Space travel is getting a bit common. Well, not for the commoners yet. But while space travel with our furry friends might sound like science fiction, let’s imagine what it would take to keep our Fantastic Furs safe on the ultimate journey around Earth or to the Moon!
Pre-Flight Health Checks
Before any space adventure, your furry friends would need extensive health screenings. Just like human astronauts, dogs and cats would require perfect health to handle the stress of space travel. Your veterinarian would need to conduct thorough examinations, including heart health, bone density, and mental wellness assessments. Any underlying conditions could become dangerous in space’s zero-gravity environment.
Managing Space Anxiety
Space travel would be incredibly stressful for dogs and cats. The loud rocket sounds, vibrations, and completely new environment would likely trigger severe anxiety. Based on how we help dogs and cats during thunderstorms or fireworks, similar strategies might work in space. Anti-anxiety medications prescribed by your veterinarian would be essential, tested well before launch day.
Creating a familiar, safe space would be crucial. This might include their favorite blankets, toys, and comfort items in a specially designed furry habitat. Calming music or white noise could help mask the scary sounds of the spacecraft.
Zero-Gravity Challenges
The biggest challenge would be helping dogs and cats adapt to weightlessness. Dogs and cats rely on gravity for basic functions like eating, drinking, and using the bathroom. Special feeding systems and waste management would be needed. Your furry friend might feel confused and scared when they can’t walk normally or control their movements.
Life Support Systems
Canine and felines would need their own life support systems, including oxygen, temperature control, and air filtration. The spacecraft would require fur-safe materials and secure areas to prevent your furry friend from floating into dangerous equipment.
Exercise and Mental Stimulation
Long journeys would require special exercise equipment designed for zero gravity. Mental stimulation through puzzle toys and interactive games would be vital for preventing stress and depression during the trip.
Emergency Preparedness
A veterinarian would likely need to accompany furry passengers, equipped with space-safe medical supplies and emergency procedures. Communication systems would allow contact with Earth-based veterinary specialists if needed.
Important Note: Always consult with your veterinarian about your furry companion’s universe and wormhole travel needs. If your dog or cat experiences stress during regular activities, professional veterinary care and possibly a veterinary behaviorist can help develop appropriate treatment plans.
In June, 2024, Perseverance, a NASA rover sent to collect samples on the surface of Mars, came upon a cluster of rocks in what is thought to be a former riverbed. Most of the rocks were identified as mudstones—they likely formed from the sediment in slow-moving water—meaning they would be perfect vessels for any traces of aquatic life in the area. After a monthlong, systematic geological survey, scientists took a special interest in an arrowhead-shaped stone slab dubbed Cheyava Falls. The rover drilled a sample of it, which researchers called Sapphire Canyon, for an eventual return to Earth. (Confusingly, the names are borrowed from Grand Canyon National Park and do not reflect the geography or the scale of the Martian specimens; the red planet’s Cheyava Falls is two feet across, and its Sapphire Canyon could fit in a tube of lipstick.)
The discovery may go down in history. Perseverance determined that the whole area around Cheyava Falls is rich in oxidized iron, phosphorus, sulfur, and organic carbon—a combination that microbes could potentially feed on. Colorful spots on Cheyava Falls contain the mineral greigite, which some microbes on Earth excrete, and vivianite, which is often found around decaying organic matter. Producing such minerals in a lifeless place would probably require acidic conditions or high temperatures—and the area showed signs of neither. Together, these findings are a “potential biosignature,” Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance’s project scientist, said at a press conference on Wednesday. This means that they are more likely to be the result of biology than the result of something else. Scientists published their findings this week in the journal Nature. Sean Duffy, the interim administrator of NASA, called them “the clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars.”
Billions of years ago, as life was emerging on Earth, Mars is thought to have fostered a wide, shimmering ocean, as well as rivers and deltas that might have flooded when it rained. If biology was possible on Earth, then it was possible on the ancient surface of Mars. The red planet eventually lost most of its atmosphere, presumably wiping out whatever might have flourished on it, but there could still be traces, even fossils.
