BackTo a certain generation, the word space will always be followed by “The final frontier,” as spoken in the opening credits of popular sci-fi series Star Trek. However, is it actually a case that space is in the last-chance saloon, amid a wave of negative sentiment and unpopular public opinion following recent galactic developments?
It’s a debate that even ended up with The Duke of Cambridge criticising the so-called space tourism emergence back in October 2021, after he suggested that the world’s greatest minds should be focusing on fixing the problems here on Earth first.
Speaking to Newscast on BBC Sounds, Prince William’s comments were aired the day after actor William Shatner – who played Captain James T Kirk in the original Star Trek TV series – made history by becoming the oldest person in space at 90 years old. The rocket that took him from a Texas desert to the stars was built by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ space travel company Blue Origin.
The Billionaire Space Race – as it was dubbed by various media outlets – saw professional rivalries form between entrepreneurs such as Bezos, Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic/Virgin Orbit and SpaceX’s Elon Musk – as they all strived to be the first to successfully launch tourist vessels into space.
Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin both launched successful flights into space in July 2021, becoming among the first people to attempt commercial space travel. However, while both safely completed their respective journeys, they approached the publicity for their journeys in very different ways.
Branson wrote blog posts and regularly posted to his own Facebook page in advance of his July 11 launch. His blogs included a lot of storytelling and anecdotal explanations of his childhood dreams – alongside photos of him and his space crew – while his Facebook posts kept the public updated, in near-real time, of how everything was progressing. One particular post – a photo of himself with Musk during the morning of the Virgin Galactic launch – gained over 131k engagements and helped to quell the perception of a billionaire rivalry between the pair.
Bezos’ approach to owned media was vastly different – as the only social media channel that he regularly interacts with is Instagram. Despite his exclusivity on the platform and the IGTV content surrounding his spaceflight, Bezos’ posts still had lower engagement than Branson’s Instagram posts.
The aftermath of both flights also showed that it remains difficult to control the narrative of any planned event – as the tone of top stories around Bezos’ flight especially shifted in a more negative direction to those that Branson’s launch had received a week earlier.
Bezos donated $200 million to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum pre-flight and auctioned off a seat on his first spaceflight for $28 million, which was then passed over to Blue Origin’s STEM-focused non-profit Club for the Future. These charitable actions could easily have complemented Bezos’ achievements with Blue Origin.
However, he created a backlash from public figures in the U.S. when he thanked Amazon employees and customers for “paying his way into space.” U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted about lower wages and poor working conditions being the real way Amazon workers had “paid” for the flight. This generated over 165k engagements, while a video of a homeless Amazon worker then went viral via Facebook three days later.
In addition, much of the pre-flight attention was directed at Branson and Bezos, which didn’t help with trying to change perceptions by separating the billionaire from the brand. Bezos tried to diffuse this somewhat by pulling at the heart strings of the public – as he chose 82-year-old aviation pioneer Wally Funk, who had been denied the chance to go into space in the 1960s due to being a woman, and making her life-long dream of going to space a reality.
Her inclusion was a crucial part of Blue Origin’s campaign to get the public on side, but Bezos’ inclusion only saw the focus start to shift back the other way again.
This tactic to create a positive public perception of space tourism was further expanded on by Jared Isaacman, the 38-year-old founder and Chief Executive Officer of Shift4 Payments – as the SpaceX Inspiration4 flight that he was involved in was the world’s first all-civilian mission to orbit.
Isaacman functioned as mission commander for the flight, which was part of a charitable effort on behalf of St.Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital. The hospital selected two crew members, while Shift4 selected the pilot.
In a move similar to Bezos, Isaacman looked to carry public favour through the careful selection of his crewmates – as the Inspiration4 crew contained a physician’s assistant who’d recovered from childhood cancer.
Media coverage was widely positive for the mission, owing to the charitable element, the duration of the flight and the altitude reached.
It should be noted though that a big part of the reason for the Inspiration4 mission was not just for a billionaire to justify his journey into space, but also for The Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH) to be able to experiment on people to see the effects on their body of space. Their findings could – eventually – allow more ordinary people to go into space, for longer, in the future.
Inspiration4 is just one of a number of journeys that have influenced various Non-Fungible Token (NFT) artwork, but this number is surely bound to increase further with the ever-increasing popularity of NFTs. The link with NFT also goes the other way as well – after pioneering piece Micah Johnson’s Why Not Me became the first digital NFT artwork to go into space in July 2021, before it was auctioned off for $120,000 following its return to Earth.
Although there is a novelty element for now, especially in the case of flying artwork into orbit to add more value to a piece, those NFTs based on actual space data have helped to democratise space – as they have provided art that captures a significant moment in human history, which the whole world is now able to enjoy.
While the space tourism element of 2021 soured the overall public perception of space travel, this attitude would surely change if it was more widely-recognized just how much space impacts us all and why there should be a lot more investment made into it.
Agricultural advancements are also being made on the International Space Station (ISS), with crops being grown in space. This application is not just limited to space though. The technology derived from space agriculture could also benefit agriculture on Earth as well, with regards to fertilising crops, developing high-yield crop production and also stimulating the research of alternative meat sources.
With the increase of bad weather and storm warnings across the UK in recent months, the need for accurate disaster and weather monitoring has never been higher. The images fed through from satellites of potential bad weather can make all the difference when it comes to assessing the risk not only for the weather but for the potential destruction/loss of life as well.
As a society, we are lost without our mobile devices, with signal coverage being solely reliant on satellites orbiting the Earth – allowing us to catch up with friends and family, the latest news or even just Google the answer to a question that you can’t remember.
The UK boasts a world-leading sovereign satellite communications capability and, only last month, announced a £1.4 billion investment in cutting-edge technology to protect the UK’s interests in space.
Over the next decade, £968 million will go towards delivering a multi-satellite system to support greater global surveillance and intelligence for military operations – known as the ISTARI Programme. A further £61 million will explore cutting-edge laser communications technology, which is hoped will deliver data from space to Earth at an equivalent speed to superfast broadband.
Quite unexpectedly, the Russian invasion of Ukraine also inspired an emergence of space entrepreneurs turning the tide on previously poor PR, changing public perception and – in turn – making space more relevant.
Elon Musk has been at the forefront of this, by sending thousands of SpaceX-owned satellites to provide a lifeline to the war-torn country – after Starlink kits already in use near conflict areas were being jammed by Russian forces for several hours, following the destruction of traditional cabled connections during the devastating invasion.
The billionaire also doubled down on his stance against the invaders by insisting that his SpaceX firm would help rescue the International Space Station if necessary – after threats from Vladamir Putin’s space chief Dimitry Rogozin implied that Russia would try to drop it out of its orbit.
It’s not just corporations the size of SpaceX that are making a difference though – as Curzon PR client Skyrora helped with the attempts to defend Ukraine’s space city Dnipro.
Despite admitting that “there is nothing we can realistically do for them right now,” Volodymyr Levykin – the Ukraine-born CEO of the UK-headquartered rocket company – told Space.com that it was “family first, country second and company third” for Skyrora employees in Dnipro, who were doing all they could to help – as they braced themselves for air strikes at the beginning of March.
With all the positive benefits that space offers us in our day-to-day lives flying very much under the radar for most, this will naturally allow the negative sentiments to sway public opinion on any sort of Space PR – especially when aspects of it are challenged by notable personalities such as the Duke of Cambridge.
However, if we can create more of a common culture for space PR and champion the many beneficial reasons for space exploration, maybe then we can move away from sci-fi series being the only aspects of intergalactic developments that the public readily welcome and truly begin to make space the new enterprise for positive PR.
