Dear Sir Richard Branson,
I am writing to explain why you should not allow me to board a Virgin Galactic spaceflight. My name is Arthur, I am eleven years old and I live in Tākaka, at the top of the south island of Aotearoa. I am pretty fortunate to live in a place with little light pollution. When I look up at the night sky I am amazed with the immeasurable, enigmatic expanse of space.
I didn’t know anything about Virgin Galactic Space flights until I started a module in my English recently. When I was asked to write a letter asking to join a space flight, I realised that this is one of the last things I would like to do. For starters, I think I would get travel sickness with the speeds you need to travel to enter space, my stomach would surely visit my mouth! I am also a pretty cautious guy, just thinking about space flight takes my fears to an insane level. I would likely scream my head off, ruining the flight experience for the other passengers. Fear takes me to my next question, Is it safe? There was a crash in 2014, with one of your flights, where the spacecraft broke apart midair, killing the co-pilot and badly injuring the pilot. Do I want to take this risk with my life? No, I do not!
Space flight has a massive carbon footprint, one flight makes approximately the same amount of CO2 as 40-80 average humans in a year combined. With the massive amount already made by humans, should Virgin Galactic Spaceflight really be adding to it? Global warming is already a huge issue, we need to be finding ways to help improve it, not worsen it! According to scientists, it is estimated that there are about a million objects orbiting the Earth as space junk, they track 35,000 of these objects and the mass is between 9,000-15,000 tons. Because your flights are suborbital, and come back to earth and get reused they do not stay in space as junk (unless it crashes or breaks!).However, the flights do create atmospheric pollution with carbon dioxide, water vapour and black carbon. No thanks!
Finally, Virgin Galactic was the first company to take on space tourism and make it accessible to people. However, this is only available to the super rich, with the cost of a seat on one of your flights ranging from 750k-1.27m NZD. 1.27 million dollars has the ability to lift approximately 10,000 people out of extreme poverty for a year, making taking a seat on one of your flights a morally questionable decision. If I was offered a seat on your flight, I would ask for a refund and use that money for good.
While I admire your visionary ideas, personally I would not like to take part in it. I will continue to appreciate and marvel at the wonders of space, with my feet planted on the ground.
Yours Sincerely,
Arthur