Life on other planets has been “discovered” before. At the turn of the twentieth century, Percival Lowell, an American astronomer, spent years mapping artificial canals that he believed had been built on Mars. Other astronomers spent decades challenging his interpretation. The issue wasn’t settled until 1965, when NASA’s Mariner 4 spacecraft flew past Mars and saw no canals. Even after that, many scientists thought that Mars harbored life. The Martian surface darkened during certain parts of the year, giving rise to theories that plants grew there. Carl Sagan, who said that extraordinary claims required extraordinary evidence, hypothesized that the dark patches were caused by windstorms, not flora, but even he hadn’t abandoned the possibility that Martian life forms existed. In the planning stages of the two-part Viking mission, which landed spacecraft on Mars in the mid-seventies, Sagan argued that the probes should include lights and cameras, in case creatures scurried past.
In the end, the Viking landers found no creatures, and biological experiments proved inconclusive. Then, in the nineties, NASA scientists studied a Martian meteorite discovered in the Allan Hills of Antarctica. It contained strange blobs and wormlike structures, which the scientists interpreted as evidence of fossilized bacteria. President Bill Clinton gave a speech to mark what was potentially “one of the most stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered.” But when other scientists reëvaluated the meteorite, they came up with several explanations that did not require the existence of aliens. Inorganic crystals could have caused the wormy features; the types of chemical reactions that produce limestone could have caused the blobs.
There was potential evidence for extraterrestrial life in our solar system, but it didn’t reach the threshold of proof. “We have a bunch of bridges built halfway, from various lines of evidence,” Kirby Runyon, a research scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, headquartered in Tucson, told me. In 2020, astronomers asserted that they’d found phosphine gas in Venus’s atmosphere, and that life could have produced it. (On Earth, bacteria produce phosphine, but so do chemical reactions involving phosphorus.) Some scholars countered that Venusian volcanoes could have produced phosphine; others said that the measurements were dubious, and the mystery gas wasn’t phosphine.
Runyon described the authors of the recent Nature paper as appropriately cautious: they offered many caveats and didn’t jump to conclusions. If an identical rock were found on Earth, he said, we would assume it had a biological origin. “The geochemistry is very reminiscent of life,” he told me. But claims of life on Mars are extraordinary, and verifying them requires extraordinary evidence. “The skeptical posture says we’re just running up against how far rocks and geochemistry can go to look like life—but not be life. And that reveals the extent to which we must be cautious in interpreting our scientific results.”
There could be a way to prove that the Cheyava Falls rock contains signs of life: by studying it more closely than Perseverance is able to do. “If this is the most compelling potential biosignature on Mars, and it seems to be, logic dictates that NASA should go back with more missions, or bring that sample home for analysis,” Runyon said. Unfortunately, NASA is currently facing its own extinction-level event: the Trump Administration has recommended a budget that cuts the agency’s over-all federal funding by nearly a quarter, and essentially halves its spending on its science program. The proposal would also cancel the mission to return the samples to Earth. Duffy, a Trump appointee, seemed pleased during Wednesday’s announcement, but he is part of an Administration that would leave the bridge half built.
The authors of the Cheyava Falls paper spent a year in the peer-review process, and during that time their discovery was publicly known. Did NASA headquarters seize this moment to publicize its findings in hopes of resurrecting the sample-return mission? “The announcement was more earnest than calculated, I believe,” Casey Dreier, the chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a space-exploration-advocacy group that is headed by Bill Nye, told me. “But it only raises the issues of the President’s self-contradictory and self-sabotaging budget.” Trump’s proposed budget would cancel forty-one science missions and slash Perseverance funding by twenty-three per cent. There’s no money to be saved on the building, launching, and landing of Perseverance—these things have already happened—so “the only dial you can turn to achieve that is by doing less science,” Dreier said. The budget, which could take effect on October 1st if Congress does not pass an appropriations bill, would also effectively disable two healthy spacecraft that are orbiting Mars: MAVEN and Mars Odyssey, both of which Perseverance uses to send communications back to Earth. (Early this year, Trump vowed to land humans on Mars, but his proposed budget invests very little in that effort.)
Methodical science could perhaps be accused of constraining our collective imagination. We no longer dream of discovering moon bats, Venusian dinosaurs, and Martian beavers, as scientists and sci-fi writers of old once did. Yet NASA is arguably within reach of something even more wondrous: the truth about life on another planet. In Dreier’s view, that would seem to call for more science, not less. “NASA just found potential signatures of life, and the official plan is to walk away from it,” Dreier said. Still, he seemed hopeful that Duffy and the rest of the Trump Administration might change course. “This is the exciting part of NASA,” he told me. “Discoveries like this are why we do this, and highlight what we could be giving up. I hope some people get inspired.” ♦
The rigors of space travel could accelerate changes in the human body usually associated with aging.
