Kim Blyre has lived pretty much her entire life in Concord, the state capital of New Hampshire. Concord is a little bit of a sleepy city. It is a city, but it has a small town feel. But in July of 1985, when Kim was just about to enter sixth grade, sleepy Concord was thrust into the national spotlight. Well, we're here today to announce the first private citizen passenger in the history of spaceflight. Here's then Vice President George H.W. Bush. The president said last August that this passenger would be one of America's finest, a teacher. Back then, NASA's Space Shuttle program had been carrying astronauts to low Earth orbit for four years. But now, it was going to carry a school teacher. More than 11,000 educators from across the country applied to the program. The teacher who will be going into space, Krista McAuliffe. Where is that you? Krista teaches in Concord High School in Concord, New Hampshire. She teaches social studies. For me, it was her charisma that drew me in, but also just the excitement. You know, here's this ordinary person from my city who is embarking on this extraordinary adventure. In the months leading up to her mission, Krista McAuliffe became a national celebrity. How long will this mission be? Do you have any idea? Yeah, it's going to be six days. Six days? Yeah, and every 90 minutes I'm going to be orbiting the Earth at 17,000 miles. So every day I'd run home from school, my parents would save the newspaper. And whatever story it was from that day, we would cut it out and save it and put it into a photo album. And as a little young girl in town, it's not like space travel was something that was on my wish list in life, but it did give me the sense that whatever was on my wish list was achievable. We have main engine start. Four, three, two, one, and lift off. Lift off. On January 28th, 1986, the rocket carrying the space shuttle Challenger exploded. Flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation. Obviously a major malfunction. Krista McAuliffe and the six other astronauts on board were killed. Kim was one of millions of children who watched this happen on live television while at school. It was a shock. Kim stopped adding to her memory book. After the tragedy, it sort of ended. We continued to collect the articles for a period of time, but every article had the smoke in the explosion, and that became a thing that we didn't want to look at anymore. In New Hampshire, Krista McAuliffe's legacy lives on. She is still an inspiration for students. But after the explosion, NASA scrapped its teacher and space project. They decided it was still too risky to try and send private citizens to space. 40 years later, things are very different. Four space tourists are on the first flight of its kind carrying humans over the Earth's polar regions. The Fram2 mission is privately funded by crypto billionaires. I'm Nate Hedgie, and this is Outside In. Today, celebrities and billionaires are buying trips to space. Private companies are designing new private space stations of their own. The question is, are we ready for that? And what happens if or when something goes wrong? One, ignition, and lift off. Producer Daniel Ackerman has the story after a break. Rural Britain, you've suffered too long. Your days of sluggish broadband are over. We're connecting rural homes to full fiber with thousands more joining every month. T-minus five. The gigaverse is expanding before my very eyes. Gigaclear, faster broadband for rural Britain from only 19 pounds per month. We have lived off. Season C's apply. 18 months contract. Prices may rise during contract. Check availability at gigaclear.com. This is Outside In. I'm Daniel Ackerman. Chances are, you have never looked at the Earth the way this guy has. Look at the Earth. Just look outside. Look at the Earth. Look what's here. These clips are from a promotional video for Blue Origin, the space company founded by Jeff Bezos. The people are floating in zero gravity, looking down at the curvature of the Earth from space. Oh my word. I'm just spinning. That was, that was enlightenment. This is the best experience of my life. The production is a little cheesy, but I got to admit, I found myself tearing up watching these reactions. The raw emotion, the overwhelming sense of awe. It was contagious. I just went to space as a first woman from Mexico. But the fact is, very few people have had this experience. Only about 750 humans have been to space. 10 times that number have submitted Mount Everest. And of that 750, the vast majority have been highly trained professional astronauts with government agencies like NASA. This is Houston. Say again, please. Houston, we have a problem. We have a main bus vehicle. A lot of us grew up watching movies about space travel that portrayed astronauts as these elite athletes and technical geniuses, something close to superheroes. Like soldiers, these were public servants putting their lives on the line for the sake of science and exploration. But the voices in that promotional video, one of them was 90-year-old William Shatner. What you have given me is the most profound experience I can imagine. These folks are among the few dozen private passengers that Blue Origin has sent beyond the Karman Line, the invisible boundary that separates our planet from everything else. And they're not exactly highly trained. That said, there's a reason that industry is so keen on it, they see a lot of demand. This is Ben Miller. He's an economist who researches space policy for the Rand Corporation. Do you aspire to ever go to space yourself? I'll leave that to others, I think. I enjoy researching the regulatory issues, but I'm giving the two feet on the ground. Ben isn't alone, but the other side is growing. A few years back, Pew surveyed Americans and asked if they'd be interested in traveling to space. 