greenhouse gases. To jump-start this process, Musk has even suggested detonating nuclear bombs over the Martian poles to warm the planet and release trapped CO₂ (Crane, 2020).

Unlike Musk, Jeff Bezos envisions a different, though equally dramatic, kind of interplanetary future. Drawing on the ideas of physicist Gerard K. O’Neill, Bezos promotes the concept of massive rotating cylinders—so-called "O’Neill Cylinders"—that could serve as living spaces for millions of people. These megastructures, according to O’Neill’s vision, “have the potential to revolutionize how we live, work, and thrive beyond the confines of Earth” (Saravanan, 2025). When asked about solutions to the energy crisis, Bezos turns to the solar system. He claims: “The solar system can easily support a trillion humans. And if we had a trillion humans, we would have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts and unlimited, for all practical purposes, resources from solar power and so on. That’s the world that I want my great-grandchildren’s great-grandchildren to live in”. (Bezos, as cited in Boyce, 2024, p. 49).

Yet before dreaming of thousands of Einsteins in space, it’s important to revisit the origins of O’Neill’s proposal, which Bezos frequently references. O’Neill’s original work, despite its visionary tone, has been criticised as “largely sociological in intent rather than technological” (Baxter, 2013, p. 15). In O’Neill’s early models, the foundation of space colonization was not scientific genius but labor. His first proposed settlement would require 10,000 workers to establish a meaningful industrial base in space (Baxter, 2013, p. 16). The second “island” would expand to 140,000 people, and the third—a 32-kilometre-long habitat—would house up to 20 million (Baxter, 2013, p. 16). Bezos, the CEO of a company employing around 1.54 million workers, whose reputation has been repeatedly challenged due to Amazon’s exploitation of low-paid employees, appears, as one might expect, to have no issue with this labor-intensive vision. In fact, after his own spaceflight, Bezos publicly thanked Amazon customers and employees, acknowledging that they had 'paid for this'. Bezos didn’t find it inappropriate to thank minimum-wage workers for effectively funding their billionaire boss’s trip to space. This is not surprising when considering that Amazon, the company he owns, has an employee turnover rate of around 150 percent, with the number of people who quit or are fired each year surpassing the total number of employees. Seventy percent of those hired leave within 90 days (Chronicles Magazine, n.d.).

The Real Stakes Behind the PR

The futuristic imaginaries of interplanetary living envisioned by these billionaires are not produced in a vacuum—they are deeply embedded in political, social, and ecological contexts on Earth. The danger of such futuristic PR is that it distracts from the urgent need to address climate change here on Earth. Instead of focusing on sustainable solutions for the planet we already inhabit, we’re invited to indulge in sci-fi fantasies that—even if technologically possible, are unlikely to be realized within the next hundred years. As such, they are not harmless fantasies; they serve as a form of climate denialism by distracting from immediate environmental action and reinforcing the idea that salvation lies elsewhere—on other planets, in other futures. 

But there’s another, often overlooked dimension to the spectacle of space travel and colonization: the race for state-backed military-industrial contracts. While media coverage tends to focus on the so-called “space race” between companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin, what remains less discussed is the contract race happening behind the scenes. The stakes here are far from utopian; they are far more practical and financially significant. These corporations are not merely competing to land on the Moon or Mars; they are trying to dominate the infrastructure of space itself. By securing billion-dollar deals for satellite launches, missile tracking systems, reconnaissance operations, and military support under the umbrella of the U.S. Space Force, they are positioning themselves to control the future of space.

On April 4, 2025, the U.S. Space Force awarded Firm Fixed-Price, Indefinite-Delivery Requirements contracts to SpaceX, United Launch Services, and Blue Origin to provide critical space support aimed at fulfilling national security objectives (Space Systems Command, 2025). These are among the latest in a series of such agreements, with the projected contract values being substantial: $5.92 billion for SpaceX, $5.36 billion for United Launch Services, and $2.39 billion for Blue Origin (Space Systems Command, 2025). As General Chance Saltzman, Chief of Space Operations, highlights, “National Security Space Launch isn’t just a program; it’s a strategic necessity that delivers the critical space capabilities our warfighters depend on to fight and win” (Space Systems Command, 2025). Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy further emphasizes the importance of space dominance for U.S. military readiness, stating that these contracts are vital for ensuring “assured access to space” for national security missions (Space Systems Command, 2025).

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