Future Space Tourism and Space Industry Will End Up Being Great for the Environment

NextBigFuture argues that while scaling space tourism to 5 million orbital trips per year via Starship could add roughly 3% to current global tourism emissions, the long-term upside is moving mining, manufacturing, and data centers off Earth. The piece frames near-term launch pollution as a worthwhile tradeoff for eventually decoupling industrial growth from the biosphere.

Teaching:
• Use this as a class theme on short-term cost vs long-term system health: practitioners often resist near-term discomfort that produces long-term capacity, like loading a joint to build resilience.
• Cue students to notice where they confuse local emissions (effort, sweat, breath rate) with global cost (nervous system load) the way the article distinguishes direct from indirect footprint.
• Frame Ashtanga's fixed sequence as the 'reusable vehicle': the same form repeated lowers the per-rep cost of insight, the way reusability changes the launch math.

Writing seeds:
• Essay: 'The Reusable Vehicle' — how a fixed sequence is to a practitioner what Starship is to launch economics: amortized cost across thousands of reps.
• Post for ashtanga.tech: accounting for the indirect emissions of a practice (sleep debt, relationships, work stress) versus the visible direct cost on the mat.
• Shala Daily seed: 'Offworld the noise' — what mental industries could you relocate so the foreground of attention stays clean?
• Essay challenging techno-optimism: when 'we'll fix it later with scale' shows up in practice culture (more workshops, more props, more cues) as avoidance of present literacy.

Idea map:
• Connects to systems literacy: emissions accounting is the same move as tracking load, recovery, and indirect cost in a practice ledger.
• Echoes Michael's throughline that the body is the first environment — you cannot externalize pollution from your own nervous system.
• Resonates with his critique of optimization narratives: efficiency gains get outpaced by demand, on the mat and in the atmosphere.
• Ties to embodiment vs abstraction: the article's 'move industry offworld' mirrors the temptation to outsource felt experience to metrics and apps.

Source: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2026/06/future-space-tourism-and-space-industry-will-end-up-being-great-for-the-environment.html