When Chris Boshuizen floats in zero-gravity in suborbital space next week, he’ll be achieving a dream he’s had since he was a kid in country New South Wales.
Chris grew up in Tumbarumba, a town of 2,000 people in the Snowy Mountains, and from a young age was always fascinated with space and hellbent on going there someday.
"I wanted it really badly. And I just decided not to let anything else into my brain other than trying to make that happen," the 44-year-old told triple j’s Hack.
Next week, that dream will happen when Boshuizen flies aboard Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin’s second commercial space flight, alongside 90-year-old Star Trek actor William Shatner.
From Tumba to NASA to space
After finishing high school in Tumbarumba, Chris planned on getting to space by applying for the Australian airforce, but that door closed fast when he found out he was partially colourblind.
He then got a scholarship from Sydney University to cover his housing costs and was accepted to study physics and maths. From there, it was onto NASA.
Chris worked at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, and was part of the team that developed a miniature satellite made from mobile phone parts, called the Phonesat project.
These satellites were about 10 centimetres square, powerful, and incredibly cheap: about $500 USD.
As well as dreaming about one day going to space, Chris’s other goal has been democratising space and making space technology and exploration more affordable.
The Phonesat project gave him and some colleagues the idea to leave NASA and build their own miniature satellites to send into orbit. And that is the origin story of their company Planet Labs.
"We left and in true Silicon Valley spirit started a startup company in a garage just down the road from Apple," Chris said.
The company has hundreds of miniature satellites in space, which run in a long line around the Earth from north to south, and as the Earth rotates they take photos. Those images are stitched together to form a complete map of the Earth’s surface.
"What's cool is you can compare that map from today with yesterday.
"You can then write a little piece of code to say, 'What changed? What's different? Did that tree get cut down? Was there a landslide somewhere we didn't know that needs repairing?' You can find that stuff from space."
The dawn of commercial space travel
Only 574 people have ever been to space, and fewer than 20 have been civilians. But in 2021, that’s changing.
In July, British billionaire Richard Branson rode on his company Virgin Galactic's first commercial joyride into what’s known as suborbital space. He was followed eight days later by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos with his company Blue Origin.
Chris Boshuizen says the space industry is a small community, so he has lots of friends in the various companies and for years has been nagging them for a ticket on one of these early commercial flights. (Chris now works as a venture capitalist and his career has reportedly made him very wealthy.)
"I was just persistent. I just asked them every single time," he laughed.
It paid off because Chris is now realising that childhood dream. Next week he will be flying from Texas onboard the New Shepherd rocket and Star Trek's William Shatner will be along for the ride, making him the oldest person to travel outside the Earth's atmosphere.
These flights are short - around 15 minutes in total, including five minutes of weightlessness above the Kármán Line, the international boundary of space, before the descent.
"We get to see the blackness of space, the curvature of the earth, the thin atmosphere. Then after soaking up that view, we then come back down on parachutes and land back in the desert," he explained.
It won’t come cheap though - although the ticket prices haven't been disclosed, they’re rumoured to be about $600,000, although Virgin will be selling theirs for $250,000.
This new era of space travel or tourism has led to criticism that it’ll become a super-rich bucket list adventure but Chris is optimistic that will change in the coming years.
"It's really the beginning of a new chapter for the human race… the beginning of something remarkable that regular people can go to space."
He’s also spent a lot of time thinking about the old 'why go to space when we have problems to fix here' argument.
"It's a little bit valid because there's absolutely very pressing problems on the Earth. But what I think that argument misses is, we can do both and there's enough people and resources to do both.
"It's like saying, 'maybe we shouldn't even bother doing art' or 'why do we do music when we have people to feed?' And the answer is because all of these things play a role in our civilization."
The trip will make Chris the third Australian to go into space. Reflecting on coming from that small country town to here, he sees it as a story of opportunity.
"It’s maybe a sign of the times that we live in this global world where people can do that. Even that I can go to space as an Australian, it's the same thing," Boshuizen said.
"The world is opening up and anyone from anywhere can make it if they have a dream and really want to do it."