NETJETS US VOLUME 15 2021

work [this new world of private spaceflight] out.
It’s like the early days of aviation, in the 1920s
and 1930s. There was airmail and then cargo,
but when passenger routes were first proposed
people scoffed,” says Shoffner. “Even the military
thought aeroplanes were silly at first. But over
time the value of such advances came to be seen,
and improvements in technology and increased
availability pushes prices down. I think the public
is still skewed towards scepticism: There are so
many major problems on Earth that need solving
it’s easy to say that the cost of space travel would
be better put to other uses. But things have to
shift slowly.”
INDEED, with NASA increasingly seeing itself
as more a spaceflight customer and not as a
spaceflight provider, Shoffner argues that the
willingness of private individuals like him to
spend a lot of money in order to, in part at least,
fulfill an understandable childhood fantasy will
in the coming years prove vital to the next space
race. That’s space’s commercialization. And, from
the human perspective, its expansion.
“Right now, getting into space is expensive
enough that people who do it have to take the
decision very seriously. You have to think about
the value your money is providing,” explains
Shoffner. “But space is only going to become
more and more available to people with different
objectives. Some people will just want to go, as
I do, while also wanting to do something useful
with my time up there too.
“But I believe that it’s also important that
humanity makes progress in space,” he adds.
“Listen to Elon Musk and he argues that for our
long-term survival it’s important we think of
ourselves as an inter-planetary species. But also
because there are [scientific research] things
we can do in space that you can’t do on Earth.
And private people like me going into space is
another way of promoting awareness of space,
of catching attention in the way mine was as a
seven year old.”
That’s also why Shoffner is developing
a STEM (science, technology, engineering,
and mathematics) program for the school he
attended, in the hope that more of an emphasis
of science and tech—“education is too generic,”
he suggests—will foster an interest in working in
the space sector, a career he would have pursued
himself if he had been nudged in the right
direction earlier.
Still, better late than never, as he may say to
himself as the countdown runs out and engine
ignition fires up. After all, he’ll likely touch down
as a changed man. As so many astronauts have
found, spaceflight can be a profound experience.
Shoffner says he hopes it doesn’t make him
cry, but he does expect to be changed by being
able to see for himself the fragility of the planet,
protected only by its thin curl of atmosphere.
“I hope to come back wanting to look for ways
to do some good in the world, without going
to the top of the mountain and sitting crosslegged
for the rest of my life,” laughs the man
who, one imagines, would find sitting still rather
intolerable. “I hope to come back less resource
hungry and less consumerist. Really, just less of
an asshole. And that has to be a good thing.”
“I believe that it’s also
important that humanity
makes progress in space.”
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