According to a new study of human tissues sent into low-Earth orbit, time in space reduces cell production, exacerbates DNA damage, and increases the signs of aging in the telomeres that cap the ends of the chromosomes.
“Space is the ultimate stress test for the human body,” says physician Catriona Jamieson of the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine.
“These findings are critically important because they show that the stressors of space – like microgravity and cosmic galactic radiation – can accelerate the molecular aging of blood stem cells.
“Understanding these changes not only informs how we protect astronauts during long-duration missions but also helps us model human aging and diseases like cancer here on Earth. This is essential knowledge as we enter a new era of commercial space travel and research in low Earth orbit.”
Over time, scientists have gained a much better understanding of the effects of spaceflight on the human body, but there’s a lot we still don’t know.
Led by biochemist Jessica Pham of UC San Diego, a team of researchers developed a bioreactor system to cultivate and monitor human hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs) in microgravity.
A close examination of the HSPCs – which are involved in the production and maintenance of the blood – could provide a better understanding of the aging effects of spaceflight on a molecular level, the researchers reasoned.
The experimental platforms were then placed on SpaceX’s International Space Station resupply missions, which spent between 32 and 45 days in low-Earth orbit. The effects on the cells were remarkable, with several key findings.
A graphical abstract summarizing the effects of spaceflight on human HSPCs. (Pham et al., Cell Stem Cell, 2025)
In a microgravity environment, the rate at which the blood-forming stem cells produce inflammatory proteins increases, resulting in a higher workload with less time to recover. The result of this was an increase in several markers generally associated with aging.
The cells became less able to produce healthy new cells over time and showed signs of wear and tear. Of particular note was a shortening of the telomeres. These are the protective caps at the ends of our chromosomes, and typically, they grow shorter over time with each cell division, until they’re so short they can’t divide anymore. Short telomeres are also strongly associated with aging.
Interestingly, some of the cells grew so stressed that they were unable to express proteins that suppress activation of the ‘dark genome‘ – the so-called junk DNA that normally resides dormant in our cells, suppressed to maintain stability. This meant that these sections of the genome started waking up, which in turn can impair immune function.
It’s not all doom and gloom. The researchers found that once the cells had been returned to Earth and were placed on young, healthy bone marrow substrates, some of the damage reversed. This suggests that spaceflight-related damage is repairable, and further research efforts in this direction may aid astronaut recovery in the future, as well as offer insights into aging here on Earth.
“These short-duration spaceflight models of accelerated HSPC aging may provide insights into terrestrial human aging and age-related malignancies,” the researchers write in their paper.
“Ultimately, these studies may provide guidance for therapeutic strategies to mitigate space-specific changes in the expanding space economy, as well as space-accelerated models of aging and age-related diseases, such as cancer.”
We could be entering a renaissance for human spaceflight research, as a record number of private citizens head to space — and as scientists improve techniques for gathering data on these intrepid test subjects.
A sign that the renaissance is imminent appeared earlier this week, when the journal Nature published a cache of papers detailing the physical and mental changes the four-person Inspiration4 crew experienced nearly three years ago. That mission, in partnership with SpaceX, launched on September 15, 2021 and returned to Earth three days later.
During the mission, the crew experienced a broad set of modest molecular changes, dysregulated immune systems and slight decreases in cognitive performance. But researchers are only able to analyze the data — more than 100,000 health-related data points — because the four-person crew was able to reliably collect it in the first place.
This is a bigger accomplishment than one might realize. The Inspiration4 crew received plenty of training, in large part with SpaceX, which provided the Dragon capsule for their ride through orbit. But their preparation is still a far cry from that of NASA astronauts aboard the ISS, and who also regularly perform a battery of health tests on themselves. That includes ultrasounds, cognitive tests, biopsies, blood and saliva testing, skin swabs and sensorimotor tests.
“You can do research with private individuals in space, that is the number one result [of the research],” said Dr. Dorit Donoviel in a recent interview. Dr. Donoviel is co-author of one of the papers published in Nature and associate professor in the Center for Space Medicine at Baylor University. She’s also the executive director of NASA-funded research consortium Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH), which conducts and funds cutting-edge research to improve human safety in space.
“I’ll be honest, nobody was sure that we were going to be able to gather a reasonable amount of data, that we were going to be able to implement it, that regular people who have never had exposure to scientific research could do something that we would actually be able to analyze,” she continued, referring to the Inspiration4 mission.
