On September 15, 2024, as the commander of the Polaris Dawn mission in the SpaceX Dragon, Jared Isaacman returned from the highest Earth orbit (1,400 km) achieved by a human-crewed spacecraft since the Apollo moon missions of the 1970s. Importantly he did this as a private citizen, with his own funding, while pursuing a personal mission to explore space and advance science.
These feats would have been enough to inspire everyone on Earth, but in a live broadcast, Isaacman also completed the first-ever all-commercial spacewalk—one that demonstrated a novel approach. When the Dragon’s hatch opened, Isaacman and his three crew members were exposed to the vacuum of space. The operation was accomplished safely because the spacesuits for the civilian crew effectively became miniature spacecraft, all floating inside the Dragon capsule.
Professor of Genomics, Physiology, and Biophysics, Weill Cornell Medicine
After Isaacman finished his spacewalk, Polaris Dawn mission specialist Sarah Gillis took a spacewalk of her own. During the mission, she also became the first person to play the violin in space, and she set the distance record for female explorers. The crew performed almost 40 experiments, including in-flight imaging, diagnostics, and cognition tests, as well as sample collection for the Space Omics and Medical Atlas (SOMA), a comprehensive molecular and cellular map of the biological impact of spaceflight on every base of the human genome.
All of this would have been inconceivable 100 years ago. We are in a unique and exciting time in history, yet not everyone is happy about space missions being led by billionaires such as Isaacman, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos. Some critics of these missions wonder why we spend money, time, and energy on missions that are far from Earth, even while problems on Earth remain unsolved. However, progress is not a zero-sum game, and these missions represent a requisite boost for humanity to continue to explore. Still, some resist—why?
Paths of resistance
Resistance to the idea of exploring space or going to other planets often occur when thoughts travel along a few predictable paths, namely, the paths of selfishness, prioritization, and avoidance. On the first path, selfishness, someone may say, “I will be dead, so why should I care?” This position is shortsighted, and it also violates every known ethical framework (Millian, Kantian, Rawlsian, and deontogenic). This position also assumes no responsibility to others who live afterward, which is unsustainable.
If this view were sufficiently widespread, people would eventually find themselves in a limited or doomed world. Then the view would finally die, if only because people capable of sharing it would cease to be born.
The second path involves the prioritization of other goals and is usually phrased as follows:
“We have poverty, disease, and other pressing issues that we need to attend to first.” But conquering disease and other societal problems can coincide with working toward the overarching research and development goals of settling new homes in space. To force a choice of one or the other is a false dichotomy.
In the 1960s, the United States supported its space program—and managed to get boots on the moon—while substantially growing the economy. It is possible “to chew gum and walk at the same time.” Also, the simultaneous pursuit of space exploration and of Earthbound priorities has become only more realistic. Space exploration continues even as NASA funding falls. At its peak, during the moon race, NASA received 4.4% of the federal budget. Today, NASA receives 10-fold less—a scant 0.47%.
The third path is just avoidance. It could be phrased like this: “I’m not directly related to this work, so I don’t need to do anything or care.” This view is also misguided. In all countries with space programs, taxes support the work on space biology, rocket engineering, flight logistics, and astronaut facilities. As such, the citizens of all these countries are already involved.
Moreover, citizens don’t have to be intimately involved with national or international projects to support or appreciate the benefits of such projects, such as peacekeeping missions by the United Nations or disease surveillance programs by the CDC and World Health Organization.
Borrowed time
Having all the time in the world may not be enough. As commander Isaacman observed while he was awaiting launch, Earth’s history has been punctuated by the kinds of events that could eliminate human life. If we had lived when a large asteroid hit the Earth, our existence (and any purpose) would have been extinguished. If a path to ensuring humanity’s survival exists, it is irresponsible not to pursue it. Starships from SpaceX can enable us to venture to the stars, with longer missions to many planets, and make life better on Earth, as Isaacman and others have noted.
“We can explore the cosmos and build children’s hospitals; we can advance our species and strive to cure childhood cancer; we can attempt to unlock the mysteries of the universe and improve the climate here at home,” Isaacman stated. “Those who see this as a binary choice, where resources must be allocated to one side or the other, are incredibly shortsighted. In fact, by attempting to delay progress, they may actually be making things worse.”
Responsible stewardship
To our knowledge, humans alone possess awareness of two key facts: (1) life is rare in the universe (so far only on Earth), and (2) the sun will eventually expand into a red giant and destroy the Earth. Thus, all known life will eventually perish if it stays on Earth. Given that humans are the only species with awareness of such extinction risk, only we can actively foresee, and prevent, the extinction of all known life. Our unique duty and ability to preserve life necessitates the creation of an independent ecosystem that can survive past the lifetime of our first sun.
In the long term, the only way to preserve all life as we know it is to terraform and permanently inhabit another planet, like Mars (preferable to Venus since it is farther from the sun). Although terraforming is a vast, unprecedented, and intergenerational goal, it represents the most sustainable and scalable means by which life could exist across multiple planets. Such an effort would both create a secondary home for all forms of life (and new Martian-adapted life) and also accelerate technologies in biology, engineering, and energy that would help life expand farther into the universe, all while providing technology that can help improve life on Earth.
A familiar complaint is that the spacefaring billionaires seem to overlook the practical concerns of most of humanity, but these billionaires are working to ensure that humanity can exist to make such complaints. For such an effort, these billionaires should be applauded.
Just as defending free speech requires the defense of all speech, even speech with which you disagree, defending humanity’s survival requires the defense of all arguments about what we must do to survive. We can think of these arguments as voices in a chorus. Even if the harmony is strained, the capacity to sing in an otherwise silent universe is sacred.
Christopher E. Mason, PhD, is a professor of genomics, physiology, and biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine. He has been a principal investigator and co-investigator of dozens of missions and projects across NASA, SpaceX, JAXA, and other space agencies and companies, and he is a faculty affiliate of the Consortium for Space Genetics at Harvard Medical School and founder of the Aerospace Medicine Biobank and SOMA. His published works include The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds, a book that appeared in 2021.
