Space is an unnatural environment for humans. We can’t survive unprotected in a pure vacuum for more than two minutes. Getting to space involves being strapped to a barely contained chemical explosion.

Since 1961, fewer than 700 people have been into space. Private space companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin hope to boost that number to many thousands, and SpaceX is already taking bookings for flights to Earth orbit.

I’m an astronomer who has written extensively about space travel, including a book about our future off-Earth. I think a lot about the risks and rewards of exploring space.

As the commercial space industry takes off, there will be accidents and people will die. Polaris Dawn, planned to launch early in September 2024, will be a high-risk mission using only civilian astronauts. So, now is a good time to assess the risks and rewards of leaving the Earth.

Space travel is dangerous

Most Americans vividly recall the disasters that led to the loss of 14 astronauts’ lives. Two of the five space shuttles disintegrated, Challenger in 1986 soon after launch and Columbia in 2003 on reentry.

In total, 30 astronauts and cosmonauts have died while training for or during space missions.

There have also been dozens of close calls. Two astronauts are currently staying on the International Space Station for an extra six months because NASA declared their Boeing Starliner vehicle unsafe for the return journey. Starliner has had many problems during its development, including flammable tape, stuck valves and inadequate parachute systems. But a critical thruster malfunction is what caused NASA to abandon it as a return vehicle.

It’s not always safe on the ground, either. In addition to the three Apollo 1 astronauts who died in a 1967 launch pad fire, about 120 people died in the launchpad explosion of an unmanned rocket in Russia in 1960, and hundreds died in 1996 when a Chinese rocket veered off course and crashed into a nearby village.

The fatality rate of people traveling in space is about 3%. That sounds low, but it’s higher than extreme sports such as BASE jumping or jumping off a cliff wearing a wingsuit. The only recreations that rival the risk of space travel are solo free-climbing and climbing above 19,685 feet (6,000 meters) in the Himalayas.

Civilians in space

The 2020s have kicked off the era of civilian astronauts. After the death of schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe in the Challenger disaster, NASA stopped sending civilians into space. But for commercial space companies, it’s part of the business model.

The first all-civilian crew to reach orbit rode a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft in 2021, the Inspiration 4 mission. Since 2020, 69 private astronauts have gone to space, although only 46 reached the Kármán line – the formal definition of the edge of space.

The commercial space industry’s safety record is not perfect. No civilian has died in space, but one pilot died and another was seriously injured in a test flight of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo craft in 2014. This accident followed three deaths and three injuries in an explosion during a prelaunch test of the SpaceShipTwo rocket in 2007.

SpaceX, the largest commercial space company with 13,000 employees and a market value of US$180 billion, has seen no fatalities in flight, but it has recorded one death and hundreds of injuries in the workplace.

The Polaris Dawn mission was planned to launch Aug. 27, 2024, though a helium leak and bad weather has delayed it. It will push the envelope of risk for civilians in space. This SpaceX flight will reach an altitude of 435 miles (700 kilometers), higher than any astronauts since Apollo.

The Polaris Dawn’s four-person civilian crew will receive a hefty dose of radiation, getting as much in a few hours as they would in 20 years on the Earth. NASA is doing research to understand the extent of the health risks from radiation.

The mission will also include a spacewalk – the first for nongovernment astronauts. It will use spacesuits never tested in space. Since the spacecraft they’re using – the SpaceX Dragon – has no airlock, the inside of the capsule will be exposed to the vacuum of space, with all the crew members wearing spacesuits.

Russian cosmonaut Alexei Leonov nearly died during the first spacewalk in 1965, and other spacewalks have led to temporary blindness, near drowning and nearly being lost in space forever. A spacesuit is like a miniature spacecraft, and it has to withstand rapid temperature changes of hundreds of degrees when moving in and out of direct sunlight. Even a small tear or puncture can be fatal.

But while space travel comes with dangers, it also has rewards. Since Polaris Dawn will travel higher than any previous mission that did not go to the Moon, the crew will be able to do research on high-radiation environments. They will investigate the effects of spaceflight on the human body and evaluate how future deep-space travelers might diagnose and treat themselves.

A less tangible but potentially profound benefit is the overview effect – many astronauts report a feeling of awe from experiencing the Earth from space.

Space boom

Space is booming – hopefully just metaphorically and not literally. SpaceX makes money by launching Starlink satellites and ferrying supplies and people to the International Space Station, with estimated revenues of $15 billion this year. Blue Origin sells rocket engines and has contracts with NASA.

Both companies sell rides into space to high-net-worth individuals, but that’s a small fraction of their revenues. Space tourism is not available to the masses yet. Virgin Galactic offers a short, suborbital ride for $450,000, but getting to Earth orbit will cost you $55 million.

The space tourism market was $750 million in 2023, and that’s projected to grow to $5.2 billion over the next decade. Reusable rockets have made the cost of launching a spacecraft 10 times cheaper than it was a decade ago.

For space tourism to take off with a demographic broader than multimillionaires and thrill-seekers, it needs to be safe – both in perception and in reality. Many space entrepreneurs expect space travel to follow aviation’s arc, which also started by attracting rich people and thrill-seekers.

Since 1930, improvements in technology and safety features have lowered the number of fatal accidents in the aviation industry per million miles flown by a factor of 3,000. A more realistic target may be to make space travel as safe as driving. That’s a more lenient target, since driving is more dangerous than flying. Your annual odds of dying in a car crash are 1 in 5,000, compared with annual odds of 1 in 11 million of dying in a plane crash.

In the United States, the government has kept regulations light on the commercial space industry to encourage entrepreneurs.