42% of people said they were definitely or probably interested. And the one hand that said, oh, that's less than half of people, but I look at that and go, 42%, that's a very sufficient slice of the pie to build a company off of. 42% of multi-millionaires will give these companies more than enough customers to work with for a while. According to its website, reserving a seat on a Blue Origin rocket requires a $150,000 deposit. The full price of the mission isn't public, but presumably if you have to ask, you can't afford it. Blue Origin, by the way, didn't make anyone available for interview. But what kind of assurances do those passengers have that they're safe? What happens if something goes wrong? To answer that, you have to go back to 2004. Amazing, it was a near flawless mission on a beautiful morning. Thousands here showing up watching in awe, their eyes glued to the sky to witness this milestone in history. On June 21 of that year, the first ever privately built, privately piloted spacecraft traveled to space. This was but a stepping stone to take space travel out of the exclusive hands of government, their goal, a tour bus to the stars. And the US government, they weren't unhappy about this. Just the opposite. They wanted to encourage this burgeoning private space industry. So a few months later, a bipartisan group of lawmakers passed the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004. So from 2004 to now, it's been a growth period. This is Doug Ligore. He's a space lawyer, which is a specialty he didn't really anticipate back in his law school days. No, and I don't think a lot of people do. It's kind of a burgeoning field. Doug says the 2004 Space Launch Bill was meant to clear the way for private space companies. One thing the bill did was set up the FAA to regulate spacecraft launch and reentry. If your vehicle is reentering the atmosphere, the FAA needs to ensure that the crew has certain safety protocols in place to protect the crew so they can operate the vehicle so they can maintain public safety. It doesn't crash into a city or something like that. But there was one thing the bill specifically forbade the FAA from doing, at least at first. And that is requiring certain safety measures for spacecraft passengers. There's a carve out for what they call spaceflight participants. So commercial for hire individuals that go on those vehicles, FAA doesn't have the authority to impose any standards, safety standards. So for example, if you want to go to space and you say, well, you know, I'd like to be strapped into my seat. That's up to the company to decide. Or you say, hey, you know, I'd really like to be in a pressurized suit in case we lose oxygen in the cabin. FAA has nothing to say about that. Let me get this straight. The very same FAA that regulates seat belts, smoking and the weight of airplane seats has nothing to say about passenger safety in space. Doug says the idea here is that human space travel is still such a new industry. We don't exactly know what the future will look like. And if we impose binding regulations now, it could stifle innovation. One worker in the industry told me that regulating passenger safety would be like strangling a baby in a crib. Again, the companies went to Congress and they said, we need this freedom because we're going to innovate all these different designs. And if you hamstring us with a rule, then it's going to funnel our technology in one direction. We don't want that. This ban on safety regulation, sometimes called the learning period, was originally supposed to expire in 2012. But Congress has extended that deadline again and again. Now, the private space industry has been learning for a full 20 years. The law is set to come under review once more in 2028. Meanwhile, the number of private citizens getting shot into space is growing. In 2021, the year of Blue Origin started taking paying customers into space, nearly 20 private citizens made the journey. The number of NASA astronauts that flew that year? About 10. I'm not saying I share this opinion, but one could argue that the high rollers who sign up for a private joyride in space, well, they know what they're getting into. And you could imagine a fair amount of online shot infroid if it were a handful of billionaires killed in the first private space disaster. Not unlike what happened when the Titan submersible imploded in 2023. He thought his submersible was one of the safest forms of transportation in the world. And he also thought it was unsinkable. And that's the same thing they said about the Titanic. But it's not just rich tourists headed to orbit on private spacecrafts. Launching is a thrill. I don't get tired of that part. It's a lot of fun. There's some G-forces involved, acceleration, so it's pretty dramatic. This is astronaut Peggy Whitson. She holds the American record for most days spent in space. That's 695. Peggy has spent the better part of two