SPACE.com talks about the connection between space tourism and ecotourism. Much of that linkage is the desire to view the Earth from space, something that has awed virtually every person to fly in space to date. That also applies to suborbital space tourism: earlier this year Chuck Lauer said that the view of Earth—particularly of a tourist’s home region—is more important than the sensation of weightlessness tourists will experience.
But some proponents stretch the ecotourism connection a little too far by touting the environmental friendliness of their vehicles, notably air-launched vehicles like SpaceShipTwo. “It’s environmentally thousands of times cleaner than any other system in the past,” Stephen Attenborough of Virgin Galactic said, while Virgin’s Will Whitehorn claimed that “ground-based rocketry and the effluents spewed into the air by those liftoffs – especially by solid fuel motors – will likely not be environmentally and politically acceptable within a generation, he predicted.” Even at high launch rates, though, it’s hard to see ground-launch space tourism craft becoming more environmentally unacceptable than, say, commercial aviation, especially when most systems on the drawing boards use liquid or hybrid, rather than solid, propellants.
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