In some obvious ways, the Inspiration4 crew are far from ordinary: The mission’s leader, Jared Isaacman, is a billionaire that founded a payment processing company when he was 16; Hayley Arcenaux is a physician’s assistant at the world-renowned St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital; Sian Proctor is a pilot with a PhD who teaches geology at the college level; and Christopher Sembroski is a former U.S. Air Force journeyman whose long career as an aerospace engineer brought him to his current workplace, Blue Origin.
The Inspiration4 crew. Image Credits: Inspiration4
And yet, they still came to Inspiration4 as spaceflight novices. That meant TRISH researchers had to come up with a testing suite that could be performed with minimal training. The Inspiration4 crew also wore Apple Watches, and the capsule was outfitted with environmental sensors that researchers were able to correlate to the other testing results. Correlating the data is “unusual,” Dr. Donoviel said, but it gave researchers unique insights into how changes in the confined environment affected things like heart rate or cognitive performance.
Overall, researchers are trying to move toward digitizing testing and making more of the data-gathering passive, to lower the cognitive overhead on the private astronaut. (NASA astronauts also take cognitive tests, but they do so using pencil and paper, Dr. Donoviel said.)
Gathering such information will be critical as the number of private citizens heading to space increases, as it seems almost certainly poised to do in the coming decade. Researchers will be better able to understand the effects of spaceflight on people that don’t fit the mold of the typical NASA astronaut: male, white and in the top percentiles for physical and cognitive performance. But they’ll only be able to do so if the future space tourists are willing to collect the data.
More data means a better understanding of how spaceflight affects women versus men, or could help future space tourists with pre-existing conditions understand how they will fare in the zero-G environment. The results from Inspiration4 are promising, especially for space tourism: TRISH’s paper found, based on the data from that mission, short-duration missions do not pose significant health risks. This latest preliminary finding adds to existing data that longer-term stints in space — in this case, 340 days — may not be as dangerous as once presumed.
So far, commercial providers ranging from Axiom Space to SpaceX to Blue Origin have been more than willing to work with TRISH, and agreed to standardize and pool the data collected on their respective missions, Dr. Donoviel said.
“They’re all competing for these people [as customers], but this allows them to contribute to a common knowledge base,” she added.
This is only the beginning. The rise in non-governmental spaceflight missions raises major questions related to the norms, ethics and regulation of human research in space. While more private citizens are likely headed to space than ever before, will they be interested in being guinea pigs in order to further scientific research? Will a private astronaut paying $50 million for a luxury space tourism experience want to spend their time in orbit conducting ultrasounds on themselves or meticulously measuring their temporary cognitive decline?
Possibly; possibly not. Last year, Donoviel co-published an article in Science calling for, among other things, the development of a set of principles to guide commercial spaceflight missions. One of those principles the authors called for is social responsibility — essentially, the idea that private astronauts arguably have a heightened social responsibility to advance this research.
“If you’re going to space, you’re resting on the laurels of all of the public funding that has enabled you to go to space. The taxpayers paid for all of those space capabilities that have now enabled you to go to space. So you owe the taxpayers the research,” Dr. Donoviel argued. She added that advances in wearable tech have only lowered the burden on the research participants — not just with the Apple Watch, but with tech like the Biobutton device that continuously collects many vital signs or a sweat patch.
“We’re not going to make it miserable for you, we’re not going to poke you with a needle, we’re not going to make you do an ultrasound, but wear the Biobutton and put on the sweat patch.”
Based on the 2008 novel by Liu Cixin and brought to the small screen by Game of Thrones creators D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, the series tells the story of an impending alien invasion of Earth.
The show portrays some science that left some viewers with questions and some historical events that have upset some people in China.
Global News spoke to experts to separate fact from fiction and history from hysteria.
What is a three-body problem?
A three-body problem refers to three astronomical bodies, like planets or suns, and how each object’s gravity impacts the other’s orbits.
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But it’s easiest to understand if we start with a two-body problem.
“The closer objects are, the stronger is the gravitational pull,” York University professor emeritus of physics and astronomy Paul Delaney said.
The sun is about a million times larger than the Earth, according to NASA, and so its gravity holds our planet in orbit around it.
The orbit is stable, making it predictable, Delaney said.
This is a two-body problem, just like the moon and the Earth, and it’s a problem that’s been solved since Sir Isaac Newton’s work on gravity.