years of her life orbiting hundreds of miles above Earth's surface. Most of that was as a NASA astronaut on the International Space Station. I remember I'd been on orbit for almost three weeks on my first flight. And I was in my crew sleep station, which is about the size of this little booth here. And in the morning I floated out of my sleeping bag and floated down the laboratory. And I'm like, I live in space. This is so amazing. When Peggy retired from NASA in 2018, she figured she'd spend the rest of her life stuck here on this big rock with the rest of us. But then, a company called Axiom Space offered her a job as a private sector astronaut. I left in 2018 expecting never to fly again and I've had two missions since then. That's faster flight rate than I got when I was at NASA. Peggy's two commercial missions for Axiom were flights to her old stomping ground at the ISS aboard a SpaceX capsule. We've done full missions, done all the training, the preparation, the mission ops, the interfaces with NASA. And it's actually an important stepping stone for us as we look forward to building Axiom Station. Axiom Station. The ISS is already well beyond its intended lifespan. And it'll be replaced by the privately built Axiom Station. Peggy says it'll be constructed over time, piece by piece, starting in 2028. Initially, the first module would be docked to the International Space Station. And then when our second module comes up, we'll detach from the space station. The two will join together and we will be capable of a four-person crew with a continuous human presence on orbit. To Peggy, the upgraded space station, that faster flight rate, it's all evidence that the private space industry is innovating. Peggy says Axiom Station will host science and medical research that just can't be done here on Earth. Some of that research already got started on one of Peggy's previous Axiom missions to the ISS. She transported cancer cells to space for drug testing. Cancer tends to grow a lot faster in space. And we don't necessarily understand why, but it becomes a great test bid for us. Because in a week or two weeks, we can tell, is this drug working? But Axiom Station isn't just going to be used for research. Because whereas NASA is bound by its mission for space exploration and science, private companies have other interests too. We're going to be developing an economy in space. We want to do in-space manufacturing, orbital data centers, be part of mesh networks on orbit. All of these things I think are going to contribute to building that presence in space. So Axiom is not a space tourism company? No. It's not just Axiom. Other firms too are vying to create their own private industrial space stations. And Peggy says realizing this vision of a thriving space economy that improves the fate of humankind here on Earth, it's going to take more than just highly trained career astronauts like her. Space is changing. It is going to involve a lot of people who I might just be a welder. I might just be somebody who's going up to build something in space or mine something in space. On the one hand, this new future opens a world of possibilities. Regular people who would never qualify as NASA astronauts may have a chance to go to space. For example, Axiom is working to determine whether it's safe for people with diabetes to travel to space. And Blue Origin recently launched someone who uses a wheelchair into space for the first time. But it also raises a different set of ethical questions. Rich tourists may choose to accept the dangers of space and pay the consequences if something goes wrong. But what if you're an employee sent to space by your boss? We know it's dangerous, but we really don't know how dangerous. And we don't know how dangerous it is for people who are not elite trained astronauts. So I started playing music again. I actually just played this folk festival recently. And now that I'm playing music, I need to look a lot sharper than my typical athleisure sweatpants working from home outfit. So I picked up this blue chorecoat from Quince that I absolutely adore. It's durable, it fits great, it looks cool, and it costs less than $100. You see, everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than what you'd find at similar brands. Quince works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen, so you're getting premium materials without the markup. Refresh your everyday with luxury you'll actually use. Head to quince.com slash outside in for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash outside in for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince dot com slash outside in. Winning hit series rivals. Welcome to the naughtiest show on television. To the unmissable crime drama, High Potential. Gotta dead body, gotta go. A lifetime of great stories awaits. This spring on Disney Plus, 18 plus subscription required. T's and C's apply. Wait, wait, wait, don't skip this, don't skip this, don't skip this. This is not an ad. This is me, Nate. And I'm here to tell you that it is yet again time to open up the outside inbox to listen to questions. We've been getting the most random submissions lately. Like can bobcats get hairballs? Or why does warm dirt smell so good? But we need more questions. So please send us the weirdest wackiest questions about science in the natural world that you can think of. It is super