The height of luxury is 65 miles above you. For four minutes there last month, a gaggle of six lucky space tourists — including a former party supplies tycoon, a university professor, a property developer and his wife — floated happily on Jeff Bezos’s New Shepard capsule, a spunky, workmanlike hunk of metal described variously as ‘a gumdrop shaped capsule’ and a ‘dong rocket’. It was the 20th successful launch by the Amazon founder’s $1bn-a-year Blue Origin joyride project since last July, the first not to boast a celebrity crewmember — Pete Davidson, the Saturday Night Live star feuding with Kanye West while dating his ex, Kim Kardashian, dropped out due to a scheduling conflict.
A new space race is accelerating. This time, it’s not about superpowers duking it out for supremacy but private companies ferrying wide-eyed mugs into Earth’s orbit. Last July, Richard Branson’s big, shiny Virgin Galactic space rocket plane made it 53.4 miles up to the edge of space; Musk’s balletic Falcon rockets are reusable, and reliably so, flinging heavy payloads — and people — above the atmosphere 31 times last year like a slick, sci-fi trampoline.
‘2021 was the most exciting year for US space since 1969, when the United States put a man on the Moon,’ says Roman Chiporukha, CEO of SpaceVIP, a ‘one-stop shop’ travel company for space experiences manifested from moneybags clients’ demands that their out-of-this-world fix be satisfied. A travel agent, but for space. Fancy a six-hour suborbital trip? A cool £96,000 for a jolly with Space Perspective, a private company that is set to tether hermetically-sealed capsules to space-faring balloons. For about £190,000 I can snap up a seat on one of Branson’s Virgin Galactic flights. And for an eye-watering £42 million, I’m to scoop a spot on the International Space Station with Axiom Space, a company training private astronauts for space proper.
I, like you, don’t have £42m. Can losers like us dream of going to space? ‘I look at this like the advent of airline travel,’ says Chiporukha. ‘One hundred years ago, when people started taking commercial flights it was eye-wateringly expensive. Then, more people became interested and prices came down.’ Right, but I don’t have 100 years on me either. ‘Remember when a flat-screen TV cost $15,000?’ he says. ‘Now you can get one for 400 bucks. So it’s just a matter of people being interested and the prices coming down. I don’t think it’s going to happen in the next five years but certainly in the next 10 to 15, as people start to take more of an interest.’
How many clients has he slipped on to a spaceship thus far? ‘None.’ This, after all, is rocket science. Reaching Earth’s orbit is still exorbitant — and tricky. Astronauts need to be trained for the rigours of space, and that trip takes deep pockets. In the 1990s as Amazon took off, Bezos’s ex-girlfriend told reporters that ‘the reason he’s earning so much money is to get to outer space’. A friend later claimed that Bezos began bulking up ‘in anticipation of the day that he, too, would journey to the heavens’ — hence the muscle-busting gilets and disturbingly tight T-shirts of post-Noughties Jeff.
The luxurious gold-capped windows are all the better to frame views of Earth below
So, I asked Axiom Space nicely if I might hitch a freebie lift with its paying crew of star farers. On 8 April the Ax-1 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) blasted off in one of Elon Musk’s SpaceX Dragon 1 capsules, with the first private astronauts to ever set foot on a space station. It’s a 10-day trip. ‘I am head down going into this mission,’ says Dr Mary Lynne Dittmar, executive vice president of government operations and strategic communications at Axiom, and founder of the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration — space code for ‘brb, am busy’. ‘I do have to say, though, that our crew are not tourists. There is a role for that but that’s not what Axiom is doing. Our team trained for between 700 and 1,000 hours… They are the first wave of non-government astronauts who are opening the path for private astronauts of all stripes destined for not just the ISS but for commercial space stations.’
I just want a nice holiday, Mary Lynne. But Axiom Station, a space palace eventually to be attached to the ISS, and replace it when it’s retired in 2024, is to be a place for recreation as well as research. The interiors — all luxurious gold-capped windows with rounded corners all the better to frame views of Earth below — have been designed by Philippe Starck, the renowned French designer who once told me that all humanity was his hero, ‘from bacteria four billion years ago, to the fish, to the frog, to the monkey, to the supermonkeys we are today’. Suede-textured walls of each private cabin are dotted with hundreds of nano LED lights that change colour depending on the time, and where the space station is travelling in relation to Earth. ‘Just like all the shades of lights and colours of day and night, the egg will also live to the mood and biorhythm of its osmotic inhabitant,’ Starck told Dezeen magazine. It’s meant to ‘evoke the feeling of being weightless in the womb’.
How does the little guy get there? People power is key, says Kim Macharia, executive director of the Space Prize Foundation, a non-profit organisation focused on promoting Stem+Arts education and increasing the representation of women in space. Inevitably, that means lurking cryptocurrency opportunists — the surest sidekick of any exciting modern market. Blockchain companies such as SpaceFund, which claims to invest in space technology start-ups, have already tried to raise money from space-mad digital devotees, selling NFTs as digital stock options.
The private space race is ‘a little bit like K-pop’, says Macharia, with frenzied fans devoting immense amounts of time to supporting rivals SpaceX or Blue Origin online. Depending on whom you ask, it’s either space tulip mania, or it’s a way of democratising a billionaire boy’s club. But Macharia is serious about diversifying the space race. ‘The space industry will never live up to its full potential until its workforce becomes more representative of the global population,’ she says. ‘This means we must address the disparities that plague the industry. The future of space, and humanity, depends on it.’ The space industry is worth £345 billion right now, she says — by 2040 it will be worth trillions. But there is a talent gap. And the more people we have coming into the industry, the greater the hysteria around space, the higher space stocks rise, the more talent we attract into the industry and the greater chance we have of reaching escape velocity from our little ball of rock. Or at least making someone else very rich as we die trying.
Why go there at all? No one has yet posted a five-star TripAdvisor review from space. Butlin’s is, arguably, nicer this time of year. But ‘exploration itself changes us’, says Dittmar. ‘It is a tremendous teacher. We adapt our technology and we learn to make use of the resources available to us.’ Just going to the edge of space, you experience the so-called overview effect, says Macharia, ‘this amazing sensation of interconnectedness that astronauts tend to feel, and which makes them reflect on the kind of problems and political strife happening on our planet. This new perspective that we really are just on this tiny, blue dot in the middle of the universe.’ Mm, nice. I went to Butlin’s and all I got was a lousy T-shirt. Maybe I would like a piece of that.
