Space tourism is back in the news following the all-female Blue Origin space mission on 15th April. That mission has raised lots of questions and a lot of criticism from the global public. Space might be the final frontier for humankind, but it may also be the ultimate frontier for unsustainable tourism.
References
United Nations (2015). Sustainable Development Goals (2015-2030). https://sdgs.un.org/goals
ABC News (2025). Blue Origin mission with all-female crew, including Katy Perry, completes space trip. 15 April 2025. https://abcnews.go.com/US/blue-origin-rocket-female-crew-including-katy-perry/story?id=120779187#:~:text=The%20Blue%20Origin%20mission%20marks,decades%20after%20the%20Soviet%20mission.
The Guardian (2025). The Blue Origin flight showcased the utter defeat of American feminism. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/15/blue-origin-flight-american-feminism
Peeters, P. (2018). Why space tourism will not be part of sustainable tourism. Tourism Recreation Research, 43(4), 540-543.
Ross, M. N., & Jones, K. L. (2022). Implications of a growing spaceflight industry: Climate change. Journal of Space Safety Engineering, 9(3), 469-477.
Spector, S. & Higham, J.E.S. (2019). Space tourism in the Anthropocene. Annals of Tourism Research 79 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2019.102772
Transcript
Space tourism is a contentious topic (see Musk vs Bezos vs Branson… vs humanity podcast 21 October 2024) and it has been back in the news recently. Two weeks ago, on 15 April, Blue Origin completed a space mission with an all-female crew that has received a lot of media attention. The mission lasted all of eleven minutes. It took the passengers past the Kármán line which is 62 miles above sea level. The Kármán line is considered the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space.
The passengers included Lauren Sánchez – the fiancée of Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos – and five of her friends. Singer Katy Perry, journalist Gayle King, former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, bio-astronautics research scientist and civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen and filmmaker Kerianne Flynn. Their fitted blue flight suits suggested to some that Bezos watched a lot of Star Trek when he was a kid.
For some an all-female space mission will be an uplifting sight. But this was not the first all-female spaceflight. That was achieved by Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova in a solo mission in 1963. But do the two really compare? To call this Blue Origin undertaking a ‘space mission’ and to describe the passengers as ‘crew’ seems a bit misleading. Most have seen this as a tourist jaunt – nothing more than eleven minutes of self-indulgence. A few seconds in space with an extremely high Earthly price tag.
King acknowledged afterwards that the trip had received a lot of criticism. In response she said that she resented reference to the trip as a ‘ride’, saying that it was definitely a ‘journey’. Journey or ride? It did seem more like a theme park ride than a space mission to most observers. Tourism or Science? Tourist or traveller? Mission or jaunt? Crew or passenger? Words do count. King responded that, despite the haters, no one can steal our joy. She claimed that most people realised what this mission means to young women, young girls – and boys, too.” Feminism or narcissism? You choose.
Moira Donegan writing in The Guardian saw it very differently to Gayle King.
She described the mission as a spectacle of US decadence and decline. In the weeks and months ahead of the launch, the mission was promoted as a triumph for the human spirit of striving and possibility – hallmarks of science and feminism. Donegan took a different view, describing it as a “…perverse funeral for the America that once enabled both scientific advancement and feminist progress – a spectacle that mocked these aspirations by appropriating them for such an indulgent and morally hollow purpose”.
Donegan nicely summed up two of the issues that caused public disapproval.
Firstly, she argued that this mission reflects the demise of science-based national space programmes. Blue Origin is a private hobby project founded in 2000 by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos. It fills a void created by the American Federal government stepping back from space exploration through the privatisation of work previously undertaken by NASA – the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. As founder and (almost) sole funder of the company, its focus has been on commercial tourism rather than scientific advancement. Celebrity publicity stunts have been a feature of the Blue Origin model. Speaking of Star Trek, one Blue Origin launch had William Shatner as a passenger.
NASA was once the pride of America, with its space programmes pushing the boundaries of possibility and the frontiers of human endeavour. By contrast, Donegan describes Blue Origin as a model of corruption and a celebration of selfishness and greed. Once a frontier of human exploration, Blue Origin reduces space to a (quote) “…backdrop for the Instagram selfies of the rich and narcissistic… tailored to the impulses of the richest, least responsible and least morally intelligent people on Earth”. All this tourist indulgence on the part of the untaxed mega-rich in America, while public funding of science is being stripped away by the Trump administration (see The War on Science podcast 18 March 2025). You have to wonder where priorities lie, and where boundaries should perhaps have been drawn, when capitalism is so unfettered.
