Commercial space travel is risky business

The Polaris Dawn mission made history this month with the first-ever commercial spacewalk.

The expedition was a partnership between Elon Musk’s SpaceX and another billionaire entrepreneur, Jared Isaacman, who was one of two civilians on the mission to leave the confines of the ship and enter the vast expanse of space.

Missing from the picture almost entirely? NASA and the U.S. government. Space travel is no longer reserved for highly trained government astronauts, but increasingly open to anyone with the funds (and the courage) to try it. 

But before we all go strapping on our spacesuits, Chris Impey, a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, says we need to be clear-eyed about the risks.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Impey about those risks and the rewards that might make them worth it.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Chris Impey: Well, nominally, it’s a dangerous thing to go into space. The death rate for launch to Earth orbit is about 3%, so, you know, that’s up there with BASE jumping and flying in a wingsuit. It’s a risky thing. It’s as risky as anything humans do. And yet, no civilian has died in space yet, but there also has only been a few dozen civilians in space over the years. And so, if we see the trajectory of SpaceX and Blue Origin, they’re heading towards sending hundreds and then maybe thousands of people up each year. At that level, if the death rate is 3%, people are going to die, you know? And so, it’s hypothetical at the moment, but the risks are going to become quite tangible when you scale up the operation. And so, it’s worth assessing the risks. Individuals who do this, you know, civilians who do this, they’re signing some waiver that alleviates the company of all responsibility and shields them from lawsuits, I know. But if the companies involved want a business model based on tourism or recreation at the very high end, then they can’t be killing people.

Meghan McCarty Carino: One of the accomplishments of this recent SpaceX mission was a successful civilian spacewalk where they actually left the ship and entered the void of space. How risky is that?

Impey: It’s extremely risky. You have to think of a spacesuit as essentially a miniature spacecraft because you’re depending on that. So, it has to have all the systems that your spacecraft would have, and they all have to work in a small space, and it’s miniaturized. You’re in utter vacuum. You’re exposed to radiation. If you go from a daylit place to a shadowed place, the temperature varies by hundreds of degrees. So, that’s extreme stress on the material of a spacesuit. Obviously, you could be punctured by space debris, even space debris the size of a grain of sand. Everything’s moving at, like, 15,000 or 17,000 miles an hour up there, so that could puncture a spacesuit. So you’re exposed to that. And in the history of spacewalks, no one has died doing a spacewalk, but people have come very close. The first spacewalk — 1965, Alexei Leonov, a Russian cosmonaut — he nearly died two different ways, drowning within his spacesuit and not being able to get in the airlock. And several NASA astronauts have had near-drowning experiences.

McCarty Carino: In general, what are the biggest risks of leaving Earth?

Impey: The biggest risks in space travel are, as with flying in fact, going up and coming down. You know, landing and takeoff. So, as we unfortunately know, two of the five space shuttles were lost catastrophically, one soon after launch and the other just before landing. So statistically, those are the most hazardous times in space travel.

McCarty Carino: Because this is such a nascent industry, there really isn’t much regulation on space tourism right now. As you said, folks sign a waiver. It’s mostly up to these companies to regulate themselves. At what point do you think that might need to change?

Impey: The space industry is sort of governed or monitored by an extension of the [Federal Aviation Administration]. It’s a sort of model based on the FAA for civil aviation, and it is lightly regulated. That was a deliberate decision of earlier governments in the 1980s to not smother this entrepreneurial activity before it even got off the ground, so to speak. But if the space industry was demonstrably more dangerous, then the government might have to step in. And the companies obviously don’t want that to happen, and they don’t want to kill people either. So, they’re treading a line between innovating, doing something that’s very risky, because you’re strapping yourself to essentially a high-explosive chemical rocket, and then you’re exposing yourself to the intense hardship of the vacuum of space. So, it’s intrinsically hazardous. You can’t mitigate all those hazards by safety features or systems. I guess the model is like civil aviation, which was dangerous if you flew commercially in the 1920s, when the death rate in civil aviation was hundreds of times higher than it is now. It got safer, and the industry wasn’t smothered and didn’t die because people wanted to fly. So, I guess the space industry is hoping for a model that analogizes civil aviation.

McCarty Carino: Despite these risks that you have enumerated, the commercial space industry and space tourism appear to be growing quite quickly. Does that surprise you?

Impey: No, because you’re working from the high end of the market. But the price point has to come down quite a lot before this business model is meaningful. But if you believe the surveys and if people believe that space travel is maybe not as safe as flying in an airplane, but is still safer than the most hazardous recreations we do on Earth, and the price point comes down to, say, a very fancy luxury cruise, there’s a lot of people who say they would do it. So, the market is there. And these business models are hypothetical, but they’re not completely made of vaporware, I don’t think.

McCarty Carino: We have talked a lot about the risks of leaving Earth. What are the rewards, in your view?

Impey: I would love to be able to speak about the rewards by having done it, but I can only judge by what people say. The civilians who go up say it’s an awe-inspiring experience to see the planet as a whole with no boundaries, no barriers, no countries, no walls. It’s an experience that astronauts have called the overview effect because it leads to a feeling of exhilaration and awe, being suspended above the whole planet. And that’s an experience, apparently, that stays with you. Astronauts have reported this extensively, and that’s a little intangible. Are there other benefits to space travel? Not clear yet. One of the possible benefits that people have talked about is when you learn how to live in space, in Earth orbit or in a base on Mars or on the moon, you have to be completely self-contained and self-sufficient. You’d be mining the soil to make building material. You’d be getting water from the soil, breaking the water into oxygen to breathe and hydrogen to make rocket fuel. You’d grow your food hydroponically. So, you have to be completely self-sufficient. And some have argued that the skills we would learn and the technologies we would use to live in space could teach us how to live more parsimoniously on the Earth, where we essentially act as if the Earth is an infinite resource that we can just use up at will.

McCarty Carino: Where do you think the commercial space industry goes from here?

Impey: Well, if you believe the prognostications of the two main space gurus, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, their ventures at the moment into Earth orbit to resupply the space station and so on, that’s how SpaceX has made money in the last few years. But those two founders are visionaries — dreamers, if you like. And they have their eyes set on the moon and Mars and bases there and colonies there, and that seems very fanciful at a time when only a few dozen civilians have ever been in orbit. To go to the moon is much more difficult, and to go to Mars is vastly more difficult. So that really remains to be seen whether those are realistic plans. But if you read SpaceX’s publicity material and you think the starship will do what Elon Musk hopes the starship will do, then maybe eventually you can get there too. But it’s decades away.

More on this

Chris Impey mentioned Elon Musk’s plans to get to Mars, and just this week, on his social media platform, X, Musk said SpaceX is planning to send uncrewed missions to the red planet within two years, and depending on their success, manned missions thereafter. Of course, like anything Musk says, that timeline can be taken with a grain or more of salt.

But populating Mars has been a longtime obsession for Musk, and according to reporting in The New York Times, he has devoted significant resources at his company SpaceX to planning for an eventual Martian settlement.

Meanwhile, billionaire space rival Jeff Bezos has a plan to build space stations for astronauts and tourists.

This year his company Blue Origin passed several milestones in proving to NASA that its planned station Orbital Reef can support life, including testing a system that can recycle urine into drinking water.

Something tells me that space tourism won’t be quite as glamorous as the jet-setting golden age of civilian aviation.

A long read from The New York Times magazine delves into the various bodily indignities of space travel, noting that the sensory deficits induced by zero gravity can often be helpful because the space station tends to smell like body odor and farts.

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