Elon Musk’s dreams of millions of passengers and a city on Mars may not become reality. But if the cost of a jaunt to Earth’s orbit comes down to the cost of a high-end cruise, many people could experience the thrill of weightlessness and of seeing the Earth as a beautiful planet from above.

Chris Impey, University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy, University of Arizona

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As I opened an email from my local grocery store chain advertising Hispanic Heritage Month – which runs from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15 each year – I was surprised to see it highlighting recipes from four distinct regions: Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and South America.

The advertisement rightly noted that while corn and beans have framed much of what in the United States is considered “Hispanic” foods, Latin America has a much greater diversity of foods. Its cuisine, which began long before the Spanish or other colonizers came to the Americas, continues to flourish.

While many of us Latine – an alternative term for Latinos or Latinx that I prefer – embrace our European heritage, we also embrace our Indigenous and African heritage.

In recent decades, many Latin American nations have officially recognized their Indigenous and Afro-descendent populations as distinct groups with unique histories, cultures, foods and languages.

Countries across the Americas, including the United States, have revised their census questions to better understand their populations, enabling them to create more inclusive policies that actually address people’s needs – and to recognize the too-often hidden achievements of these groups.

Census changes in Latin America

Some Latin American countries, such as Peru, have counted their Indigenous population for over a century. But with the exception of Brazil and Cuba, Latin American countries generally excluded race on their national census, allowing economic and social inequalities to flourish undocumented.

The effort to better capture both Indigenous and Afro-descendant populations in Latin America began around the turn of the 21st century.

Uruguay, a small and prosperous South American country, long portrayed itself as white and European despite being home to Afro-Uruguayans descended from enslaved Africans. In 1996, under pressure from Afro-descendent activists, it added race to its national household survey. That census had census workers identify the respondents’ race and found the country to be 6% Afro-descended and revealed stunning racial disparities in education, income and employment. When in 2006 Uruguayan census-takers began asking residents to state their own racial identity, the Afro-descended population jumped to 10%. This data shift had important implications when Uruguay implemented race-based affirmative action a few years later.

In Mexico, where Indigenous identity had previously been linked only to speakers of one of the country’s 68 Indigenous languages, the census was changed in 2020 to ask if respondents self-identified as Indigenous or belonged to a community that identified as Indigenous. The result was an increase of 7.1 million people to 23.2 million who identified as Indigenous. The same change targeting the Afro-Mexican population identified a previously unrecognized population of 2.5 million.

‘Some other race’

The U.S. added a question about Hispanic descent to the 1970 census long form, and to the short form in 1980. The question asked, “Is this person of Hispanic/Spanish descent?” If the answer was Yes, these were following options: Mexican or Mexican-American or Chicano; Puerto Rican; Cuban; Other Spanish/Hispanic.

In subsequent decades, small changes were made such, as including the word “Latino” and allowing those who choose “other” in the national origin category to write in a response, with suggestions of “Argentinian, Colombian, Dominican, Salvadoran, Spaniard, and so on.” In 2020, the census allowed respondents to identify as “multiracial.”

The U.S. Census Bureau argues that its categories now adequately capture the heritage of the 62.6 million Hispanics that flourish in the U.S. “because all detailed Hispanic origin groups are included in the newly combined code list.”

In fact, however, if your heritage stems from one of the hundreds of Indigenous or Afro-descended groups in Latin America, these identities remain outside of the way the U.S. captures race among the Hispanic populations. That may explain why, according to the Census Bureau “the vast majority (94%) of responses to the race question that are classified as Some Other Race are from people of Hispanic or Latino origin.”

Overgeneralized and under-recognized

When the fixed categories of a census erase the diversity of a population, the gross miscalculations that result may harm a country’s ability to appropriately respond to the needs of its people.

For example, the overgeneralizing of U.S. Hispanics hurts the quality of American education and health care when these institutions assume that Latin American heritage communities speak Spanish. In addition to Indigenous languages, Latino Afro-descendant populations may not speak Spanish but rather may speak French or Haitian Creole, Portuguese or an Indigenous language. If they are from the Miskito Coast of Nicaragua, they may speak an English Creole.

These language differences reflect unique cultures and histories that relate to how people engage with doctors, teachers, politicians and much more.

Failing to recognize the diversity of Hispanics also creates frequent election surprises in the U.S. For example, pollsters got the Latino vote all wrong in 2020 by lumping together 32 million people with diverse political opinions and national origins as “Latino.” Democrats arguably made the same mistake in 2018.

In overgeneralizing Hispanics, the U.S may also overlook – to its own detriment – the knowledge and experience of a culturally unique people who bring with them alternative understandings of the world, some of which I’ve studied as an anthropologist focused on food security, migration and health in Latin America. These include agricultural practices that can aid American farmers in responding to the global climate crisis and Mesoamerican strategies for health based on communal care and traditional remedies.

A growing community with more to offer

Despite its limitations, U.S. census data clearly shows that the Hispanic population continues to grow. While the overall U.S. population increased 7% between 2010 and 2020, the Hispanic population expanded by 23%. Today, 1 in every 5 people in the U.S. identifies with Hispanic or Latino heritage.

This growth is particularly notable in the South – in states like Georgia and North Carolina – and in rural areas. The Hispanic population has become a demographic lifeline for parts of small-town America that experienced significant population loss in the late 20th century.

Hispanic communities have also reinvigorated urban neighborhoods as they open small businesses.

Rebuilding cities, stabilizing rural counties, expanding local economies – these are among the group contributions made by the community of Americans celebrated each year during Hispanic Heritage Month.

The better we understand the nuances of this large population, the better we will understand who we are as a nation – and benefit more fully from our diversity.

Ramona L. Pérez, Professor of Anthropology, San Diego State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.