“We can theoretically figure out where (the two objects) will be as a function of time,” Delaney told Global News.
“There are complications with angular momentum and tidal forces and friction,” he said, speaking from Tuscon, Ariz., “but to all practical intents and purposes, the moon will stay in a stable orbit.”
There are other planets in the solar system and the moon orbits Earth. Delaney told Global News, though, that these objects are so far away and have such small mass compared with the sun that they don’t significantly influence the Earth’s orbit.
A three-body problem involves another astronomical object, like another sun.
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“The stability of the planetary orbit around the two stars,” he said, “is not stable.”
‘We’re charting a course to Mars’: Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen reflects on moon mission
That instability means the orbit becomes less predictable because the changing distances and forces that the objects exert on each other would also alter the speed.
“Therefore, predicting where they will be as a function of time (is) doable, but much more difficult,” Delaney said.
So, three-body problems do exist and can get even more complicated, with even eight stars.
An “n-body” problem, Delaney explained — where “n” represents any number of objects exerting gravity on each other — is “horrendous” to calculate.
An n-body problem could eventually result in one of the objects colliding with another, or being ejected off into space, according to Delaney.
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And the different gravities pulling on a planet in an n-body problem of two or more could disrupt, if not destroy, life on the planet.
It could affect tectonic plates and cause earthquakes, alter tides and change the water cycle and weather, Delaney told Global News.
“If our surface temperature fell below zero consistently for just years, let alone centuries or beyond, yeah, we’d be toast,” he said.
The three-body problem in the Netflix show refers to three suns, with the Trisolaran people living on a planet caught between them.
“Tri” comes from the Latin and Greek language and means “three,” while “solar” comes from the Latin word for “sun.” Their planet is caught between the gravity of the three suns and their civilization is perpetually destroyed.
The aliens want to invade Earth to live on a planet with a stable two-body problem.
To view their potential future home, the Trisolarans use a proton to project and receive information across the universe from Trisolaris to Earth using something called “quantum entanglement.”
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“The moment you put the word ‘quantum’ in front of anything, everybody goes, ‘ooh,’ and anything seems possible,” Delaney said.
Quantum entanglement is real, he added, but it doesn’t work — as far as we know — how the show portrays it.
Protons are positively charged subatomic particles. Along with neutrons, which have no charge (as in, “neutral”), they make up part of an atom’s nucleus.
For example, an atom of hydrogen comprises one proton and one negatively charged electron in a probability field around it.
Protons are not “small lumps of matter that just sits there,” Delaney said. They have specific characteristics, involving, among other things, the electrons around them and their own spin.
“That information, we believe, can be entangled to other particles, so that all of the exact states of this particular particle are mimicked by (that) particle,” Delaney said.
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“And if you change this (proton’s) state, (the other proton’s state) changes instantaneously regardless of distance.”
He said this was an example of one of the frictions between quantum mechanics and the regular atomic theory of matter, which states that anything can only move as fast as the speed of light.
“If you’re 400 light years apart, then it takes 400 years” to get there, travelling at the speed of light, Delaney said.
Entanglement ignores that distance – but it doesn’t mean information can be transmitted.
“The proton isn’t exactly scanning Earth, picking out photographs and transmitting information about its local environment,” he said.
The craft would have been “powered by successive explosions of hydrogen atomic bombs,” according to the American Air and Space Museum website. The crew compartment would be “well shielded from the blast and radiation” and shocks of the blasts were absorbed through water-cooled springs.
The site says the U.S. government cancelled Orion in 1964 after seven years of work “mainly because of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which outlawed nuclear testing in the atmosphere.”
Delaney said the design looked untenable and dangerous, with a giant irradiated plate permanently situated behind the astronauts and a need for many nuclear bombs.
The show has drawn attention not just for its science fiction but also for its portrayals of political events.
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The series opens with a scene set in the 1960s in China during the Cultural Revolution.
“The first scene made my jaw drop,” one person wrote on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform.
“Westerners fundamentally can’t accept the idea of Chinese people inventing cutting-edge technology,” another person wrote on the ratings and social network site Douban.
The Cultural Revolution began in China in 1966 when the leader of the Chinese Community Party (CCP) and country, Mao Zedong, mobilized Chinese youth against the bureaucracy, according to Carleton University professor emeritus Jeremy Paltiel.
Mao believed he was being frozen out of power, he said, and believed he could purge the people he didn’t like while also inoculating China against losing its revolutionary zeal by having young people toss out the old.
