Going to space is going from a great aspiration of humanity to a “Ryanair with rockets”

When Andy Davis opened his birthday gifts that afternoon of 1995, I was about to certify One of the most important changes of the cultural imaginary of the American twentieth century: the death of Western and the consecration of the astronaut as a great aspirational figure.

Because, forgive me the expression, but how astronauts were cool. We talked about people who prepared for decades, who risked their life every fighter second and who achieved feats that we, simple mortals, could not even imagine. There was nothing more glamorous and guay than to be an astronaut.

Now The thing has changed.

The life cycle of all means of transport. When the train was invented, first There was curiosity. Then, fear. Later, luxury. And finally, The Rodalías de Barcelona either The Extremadura train. It is a law of life: a kind of Kübless model of the social perception of the means of transport.

The same thing happened with the planes. From the first test flights we move on to Spirit of Sant Luisthen to the luxurious airplanes of the 60s And, now, a manifestly bad service that we usually associate with lowcost airlines, but that affects the entire sector.

In space, we are living that process and we are living it very quickly.

But why? In the background, what we are seeing is the logical development of the privatization of the space race. And, as we have been pointing for years, what has been privatized now is not space. The space has been privatized for many years. What we are living is the privatization of spatial sleep.

Or, in other words, what we have seen is the birth of companies that are knowing how to take advantage of space rhetoric to find financing (winning the large agencies).

Behind all that space rhetoric … The new space race does not “become an interplanetary species” or take “tourists to space.” The new special career goes, for now, to finance the development of an infrastructure Very expensive, very lucrative and that will be indispensable in the future.

When Jeff Bezos said that the great battle is in whom it is responsible for taking out the devices from the earth (the basic infrastructure of the new space race or, as he said, The ‘Amazon Web Services’ of space) He was right, but fell short. There is Many critical services They will depend on what happens up there.

Tourism (and the ‘banalization’ of space) is key in all this. Since Dennis Tito became the first space tourist In 2001 (and counting The six of Jesús Calleja’s last trip) About 84 people have gone to space to do something we could call “tourism.”

That is to say, Jesús Calleja is a symptom of that progressive banalization of space, yes; But we already had many previous examples. The key is to take the analysis one step further: in understanding that the ‘democratization’ of space trips come to replace the spatial epic of the cold war years.

It is its “aggiornamento”, its contemporary version: the story that serves to continue moving the gears of the development of the space industry. That is why it makes sense that a television star goes to space, so it makes sense wanting to lower costs, so it makes sense to take many people. Because as with the lowcostthe business is another.

And, in normal conditions, it would be very interesting. After all, the twentieth century has taught us that every euro invested in space It is a euro invested in improving the conditions of this planet. Historically, The return of investment is huge And that has been one of the great levers that have allowed us to continue investing in it.

However, as the years go by and we see that the business career derives quickly in A power struggleit is worth asking if the transfer of knowledge will remain so effective. If, in one way or another, the privatization of space will also be the privatization of all the good we can learn from it.

Image | Club of the Future

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