easy. You can call our hotline at 1-844-GO-AUTER. Or even better, send us a voice memo to outsideinradio at nhpr.org. Okay, back to the show. This is Outside In. I'm Daniel Ackerman. And who is that peering over your shoulder back there on the wall? That is Mr. Spock, a life-size cardboard stand-up that's been with me for almost 35 years now. This is Donna Tullidzecki. Dr. Spock loomed over her desk at Purdue University where she works as a space ethicist. Would you ever travel to space if you were offered a seat? Yes, absolutely. I don't know how long I would make it because you're going to feel quite hot in space and I like cold weather. But absolutely, yes, I would be extremely excited. I wanted to talk to Donna to better understand what the FAA's learning period means for everyday people who might wind up in space, either as tourists or as workers in a futuristic orbital economy. And she started by reminding me just how few people have actually been there. We know it's dangerous, but we really don't know how dangerous. And we don't know how dangerous it is for people who are not elite trained astronauts. Donna says being in space does some very strange things to the human body. We do know that microgravity results in rapid muscle loss. We've got bone thinning, cardiovascular deconditioning. That's why NASA astronauts on the ISS do at least two hours of exercise every day. There are lots of fluid shifts that basically affect vision, balance. That last one, fluid shifts, you can actually see this in images of astronauts. Their faces puff up as the lack of gravity causes blood to move from lower in the body up to the head. And this can cause swelling in the brain and eyes. In space, even the heart changes shape, going from something like an oval to something more circular. People who stay in space for a longer period of time are very prone to certain kinds of medical conditions, UTIs, which turn out to be very difficult to treat, so they can actually be quite dangerous in space. But there's also radiation that increases cancer risk, it can damage the nervous system. And this stuff may not be a huge deal for brief minutes-long space tourism flights, but Donna said it would certainly come into play with workers on longer private missions in the future. Workers who might manage a research lab or do construction and maintenance on a private space station. It's one thing if people voluntarily decide to do certain things that are quite risky, and it's a different thing for an employer to demand that the employees actually do this. I mean, one thing is also that you can't just go home if you don't feel well. But there are questions here about cumulative radiation exposure, various other kinds of health issues, that again, NASA is regulating very stringently. And right now, this is not regulated for the potential commercial employees. Under the FAA's learning period on safety regulations, firms could send pretty much anyone to space. As long as they sign a waiver acknowledging that, yes, I know, space travel is risky, and if something bad happens, my family won't sue. That's even more lax than rules about climbing Mount Everest, by the way. For that, you need approval from Nepal's government, certifying that you're healthy enough to make a summit attempt. Peggy Whitson, the NASA retiree turned private space sector astronaut, says, even without that regulation, private companies have very good reason to make sure they're keeping everyone on board safe. Just because the FAA doesn't require certain safety measures doesn't mean they're not happening. You're not going to have customers if, you know, you're blowing up a vehicle. So you have to care. Everyone has to care about the safety of the crew in order to be successful. And so it's important how you go about it might be new and different. And that's the thing that I think commercial industry gives us now, as we can look at new options. We don't have to be stuck in the same path that's been used over and over again for many, many years. It's hard to dispute that since private companies got interested in space, technology has advanced at a rapid clip. Despite winning the so-called space race, NASA isn't exactly known for moving at breakneck speeds. To Peggy, extending the learning period makes sense. The industry is still in its relative infancy. I think we're all still new enough now that we still need some of that flexibility. And if we want to drive that innovation, we need to not have too many restrictions at this phase. So I think that flexibility is important right now. Suffice it to say, though, not everyone agrees. I mean, you can bleep this out, but that's complete bullsh**. This is Doug Legore again, a space lawyer. He says some private firms rely on what he calls a mythology. That regulation is going to kill the industry and kill innovation. And really what it's about, it's about them wanting to continue to avoid liability. Doug says that if something were to go wrong, if a passenger were to die aboard one of these spacecraft, the company would likely face no civil or criminal liability, because it can't be in violation of safety regulations if there aren't any safety regulations. If something happens to you on an airplane, something happens to you on a train, a bus, an Uber, even driving your own car, and the automaker is at fault, you have ways of getting justice that you simply