Beyond the biosphere: tourism, outer space, and sustainability

ABSTRACT

Dominant sustainability discourses commonly situate Earth as the singular realm of human influence and position modern mobility as one of the primary means through which we are destroying the biosphere. The commercialisation of activities in outer space and the development of space tourism have resulted in drastically reduced launch costs, enabling an increased human presence beyond the biosphere. This paper argues that current debates concerning the relationship between tourism mobilities and sustainability are marked by increasingly untenable assumptions concerning the spatial and temporal parameters of human influence. We critique those assumptions by introducing the concept of a sustainable trajectory to examine the relationship between modern mobility and sustainability, a relationship that is being redefined by the rapidly advancing fields of commercial spaceflight and space tourism. Greater attention to space tourism and commercial spaceflights is required in order to develop a coherent, long-term conceptualisation of the implications of modern mobility for sustainability.

KEYWORDS:

• Spaceflight
• commercial spaceflight
• space tourism
• tourism mobility
• sustainability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Samuel Spector holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Tourism at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, and is now a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Sustainability at the University of Otago. His research interests include space tourism, the environmental and social impacts of tourism, and perspectives of sustainable transport futures.

James E.S. Higham holds the position of Professor of Tourism, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, and Visiting Professor of Sustainable Tourism, University of Stavanger, Norway. His research is situated in the broad field of tourism and global environmental change, which in recent years has focused on climate change, tourist behaviour and transitions to a low-carbon future. He is co-editor of the Journal of Sustainable Tourism.

Adam Doering is an Associate Professor at the Center for Tourism Research, Wakayama University, Japan. Theoretically informed by continental philosophy and critical theory, his recent research critically and creatively engages with the fields of sustainable tourism and transportation, Critical Tourism Studies, and lifestyle sports in East Asia.

Notes

1 The founder and CEO of SpaceX, Elon Musk, envisions using commercial spaceflight to build and populate a permanent settlement on Mars (Coppinger, 2012).