Commercial Space Travel Is a Giant Leap for the One Percent

If you can't afford the ride, stream the video.

Peter Garrison

Thursday, June 09, 2022 at 12:24 PM ET

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Blue Origin recently completed its 20th spaceflight for the New Shepard missions. [Courtesy: Blue Origin]

Key Takeaways:

The article clarifies that the "edge of space" visited by suborbital tourism is merely the Earth's fading atmosphere, with common definitions like the Kármán Line being arbitrary; it also argues that the title "astronaut" should strictly apply to active flight crew, not passengers.
It contrasts the technical approaches of Blue Origin, which uses a conventional vertical rocket, with Virgin Galactic's mothership-launched spaceplane, noting Blue Origin's grander ambitions despite Virgin Galactic's roots in simpler, Rutan-designed technology.
The author critically views current commercial suborbital space tourism as "plutocratization" due to its prohibitive costs, making it accessible only to the extremely wealthy, rather than a true "democratization of space."

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We heard a lot in August 2021 about the “edge of space” and the life-changing effects of going to it. But wait a minute—does space even have an edge?

Space is everywhere. It permeates everything, as water does a sponge. In fact, the volume each of us occupies in the world is mostly empty space. What Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and their clients went to the edge of was not space, but the Earth’s atmosphere. And of course, the atmosphere does not have a real edge either; it just gradually gets harder and harder to detect.