do not have in space. And so I think we're setting ourselves up for a catastrophe. I think people will die. And it's a shame. We don't have to wait for people to die. We know how to do this now. My controllers here looking very carefully at the situation. Obviously a major malfunction. Doug says if that happens, a private version of the Challenger disaster, it's likely that the government would suddenly change its tune, rush in with performative regulations that might not make a lot of sense. What typically happens in a catastrophic incident is yes, you get regulation quickly. In many cases, those regulations are suboptimal because Congress is acting very quickly. There's another argument for proactive regulation. Ben Miller, the space economist we heard from earlier, he says the idea that regulation is bad for industry, that's not actually supported by the evidence. In fact, usually it's the opposite. Usually regulation either has no harm to the industry both at all or sometimes it's even helpful to the industry because it establishes a baseline set of ground rules that everybody operates under. Then if I'm a multimilitary that wants to go to space, well I'm going to come do that in the US with the US company because I'm confident that I'm not going to die on the US ship because I know the US system, it's regulated, it's structured, it's safe. The industry is still so new with so few launches, it's impossible to calculate the risk of private spaceflight. Economists like Ben told me that and so did insurance brokers, whose job it literally is to calculate these risks. There's just not enough data. But if you take NASA's space shuttle as an indication, it's not just about the risk of the risk of the risk. It's about the risk of the risk of the risk of the risk. There's not enough data. But if you take NASA's space shuttle as an indicator, well that program launched people into space 135 times. Of those two were catastrophic failures. The most recent in 2003 was the space shuttle Columbia explosion, which killed all seven astronauts aboard. And before that, in 1986, was the space shuttle Challenger, the one carrying Concord High School teacher, Krista McAuliffe. I still can't believe that I'm going to actually be going into that shuttle. It just, it just really doesn't seem possible. Maybe when I'm on the launch pad it will. What are you most excited about? Seeing the earth from that perspective of that small planet, you know, it's such a big place here. But being able to look at it from a new perspective, and I hope I can bring that wonder and that excitement back. A lot of us grew up thinking of space travel as something close to an impossible dream. But that's becoming less true. We're moving toward a future where space could be a research lab, an industrial work site, a tourist destination. New technologies often emerge faster than we have the ability or political will to regulate. But it's still early days for private human space travel. And we still have the chance to decide if this time should be different. Maybe just a little bit of fright too? Not yet. Maybe when I'm strapped in and those rockets are going off underneath me, there will be. But space flight today really seems safe. We had a good example of that when... For the 40th anniversary of the Challenger Disaster, my colleagues at NHPR have put together some other really amazing stories about Krista McAuliffe and her legacy. We'll put a link in the show notes. This episode was reported and produced by Daniel Ackerman. It was edited by Taylor Quimby with help from Marina Hanky and Felix Poon. It was mixed by Taylor Quimby and Felix Poon. Our staff also includes Jessica Hunt and Justine Paradis. We also have a lot of great people who are working with us and we also include Jessica Hunt and Justine Paradis. Special thanks to Neil Stevens, Tom Lottorette, Bruce McClintock, Oscar Garcia, Andrew Nelson, H.R. Zucker and Anna Mathis. I am your host, Nate Hedgie. Taylor Quimby is our executive producer. Rebecca LaVoy is NHPR's director of On Demand Audio. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Outside In is production of New Hampshire Public Radio. We all need advice, but it's not always clear who to ask. Even in 2026, enter how to. The long-standing advice show and ambi-award nominated Best Personal Growth podcast that's back with new episodes and a new host who, me, Mike Peska. Each week I tackle a listener question ranging from travel to finance to relationships and beyond with help from a world-class expert, you know, someone who actually very much knows what their topic is. Think of it as eavesdropping on someone else's therapy session without the copay or awkward silences. You've got questions. We'll find the experts and the answers. So follow How To with Mike Peska wherever you get podcasts. Have you ever asked yourself, can the president really do that? Or wondered if there is too much money in political campaigns? Then check out the new season of You Might Be Right, hosted by us, former Tennessee governor Phil Bredesen. We're back for a brand new season now, and You Might Be Right cements the idea that constructive disagreement can lead to real problem-solving. This season, we're going to dig into the role of the National Guard, AI regulation, and a lot more. New episodes drop every other week. Follow You Might Be Right wherever you get your podcasts.
