The Underview Effect

Women travel to space, encounter green eyed monster.

On Monday, six women went on a suborbital space tourism flight on board Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft, including journalist Gayle King and pop star Katy Perry. The presence of the latter especially made this a media event that had reach substantially beyond the space community, and generated a huge amount of headlines and comment.

To be clear, this was not a particularly important mission, either for spaceflight or the advancement of women. The Polaris Dawn mission last year allowed Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon to break a long standing altitude record for women, while conducting scientific research on orbit and Gillis participating in the first ever private spacewalk. Their record in turn will be smashed next year when Christina Koch is scheduled to fly around the Moon on board Artemis II. These women are trained astronauts who are truly breaking new ground, rather than space tourists.

But any criticisms I might have of this are outweighed by my contempt for many of the responses - a great deal of outright sexism, backbiting and mean spirited bullying often hidden behind a thin veneer of concern about the use of resources.

I’m coining the term “The Underview Effect” for this sort of petty response to somebody else going into space, in contrast to the Overview Effect.

The Overview Effect

The overview effect is the supposed transformational effect that space travel, specifically viewing the Earth from space, has upon astronauts. People have reported a great sense of awe and changed perspective on life after having returned.

I’ve always been moderately skeptical of the effect - the profundity experienced by people who are emotionally moved by the experience of seeing Earth always seems to align with the current cultural trends. Edgar Mitchell, the LM pilot on Apollo 14, said this about how his journey impacted him:

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch’

This statement came at the height of the Cold War, when the US was involved in a very unpopular intervention in Vietnam, so its not unreasonable to think Mitchell may have been influenced in his reaction.

Contrast to when William Shatner flew on New Shepard in 2021, his impressions of space were quite morbid:

I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her.

Which again is an understandable statement for a 90 year old contemplating the end of his life. Clearly the experience of spaceflight is profound for many people, but it does not seem to have a consistent theme - perhaps what we discover up there is ourselves, rather than anything new. Whatever the validity of this, it is far preferable to the “underview effect”

Envy

Whenever spaceflight enters the news, it is met with criticism that is often unreasonably vitriolic, and bluntly seems to be motivated by envy, and were just openly insulting the crew (especially Perry)

Do not read this article, its just mindlessly mean and contains the word “heteropessimist”, indicating an over-educated gossip columnist who clearly thinks she is too good for the genre

Lots of harsh criticism came from other female celebrities, such as Emily Ratajkowski and Olivia Wilde, and in both cases they frankly came across as unpleasant schoolgirls angry another girl was getting more attention than them.

An ostensibly serious female journalist in the Guardian also got in on the act. This article has three whole paragraphs - the first and last are simple complaining about Perry’s hair and outfit, which gives a clue to the underlying motive, but the middle paragraph does contain an actual criticism, albeit a daft one. That “we” should be spending “our” resources on more important things.

Our Resources

Underlying this is a simple assumption - that resources are collectively owned, and that private control of any of them is a privilege that we grant. This is not how our society works, and definitely not how it should work based on the experiences of the 20th century.

This is a very old mode of criticism of spaceflight - summarised as “Pennies for the poor, Billions for space”. Even in the context of government funded space programs, which this flight was not, it has always been silly because it ignores how much greater the cost of social programs are than space programs, often by multiple orders of magnitude. Typically the speaker gets around this by comparing the per capita cost of social programs to the total cost of space programs, incorrectly inserting a huge factor in favour of their argument.

An anti-space poster paid for by a UK activist group

Its hard to reason people out of this position because they never reasoned themselves into it. They simply are reacting emotionally to something which they feel is excessively flashy.

But at least they believe it actually happened.

In addition to the usual gripes, some people have claimed the flight was “faked” to various levels - from accusing them of just using CGI to saying it wasn’t a real spaceflight, and that the crew did not experience microgravity.

The former generally lines up with the people who think the Moon landing was faked; but sadly there seems to be an increasing number of those people. The latter is not overtly conspiratorial but shows how the general public lack some fairly basic knowledge about spaceflight.

What Can Be Done

In all of these cases, there is a desperate need for better communication from the space community. I’m trying to do my part here.

Hopefully, as suborbital and then orbital space tourism becomes more common, people will familiarise themselves with the facts a bit more and not make so many foolish statements. But I suspect the bitterness towards people going into space won’t go away.

One positive step that you can do to drive the debate forwards, if you live in the UK is to sign my petition for increasing our public spending on space.

Otherwise, if readers have any ideas for how to win such people over, I am willing to listen, but I suspect that for the most part they can’t be reached. Nobody is going to give up envy because you ask them to, and that is fundamentally what its all about.

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