Richard Branson Reacts To ‘Attacks’ Regarding His New Space Trip

The effects that space tourism and other plans for future space exploration have had on the world’s environment have sparked a lot of discussion and debate.

Several billionaires have already traveled to outer space to explore that universe. Richard Branson, a British billionaire, is of the opinion that going into space can be beneficial to the planet. He claims that trips like the one he took in 2021 open doors and cut through bureaucracy.

The entrepreneur was told in an interview with the BBC that prominent people like Prince William and Bill Gates had expressed some degree of skepticism regarding space travel due to the fact that there were still a lot of problems on Earth.

Branson was also pushed for a reaction to those questions why, if environmental change was one of his first concerns — he’s recently tweeted that it “threatens our future” — he was sending rockets up into space.

He responded,

“I 100% agree with them that we’ve got to concentrate on dealing with a whole lot of issues in this world and most of my life is now spent on, you know, tackling a whole raft of different issues in the world”.

“And I think some of those issues are made easier to deal with by the fact that I have been to space, so I can now pick up the phone to pretty well anybody in the world, get through, cut through the red tape and hopefully get things sorted.”

The Virgin Group founder is one of a few rich people to have participated in space tourism flights. Through his Blue Origin business, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is one of the others. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, is another billionaire involved in the industry through SpaceX. In an interview with the BBC, Branson argued that space travel is “incredibly important” for Earth and that it should continue.

He stated,

“Communication between people is being transformed because of space travel and satellites up there,” he said.

“Monitoring things like the depredation of the rainforests or illegal fishing … has been transformed by satellites up there,” he added, going on to state that there were “all these … kinds of benefits that come from space travel.”

There has been a lot of discussion and debate about the effects that space tourism and other plans for future space exploration will have on the environment in recent years.

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A study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for instance, was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres in June 2022.

The research, the NOAA said, suggested “that a significant boost in spaceflight activity may damage the protective ozone layer on the one planet where we live.”

For his part, Branson told the BBC that the picture was improving.

“What Virgin and our principal competitors have managed to do is bring the environmental costs of space travel down dramatically, in terms of carbon cost,” he said, later adding that this would “come down even further.”

“You can’t and shouldn’t stop progress,” he said. “Through progress you get the breakthroughs — you can never be quite sure what breakthrough you’re going to get, but you get these breakthroughs, and that will benefit the Earth.”