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William Shatner's recent unprecedented trip to space at age 90 overshadowed what was, in my opinion, a bigger story: the failure of a high-priced space tourism package to attract even a single passenger. According to a blog at Futurism, which calls the event a "major narrative shift," the space tourism firm Space Adventures "had to cancel its upcoming launch with SpaceX because it couldn’t find any viable — and sufficiently wealthy — passengers for the journey."
Particularly shocking about this failure is that just one month ago, Space Adventures launched four amateur astronauts into three days of Earth orbit, which was widely acclaimed as a success. In spite of this accomplishment, and in spite of what Space Adventures called a major marketing offensive, not a single person signed up for the subsequent trip, and eventually the firm's contract with Elon Musk's SpaceX expired.
The Futurism piece also recognizes that the joy-ride event last month was beset with problems — faulty toilets, space sickness, that kind of thing — but Space Adventures figured, and not without good reason I think, that people would still be eager enough to travel into space that they'd pay the $200,000 ticket price. And one would think the publicity around Shatner's 10-minute ride would have sparked interest in taking a longer journey.
But, as Futurism notes, we are instead learning that "the target demographic for space tourism is both very small, tolerant of significant discomfort, and inordinately wealthy."
In a way, this stunning failure to attract even a few passengers is a sign of the times:the current chaotic condition of the planet, the shaming of conspicuous wealth and finance capital, and a rising population nonplussed and unimpressed by much of anything all combine to make space travel a less than popular option. But certainly, if the price had been lower, someone might have filled those seats. It's hard to say how much lower a price would have enticed such a passenger, but eventually some price threshold would have been crossed, the investors in space tourism would have received something, and the firm would have turned a profit. Maybe there will be another attempt by a different firm in the near future to fill a space-bus. In the meantime, this anecdote remains indicative of a current apathy towards extravagance in the context of near constant emergency, as well as the inability of so many to engage in such extreme lifestyles generally.
Science fiction about space travel often addresses class and classism. Stories about poor and working-class people doing grunt-work, or even slave labor in space have long existed. But such stories assume contexts where the infrastructure of space travel, space resource extraction and space industry are all already in place, although perhaps in varying degrees and even various states of disrepair.
We often compare space exploration and travel to ocean and sea travel. Notably, however, the entry barriers and cost prohibitions of space travel have no analog in seafaring. Travel on water has existed for millenia, and acquiring or building a raft or boat has long been accessible to all groups of people. The barriers of entry to space travel, however, are likely to stay in place for a long time, as space tourism firms have no incentive to make such travel more easy or more widely accessible. In many ways, the exclusivity of space travel is what gives it much of its allure. If anything, they'll only lower the price to just below the critical margin Space Adventures wasn't able to play, yet such a margin will not do very much to greatly increase space travel’s accessibility nor will it do much to democratize it. So for the next couple of decades, at least, it’s fair to assume that mass space transit or cheap tourist packages won't exist.
What will make that kind of accessibility happen will be a need for human labor in space, and that in turn depends on whether AI and robotics can fill the labor gap that will inevitably emerge when settlements, extractive colonies, and joint military-civilian projects begin proliferating, perhaps on the moon or asteroids, perhaps in large space station-sized artificial habitations. At such a time, it will also be necessary for the labor movement to follow this industrial and technological development. After all, there's a precedent for labor resistance in space, via now-famous Skylab astronauts. Recently, naysayers have written pieces insisting that what happened concerning the Skylab 4 crew wasn't a "real strike," and that's correct, but it was a labor pushback that carried symbolic value and reflected real dissatisfaction with the NASA decision making hierarchy.
Already, Jeff Bezos's PR minions are advertising the development of a manufacturing base in space. This will require some kind of labor force, some of which will be human labor. Such labor will manifest in hierarchies. Eternal truths about wealth/poverty and capital/management/labor hierarchies will ring true in space: When disasters or mishaps occur, space workers will be blamed just as those here on Earth are. When great accomplishments in technology or travel happen, the people at the top will take the credit. Risk, including life-and-death risk, will be delegated to the bottom, while credit and glory will remain at the top. We know these things will happen because they've happened in every other historical context.
Although it's a short list, there may be more sci-fi stories about labor conflicts in space than about space tourism. On the subject of labor actions in space, check out Robin Brownfield's 2017 post on the subject. Brownfield teaches film and popular culture and began compiling a list of movies and TV episodes around the theme. The list includes some classic TV: Star Trek: TOS's 1969 piece “The Cloud Minders”; the 1977 Doctor Who storyline The Sun Makers; a couple of 90s gems--an episode of Babylon 5 entitled “By Any Means Necessary” and an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space called “Bar Association”; and the celebrated Firefly series' 2003 piece called “Jaynestown.”
There's also the short-lived TV series Incorporated, a gem which sadly didn't make it past its first season in 2016. The premise is solid: As Brownfield describes it, "a world that exists after climate change has decimated most life on Earth, creating a chasm between the haves and have-nots that leaves a corporate elite upper class (the 1% or the bourgeoisie) that has all access to jobs, homes, fine food, water, clean air, health care, and a wide choice of entertainment, and an impoverished lower/under class without access to food, clean air or water, medical care, other than menial jobs, or homes."
In the future there will no doubt be the upper decks and lower decks of space travel. The anecdotes and histories that have historically emerged from such a dynamic will probably be even more interesting than even the most thrilling class-based science fiction we're reading or watching now.