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“It became quickly extremely violent because nobody was sure who the right targets were,” Paltiel said.
He said the CCP never fully counted the dead, but “certainly we’re talking about tens of thousands of people who were beaten to death.”
“People were beaten to death in public,” he said, and some were “cannibalized.”
He told Global News he was an exchange student in 1974, after the violence ended.
“In our dorm, the shower stalls had no doors left on them because they’d been taken off during the Cultural Revolution to form armour (for) the students who were fighting each other.”
The country is still ruled by the CCP and Mao remains a revered leader. As such, Paltiel said, the Cultural Revolution is “not very well taught.”
“(The CCP) says it’s a mistake, but they don’t dwell on it” because it’s a period of suffering and humiliation for the party.
He suspected the criticism some in China have levelled at the Netflix series likely stems from surprise from people unfamiliar with what happened, in a country where history and the internet are heavily censored. He also suggests some may be outraged because it seems like foreigners are embarrassing China by showing such a tumultuous time.
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But the novel that forms the source material for the Netflix show was written by a Chinese author, Liu Cixin, and initially published in China before being translated into English.
The novel won the prestigious Hugo Award for science fiction and fantasy in 2015.
While the decision to adapt the book faced criticism in 2020, with five Republican senators calling on Netflix to reconsider over comments by Liu about Uyghur Muslims, Netflix defended the decision in a statement reported on by Variety that year.
“Mr. Liu is the author of the books, not the creator of this series,” Netflix was quoted as saying.
Why not just send our “genius” billionaires to Mars, and let them report back?
Unfortunately, in the short time we homo sapiens have existed on this 4.5-billion-year-old Planet Earth, we have trashed the place. Climate change, deforestation, desertification, plastics in everything, etc.
Fortunately, though, we large-brained hominids have evolved an almost-magical resource that promises to be our salvation: Billionaires!
One of the priceless benefits of amassing a multibillion-dollar, self-regenerating pile of wealth is that it automatically establishes you as “a Genius.” Never mind that you’ve most likely acquired your stash through some combination of inheritance, grift, rank exploitation, tax dodging and such; you’re suddenly treated as a savant whose most fanciful nonsense is now taken seriously by the establishment.
Thus, we presently have two overstuffed money hogs, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, preaching that Earth is a lost cause. But, no problem, for they are designing space technologies that will let a cadre of select humans escape doom by colonizing the Moon and Mars. Using untold billions of our tax dollars, the two are in a PR race to land their spaceships first. But — hey, bozos! — what then? You think our blue-green planet is hell, try living with no air, water, soil, little gravity and zero protection from the incessant bombardment of cosmic radiation.
Well, postulate the billionaire space cadets, “we” (actually meaning us taxpayers) will just geoengineer Mars and the Moon, terraforming them into an Earthlike oasis. But, wait — as astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson pointed out a decade ago — “If you had the power to terraform Mars into Earth, then you have the power to turn Earth back to Earth.”
Tyson later said he’d only go to Mars if the designer of the colony “had sent their mother first.” Nice… but I have no doubt Musk and Bezos would gladly sacrifice their moms to advance their egos.
Forget Millionaires. A Few Billionaires Are Now Stealing Our Country
In the serious business of politics, a little humor can be your best friend.
I saw its impact 30 years ago in Austin when a group of young, irreverent democracy activists decided to try limiting corporations that were drowning our local elections in their special-interest campaign cash. The upstart group named their grassroots effort a name that was a bit whimsical, yet pointed: “Austinites for a Little Less Corruption.”
It caught on. Even though the entire corporate, political and media establishment united in furious opposition to the reform, 70% of voters rather joyously shouted, “YES!”
Now more than ever, we need to rally grassroots Americans in a high-spirited, openly rebellious campaign to save our people’s historic democratic values. An autocratic coterie of plutocratic supremists with unlimited corporate funding already dominates our elections, public policy, agenda and our highest courts. It’s not a secret conspiracy; they’re quite open about it!
But forget the days of million-dollar donors; the arsenal of the systemic corruptors has now been nuclearized. For example, Charles Koch has just injected $5 billion in his 2024 political operation. Tim Dunn, an ultra-right-wing Texas oil baron and extremist GOP sugar daddy, has just sold his fracking empire for $12 billion, gaining a new gusher of cash to weaponize his intention to impose laissez-faire rule over America.
