Space tourism will worsen climate change crisis?
To its many detractors, space tourism amounts to nothing more than joy-rides for the global super rich that will worsen the planet's climate crisis.
But the nascent sector also has supporters, who, while not rejecting the criticism outright, argue the industry can bring humanity benefits too.
The first argument is that private spaceflights, in addition to their customers, can send to space scientific experiments that require microgravity environments.
In the past, national agencies "it used to take quite a long time to work within government grant channels, get approval, get the funding, get picked to be among the very select few that could go," Ariel Ekblaw, of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative told AFP.
By contrast, it took Ekblaw just six months from signing a contract to sending her research project to the International Space Station on board the private Ax-1 mission, which blasted off Friday thanks to the private entrepreneurs paying for the trip.
Her experiment, called TESSERAE, involves smart tiles that form a floating robotic swarm that can self-assemble into space architecture -- which might be how future space stations are built.
An earlier prototype was flown to space for a few minutes aboard a Blue Origin suborbital spaceflight, paving the way for the new test.
"The proliferation of these commercial launch providers does allow us to do riskier, faster and more innovative projects," said Ekblaw.
Virgin Galactic, for its part, has announced plans to take scientists on future flights.
Space tourism, and the private space sector overall, also acts as an innovation driver for getting better at doing all things related to space.
Government agencies, which operate with taxpayers' money, move cautiously and are
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