On Sunday morning, Virgin Galactic (NYSE:SPCE, profiled above) CEO Richard Branson touched the edge of space, beating Blue Origin CEO Jeff Bezos’s own escapade into suborbital space by nine days.
The journeys cap a race between billionaires Branson and Bezos to prove their companies are safe for commercial travel, paving the way for daily passenger trips by 2022. Amid the pandemic- and climate-related negative news of the last few months, finally a bright spot: space tourism has liftoff.
But is it a bright spot? The view from the mesosphere must be serene — assuming it’s hard to see the raging wildfires and diminishing icecaps. Soaring 86km above a drought-hit New Mexico, it’s unclear whether Branson had any of the epiphanies about the Earth’s fragility and unity so often relayed by astronauts.
Aerospace technology is exciting. Burning the required fossil fuels to launch rockets 86km above the earth every single day: not so much. Rockets individually produce up to 150 times more CO2 per launch per passenger than aircraft.
That seems unlikely to bring investor excitement back down to earth. In a note, Morgan Stanley today observed that “investor interest in space, which just two years ago was as vacuous as space itself, today seems to be on a path to become as crowded as an orbital debris field.”
Our analytics show the price of that enthusiasm. Virgin Galactic says emissions will be offset, but it’s still an enormous negative climate impact for a few minutes in zero gravity.