Secondly, this mission signalled the defeat of American feminism. Lauren Sanchez was quick to frame the mission as a win for women. There were two passengers onboard with space credentials. Aisha Bowe – the aerospace engineer and Amanda Nguyen – the civil rights entrepreneur with previous NASA experience. Both could genuinely be described as astronauts rather than sightseers. But neither passenger nor their credentials were given significant profile. Most of the limelight was taken by Katy Perry and Lauren Sánchez.
This all-woman mission could have presented an opportunity to comment on the Trump administration’s ban on diversity, equity and inclusion. Instead those preparing to board the Blue Origin rocket talked about their makeup and hair. Sánchez boasted that “We’re going to have lash extensions flying in the capsule.” Bowe mentioned that she gave her hairstyle for a dry run by skydiving in Dubai.
So much then for space and an all-woman crew as frontiers for exploration, science, discovery and human endeavour. These aspirations have been replaced by a vision of womanhood based on cosmetic looks or, in Donegan’s words “… a profoundly anti-feminist vision of what womankind’s future is: dependent on men, confined to triviality, and deeply, deeply silly”. Meanwhile a live television audience in America watched on to see the eyelash extensions would stay in place for a few brief seconds in space, while Katy Perry sang ‘What a beautiful world’. It was a major win for cosmetics in space.
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Somewhere beneath the stratospheric stupidity of this Blue Origin space mission are some serious questions about sustainable tourism. Commercial space travel is advancing very rapidly. The number or space launches, which has tracked consistently over the last seven decades since the first space launch in 1957, has leapt in the last five years due to the growing wealth and influence of Musk and Bezos. It is in the interests of these space billionaires to ignore the implications for sustainability on Earth. As we have seen in recent American politics – the billionaires seek to remove all barriers, most notably taxation and regulation, in order to advance their personal interests.
What is clearly required is careful consideration of the impacts of space tourism on important dimensions of sustainability. An interesting exercise would be to consider Blue Origin’s recent visit to space in relation to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (2015-2030). SGD 12 for example addresses the importance of ‘responsible consumption and production’. The conspicuous consumption on display in the case of Blue Origin does little to advance SDG 12. Or SDG 13 Climate Action – given that high energy transportation is the driver of high emissions tourism (Sun et al., 2024). Yet just 1,000 suborbital spacecraft launches per year emits black carbon into the stratosphere equivalent in terms of global warming to the entire annual global aviation fleet (Ross, Mills, & Toohey, 2010).
Paul Peeters (2018) from Breda University in the Netherlands has stated that he cannot “…see any argument to believe that space tourism could be part of sustainable development on Earth”. He has argued that with the existential crisis of sustainability facing humanity on Earth, we should “…forbid space tourism and the very idea of galactic migration through a United Nations treaty”. This perspective is justifiable given that space tourism is both an environmentally destructive and highly conspicuous form of consumption. Space tourism is disproportionate in the tiny number of people rich enough to indulge, and the enormous burden of emissions incurred by those who remain on Earth. So much needs to be done to meet the challenges of tourism and sustainable development on Earth. Yet, this new frontier of tourism is advancing in the absence of regulation or management. The emissions of rocket launches are unaccounted. At what point should legal boundaries be drawn and some form of regulation and accountability put in place?
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The reporting on the Blue Origin space mission in The Guardian drew some classic comments from online readers. One reader commented that “If Messrs Bezos and Musk could be persuaded to be part of the next ‘crew’ of Blue Origin, perhaps the backroom team could help solve some of Earth’s current problems by providing enough extra boost for the rocket to be able to break out of Earth’s gravitational field”.
And with SDG 5 Gender Equality in mind, the final word goes to Andrew Carroll from County Wicklow in Ireland who responded to the claim that this was the first all-female space flight since 1963. He commented that this claim “…overlooks Martine, the pig-tailed macaque, sole occupant of the French Vesta rocket launched on 7 March 1967. She survived the flight, living for several years afterwards, and – rather inspiringly – never tried to cash in on the experience”.
Out of interest, this podcast has taken … eleven minutes.