It’s hard to visualize how much more anti-democratic firepower one gets by spending billions instead of mere millions. Think of the difference not in terms of dollars, but time. If you have a million seconds, that’s 11 days. But a billion seconds — that’s more than 31 years!
We can have no progress — no democracy — without getting corporate money out of America’s political system. For info and action, go to citizen.org.
National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, “Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow,” Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be – consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.
Twice elected Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Hightower is a modern-day Johnny Appleseed, spreading the message of progressive populism all across the American grassroots.
He broadcasts daily radio commentaries that are carried in more than 150 commercial and public stations and on the web.
October 31, 2000, was humanity’s last day all humans were together on Earth.
Since that day, there has always been at least one person in space, marking a continuous human presence off our planet.
The International Space Station: A New Era
The event that initiated this ongoing human presence in space was the launch of Expedition 1 to the International Space Station (ISS). The ISS has since been home to astronauts from around the world. It serves as a research laboratory where scientific studies are conducted in microgravity.
Expedition 1 crew members, William Shepherd (USA), Yuri Gidzenko (Russia), and Sergei Krikalev (Russia), were the pioneers of this new era. They launched aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket and began what has become over two decades of continuous human occupation of the ISS.
The Significance of October 31, 2000: Humanity’s Last Day
This date is more than just a historical milestone. It signifies humanity’s leap into a future where living and working in space is a reality.
The ISS has been instrumental in advancing our understanding of space and science. Research conducted there has led to breakthroughs in medicine, environmental science, and materials engineering. The microgravity environment provides unique conditions for experiments impossible to replicate on Earth.
Future Missions
Living aboard the ISS has provided vital information about the effects of long-duration spaceflight on the human body. This knowledge is crucial for planning future missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
Understanding how to maintain physical and mental health in space is key to the success of these ambitious projects.
As we look to the future, the legacy of October 31, 2000, continues to influence space policy and aspirations.
With plans for lunar bases and Mars expeditions, the horizon of human space habitation is expanding. The ISS has laid the groundwork for these future endeavors, proving that humans can live and thrive in the harsh environment of space.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
We are living through a new era of space activity, and the evidence is all around us. From striking images of private sector rocket launches to new satellite and data capabilities to the innovative tools that will permit lunar exploration, the space industry is more vibrant and ripe with opportunity than ever before — and this is true not just for “space companies,” whose primary business is space activity, services and tools, but for every company.
This may at first seem counterintuitive. The current space economy is valued at $469 billion, according to The Space Report, and is expected to top $639 billion by 2026. This growing economy is fueled by thousands of businesses large and small worldwide, and many of these companies are not space-specific. Instead, they are “space adjacent,” which means their products and services have applications in the space industry, as well as in other sectors, like high-precision manufacturing, data science and artificial intelligence, and life sciences and biology.
In this era of dynamic growth in the space market, the challenge for entrepreneurs is to answer:
Is their enterprise space adjacent or could it be changed to become space adjacent?
What is the space market demanding and what could the company offer?
How does the business leader or entrepreneur identify and access opportunities that require fundamentally innovative applications for space?
There is not one route or strategy that will lead a space-adjacent company into the space economy. The approach that best fits the existing business model isn’t necessarily defined by the entrepreneur or business leader. Yet, there are best practices and signposts along the way that can facilitate entrance. With that in mind, here are four steps to consider when seeking opportunities in the global space economy.
As with any business endeavor, opportunity requires connections and collaboration. Wherever the business is located geographically (potential in more than one location), survey the area for organizations or businesses that are already engaged in the space economy.
This does not necessarily mean seeking out a rocket launch provider. Instead, consult with large manufacturers who may be selling technology components to civil or commercial space organizations. Engage with regional military installations, where there are sure to be space-engaged professionals who can help elucidate market opportunities and facilitate introductions. Look for local chamber of commerce events related to space and explore industry groups and academic institutions that may offer space-focused seminars and forums. Ultimately, only the entrepreneur or business leader will be able to precisely identify local space stakeholders. Step one is to find them and grow from there.
2. Seek new applications for existing IP
When we think of space products and activities, some might imagine breakthrough technologies invented in government-run labs whose applications begin and end in space. This is incorrect. In fact, while some space technologies are entirely novel (e.g. scientific instruments for biological experiments in microgravity), many are simply the reapplication of space tools and services devised for use on Earth.
