No, billionaires won’t “run away” into space while the world burns

[ad_1]

Last Friday, Richard Branson announced, in the latest blow to the billionaire’s space race, that he will fly into low Earth orbit on July 11, nine days before Jeff Bezos’s scheduled visit. While some wealthy oligarchs cheered on the company’s chosen leader, many on Twitter responded with renewed anger that not one but three billionaires had amassed enough wealth to start their own personal space programs. The news landed particularly fiercely after a week in which hundreds of people died from a record-breaking heat dome in Canada and the Pacific Northwest and the ocean caught fire.

What has surprised me is the number of people who seem to believe that Musk, Bezos, and Branson are trying to “escape” the ravages of climate change for the sake of life in space — and may even succeed in doing so. The idea that the rich would live comfortably on Earth while the planet became an uninhabitable wasteland has been popularized in films like “Elysium” and “WALL-E.” The New York Times fueled this fantasy in 2018 with a story about Axiom’s proposed luxury space hotel, headlined “The Rich Are Plotting To Leave This Miserable Planet.”

But as a fiction writer and wife of a NASA flight controller, let me assure you that the runaway from Earth for the sake of a space-space city is a metaphor in fiction — at least in our lifetimes.

The most comfortable living situation we’ve ever created above Earth orbit is on the International Space Station. The International Space Station (ISS) is an incredible engineering feat – work that the joint space agencies of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada have been working on for 23 years now. But life on the International Space Station is nothing but luxury.

About half a dozen astronauts live there at any given time, hopping around a narrow tube with unchosen roommates who can’t shower properly for months in a row. slow wifi. The food is not Michelin starred, to say the least. Putting them to sleep is like a floating coffin. Defecation requires a complicated procedure in the toilet bowl where the door is a plastic curtain and everything is floating.

The astronauts’ time is meticulously managed by a team of experts on the ground. Unlike the flight paths that future space tourists imagine, a lot of their time is spent working on actual science, but a lot is dedicated to just survival as well. Space dwellers must exercise at least two hours a day to keep their bones from turning sticky. They spend a lot of time studying systems and making repairs on equipment that breaks down frequently because space wants to kill you. Outside the space station, there are micro-meteoroid strikes, extreme temperature fluctuations, cold welding of metal parts taking place in a vacuum, and atomic oxygen/ultraviolet degradation. Inside, things often fall out of age and constant use—fans, exercise equipment, and toilets tragically.

The ISS crew cannot survive there at all because many countries employ thousands of brilliant and highly trained engineers, doctors, astrophysicists and computer experts, whose full-time job is to keep them alive and running the ISS. When something breaks, these teams scramble to invent fixes. And these repairs – Lord, are they boring.

I thought my wife’s job was pretty glamorous, all hanging out with astronauts at Mission Control. But during this pandemic year, he’s mostly been working from home, and I’ve peeked at the plans and heard parts of the meetings. It’s like an IKEA furniture assembly guide. Fall in love with a PhD math book – this level of boredom.

Every time a critical system breaks outside the station, astronauts have to study these plans and procedures for hours to learn how to fix the broken thing. Then the spacewalks themselves take five to eight hours in a bulky suit, working in hard gloves, and with someone in your ear all saying, “Drive the 7A bolt to the 31X dock.” That’s five to eight hours of hard, tedious work that often leaves discerning astronauts shivering from muscle fatigue. Can you imagine Richard Branson enjoying that? I do not print.

Scott Kelly was the first American astronaut to spend a consecutive year in space on a single mission. Once home, he retired from NASA and worked on writing his memoir, called Endurance. He had spent his adult life preparing to be an astronaut, and he still found it physically and psychologically difficult to stay there for only one year. “During my time in orbit, I lost my bone mass, my muscles atrophied, and my blood redistributed itself in my body, straining my heart,” he wrote. “Every day, I am exposed to ten times the radiation of a person on Earth, which will increase my risk of developing fatal cancer for the rest of my life.”

So rest assured, Bezos and Branson won’t be sipping champagne by their pool at Low-Earth Mar-a-Lago. Even if Axiom built its own space hotel, it would be cramped and dangerous, and when the toilet broke, someone would have to clean up the floating filth. Despite their fortunes, billionaires don’t have the power to make space a more comfortable place than Earth. I can’t tell if they understood that or not. Musk doesn’t sound like it when he says he wants to “die on Mars.”

And what about Musk’s dream of a colony on Mars, or at least the moon? This is less astronomically feasible. The more you try to keep life in space away from Earth, the more difficult it becomes. And although they have the benefit of gravity, the surfaces of the Moon and Mars are covered in soft lure that fills the mechanisms. NASA is currently working on sending astronauts to live on the Moon as part of the Artemis mission. They’ve worked on Artemis’ plans for years and will continue to plan for many more years before sending the first crew to sleep on the moon — for a week or two, max. No, there will never be a Moon-a-Lago, let alone a Mars-a-Lago, in our lifetime.

So, despite Musk’s lofty claims to make humanity a “multi-planetary species,” this is a method that is way beyond the realm of current technical possibilities. And his claims are particularly absurd, given that in order to generate the wealth that sustains billionaires like Musk, we are rapidly destroying the only planet we can live on – Earth. If we do not reverse the environmental and societal degradation caused by global capitalism, the International Space Station may well turn out to be the pinnacle of human space exploration.

So when you understand the science, it becomes clear that the “Billionaire Space Race” is nothing more than a pissing contest between selfish robber barons. Branson and Bezos are not investing to redirect science or expand the frontiers of human potential. They do so to be the first wealthy man to navigate uselessly out there, unlike the NASA astronauts who are, once again, studying science. After they jump in vain, they hope to trick more of their wealthy friends into doing the same.

The futility of it all is especially despicable when you understand that space tourism is financed by the overwhelmed wealth of billions of workers struggling to survive here on Earth. The space tourism industry will be built with profits from supply chains that work to death by exhaustion, literally enslaving people, and rapidly destroying the future livability of our planet.

This is a very dark dystopia. We should really think about getting our fortune back from the billionaires before they build it.

But if we fail, join me in enjoying schadenfreude. Space tourism will inevitably suck. Our billionaires won’t find anything there but plenty of time to sit with the enormous emptiness in their hearts, a place they certainly won’t fill, while forcibly holding an absorbent toilet seat, because they’re constipated. The hell out of astronaut food.

The world is burning, and billionaires are arguably the most responsible people. But at least they won’t be able to escape to another better place. They will live and die (alone, like all of us) on this beautiful, precious planet, one out of every gazillion.

[ad_2]