The experience of seeing the Earth, and the fabled visible thinness of its atmosphere, also plays into eco-tourism, a current passion of wealthy travelers, he said.

[The “he” above is Matthew D. Upchurch, owner of a luxury travel agency in Fort Worth called Virtuoso.]

I don’t think the Virgin people have used the term “eco-tourism” per se, but have played up the thrill of looking down on the Earth from space, which is what Upchurch was referring to. However, Virgin has also spent a lot of time discussing how environmentally friendly (relatively speaking) this venture would be, from the limited amount of emissions from a typical flight to the efforts being put into the design of Spaceport America (which, if all goes well, will be certified LEED platinum.)

If he’s specifically against pollution for doing things that are merely for enjoyment, maybe he should get the government to outlaw Disneyland, cruise ships, tourism in general, visiting relatives, sporting events, using energy-consuming devices for entertainment, etc.

I’m not sure why a scientist concerned with the environment would be against environment monitoring science. I have a recent email from an environment monitoring science organization on using the suborbital RLVs for environmental science. Basically it’s about this:

nspires.nasaprs.com/external/viewrepositorydocument/cmdocumentid=150845/E.7%20Human%20Tended%20Suborbital.pdf

“This amendment announces a new proposal opportunity in Appendix E.7 entitled “Concept Studies for Human Tended Suborbital Science”. NASA recognizes the advancement of the commercial spaceflight industry and the potential for human-tended suborbital flight experiments enabled by this capability. The imminent emergence of human suborbital flight for commercial purposes offers an opportunity for a new mode of research for the scientific community: human-tended suborbital investigations for cases where having a human in-the-loop would increase the scientific return of flight experiments. …”

The mind boggles at the array of potential environmental science applications of these vehicles with low cost, frequent, human-tended suborbital space access: environment satellite calibration, testing environment monitoring space instruments before orbital launch, upper atmosphere measurements, frequent Earth remote sensing, cheap launch of environmental smallsats, educational and training opportunities for scientists, etc… None of it will happen without those selfish mean space tourists.

If it’s space-related pollution that he’s for some reason particularly against, maybe he should call for the Shuttle and Ares rockets to be closed down. Or, maybe the objection really isn’t about pollution? Maybe he just doesn’t like private industry, or just private space industry?

Maybe he doesn’t like that the initial customers might pay $200,000 for the service. If he doesn’t like wealth, I’m not sure why he’d object to it being separated from wealthy customers and brought into the rest of the economy (aerospace workers, etc). Maybe he just objects to them spending it how they want to, instead of how he wants to. Anyway, if he doesn’t like the price, he might be happy there’s a good chance the price will decrease over time.