Jeff Bezos, center, and the rest of the Blue Origin team arrive for a press conference after flying into space in the New Shepard rocket on July 20, 2021, in Van Horn, Texas. Some worry that the rejuvenated interest in private space travel might provide an escape for Bezos, Elon Musk, and other members of the super-rich, allowing them to take up residence elsewhere in the solar system and leave the rest of us behind on a burning planet. Space travel has been criticized, then and now, as a waste of money and resources and a distraction from more pressing problems. Today’s renewed interest in space travel has revived environmentalists’ long-simmering antagonism against it, tracing back to the early days of the space program in the late 1960s. There’s an irony here: In order to gain this more-than-sky-high perspective, astronauts and space tourists have had to take an incredibly polluting journey. At last year’s summit in Glasgow, Scotland, known as COP26, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet called into the negotiations while orbiting Earth on the International Space Station, telling President Emmanuel Macron of France, “We saw all of California covered by a cloud of smoke and flames with the naked eye.” climate conference in Poland they needed a “ reality check” on climate change. In 2018, the former NASA astronaut Mae Jemison, the first Black woman in space, told delegates at the U.N. In recent years, astronauts have become fixtures at international climate negotiations, bringing their big-picture perspective with them. A half-century later, ex-NASA astronaut José Hernández said that the view aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery in 2009 turned him into “an instant treehugger.” “People of the world, let us safeguard and enhance this beauty - not destroy it,” the Soviet cosmonaut said upon his return. This so-called “overview effect” has been turning astronauts into environmental advocates ever since the first person in space, Yuri Gagarin, marveled at the planet from orbit in 1961. National borders disappear the scene evokes a feeling of cosmic connection. Looking down on Earth from above for the first time, astronauts see that only a fine blue line of atmosphere shelters our planet from the hostile vacuum of space - and often, they suddenly get an overwhelming responsibility to protect it. The epiphany Shatner experienced is a phenomenon as old as space travel. Star Trek actor William Shatner, right, describes his brief experience in space as Planet Labs co-founder Chris Boshuizen looks on. The 90-year-old man, the oldest person to go to space, said humans can’t continue “burying our heads in the sand” about climate change, and that “we’re at a tipping point.” In interviews afterward, Shatner made a plea for the planet as TV hosts tried to steer him toward topics lighter than death and global warming. It’s immeasurably small when you think in terms of the universe.” “This air which is keeping us alive is thinner than your skin. “What I would love to do is to communicate as much as possible the jeopardy, the moment you see the vulnerability of everything,” he told Bezos. (“Was that death? Is that the way death is? Whoop and it’s gone. As if in a religious awakening, Shatner described his 10-minute flight whipping through the layers of the atmosphere as an existential journey through Earth’s “comforter of blue” into the “black ugliness” of space. ![]() When the New Shepard rocket capsule touched down in the dusty desert in west Texas on October 13, Shatner pulled aside Jeff Bezos, mega-rich tech lord of Amazon and founder of the private space company Blue Origin. Nothing could have prepared the man who played Star Trek’s Captain Kirk for the profound shock of seeing his home planet from 65 miles above. ![]() After decades of voyaging through galaxies in science fiction, William Shatner finally blasted off to space in real life last fall.
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