To wit, entrepreneurs and businesses may already have intellectual property that, with some adjustments, could be sold to companies engaged in space activities. If you are engaged in textiles, do you hold a patent on an innovative material whose properties may be useful in space operations? If your business is in the food and beverage industry, could you cater to the local space operations on Earth or even adapt your product for consumption in space? In industrial construction, artificial intelligence, raw materials sourcing, supply chain optimization, the list of industries where existing products could be used in space is unending. When seeking space economy access, entrepreneurs should look to existing IP and consult with their growing network of space industry contacts.
The space-to-Earth market accounts for most of the space economy. Put another way, the enormous data flows pouring in from satellites and other space-based assets are the currently dominant area for financial return. Entrepreneurs and businesses in the data science fields can find eager customers seeking insights and services derived from this data. This can include markets for Earth observation, climate monitoring, logistics and transportation, agriculture, water management, public health and many other industries. In this, space adjacency is defined by the capacity to process and compute data streamed from space and sell the resulting insights to markets here on Earth.
For example, an incisive understanding of water levels and drought in a geographic region could be highly valuable to water utilities, local governments and agricultural businesses. The task for entrepreneurs and businesses is to consider how to access space-derived datasets, consider their data science capabilities and look to the marketplace for the intersection between space adjacency, data insights and on-Earth demand.
4. Check for patents in the public domain
Space activity is valuable in part because the tools and technology needed to operate in space often have important applications on Earth. In the United States, NASA offers a Technology Transfer Program and a database of thousands of its expired patents that are available for unrestricted commercial use. The European Space Agency also offers a technology transfer process. These and other space agencies already did costly, innovative work to create something new. Dig through these databases, consider your capabilities and identify patents you can use to bring new products to market.
We are still only at the beginning of a new era of space access and exploration, and analysts expect the global space economy will reach $1 trillion in the coming years. Entrepreneurs and business leaders who begin probing the space domain for opportunity today will not only open new revenue streams and invigorate innovation. They will also capitalize on first-mover advantages and position their organizations to lead as the space market grows.
In a giant leap for luxury space travel, affluent “voyagers” will soon be able to board a space capsule called Spaceship Neptune, which ascends via a balloon 100,000 feet to the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Once they arrive at their destination, the passengers can take in the spectacular views in a high-tech space lounge, enjoying a fine dinner and cocktails.
The trip will be provided by Space Perspective, which describes itself as “Planet Earth’s leading luxury space travel company,” in conjunction with Siemens Digital Industries and Amazon Web Services. Siemens offered an immersive demo of the voyage last week at CES 2023 in Las Vegas.
The price tag is as sky-high as the journey — $125,000 for the 6-hour trip from Earth and back. But that hasn’t stopped space enthusiasts from gobbling up tickets. Journeys on the Spaceship Neptune are sold out until 2024, but the company is taking reservations for 2025 and beyond with a $1000 deposit.
View from the Spaceship Neptune capsule, which offers passengers killer views of Earth while they chill out in the space lounge enjoying dinner and a cocktail. A space balloon takes you 100,000 feet up (and hopefully down). Price tag: $125k for 6 hour trip. #CES2023pic.twitter.com/TxWh6RnSQL
Spaceship Neptune offers a carbon-free trip to space. Unlike rocket-fueled space endeavors, which spew chemicals into the atmosphere, Spaceship Neptune ascends to the edge of space in a climate-controlled, pressurized capsule propelled by a patented SpaceBalloon. Voyagers can take in the beautiful views of the thin blue line circling the earth below and the vast dark space above.
“Changing people’s perspective on our planet demands that we are good stewards of the planet,” Space Perspective founder and Co-CEO Jayne Poynter told Entrepreneur. “As the world’s only carbon-neutral space travel company Space Perspective has completely re-engineered space travel, forgoing high carbon footprint rockets in favor of our sustainable SpaceBalloon.”
Spaceship Neptune is large enough to accommodate eight passengers per trip. Once they coast 18 miles above the earth, they’ll be free to roam around, take photos, and feast off a five-star menu.
“We have integrated the travel experience and aesthetic – from headroom and groups of Explorers being able to move around comfortably within Spaceship Neptune from chair to restroom to bar – to, of course, maximizing the once-in-a-lifetime views,” said Dan Window, Experience Design Lead, and Isabella Trani, Experience Designer, in a statement.
When it’s time to return to Earth, passengers will splash down gently into the ocean, where a Space Perspective crew will greet them.
NASA considers water landings the most low-risk way of returning a capsule from space.
