The Strange Dance of Space Business and Spirituality

Anatomy of Spiritual Marketing [6]

Deep in the night on Tanegashima, a rocket ascends, leaving behind a pillar of light.
Every time the roar tears through the clouds, someone's "wish" is sealed in a metal coffin and thrust through the stratosphere.

Satellites, ashes, prayers—the three have become cargo sharing the vacuum, indistinguishable from one another...

The market is hotter than you might imagine. According to research firms, the space tourism market was valued at $888 million in 2023 and is projected to exceed $10 billion by 2030. What justifies this 40% annual growth rate is the unique story of an "extraterrestrial experience". In this era of Reiwa, stories attract capital more than numbers do.

Of particular note is space burial. The U.S. company Celestis has been providing services to deliver portions of cremated remains into Earth orbit or to the lunar surface for nearly thirty years. Prices start at $5,000.
Competitor Elysium Space offers a "return as a shooting star plan," selling a set of space and a funeral procession of fire for $2,490. The story created by a business model that puts a price tag on a journey after death might just be the space-age version of a "posthumous Buddhist name" (kaimyo).

Further, ever further—the lunar cemetery project has also begun.
In January 2024, a plan to carry ashes on the U.S. company Astrobotic's lunar lander was thwarted by propulsion system trouble, but the Navajo Nation, the largest Native American group in the U.S., had protested it regardless, calling it a "desecration" of indigenous culture that views the moon as sacred (*1). Space development and the spiritual rights of indigenous peoples have collided.The moment business steps into a sacred void, cultural friction burns even in a vacuum.

Let's turn our eyes to psychology. The Overview Effect reported by astronauts is a sense of awe and unity born when viewing the Earth from the outside.Latest research suggests that subjects who experienced it via VR also showed increased altruism.
The motivation for buying expensive space tourism tickets might not just be status, but a deep-seated desire to "dissolve the boundaries of the ego"...
However, investor psychology is more vulgar. Tokens for unlisted rocket companies, satellite NFTs, metaverse observatories—exhilarating stories cause expected rates of return to be overestimated. As Kahneman's "Prospect Theory" shows, people are hypersensitive to small-probability, high-reward outcomes.Space + Spirituality = Infinity, the equation flashes red in the brain.

Risks are also entering orbit.
If a rocket carrying ashes explodes, the funeral vanishes like dew, and if a tourist flight is postponed, the advance payment is left hanging in the air. Moreover, space law varies in application depending on nationality, and the shield of consumer protection is thin. There are no relief agencies in a vacuum. We must calmly read the structure in which this uncertainty is added on as a "mystique premium."

Nevertheless, not everyone is moved solely by numbers. It is difficult to measure with cost-benefit analysis the eyes of a child who believes that the moment their father's ashes become a star, the family's story is renewed. What is scattered into space is ash, romance, and a little bit of speculation. These mix together, and the moment they escape the gravitational sphere, they sublimate into a "myth."

In the end, astral infrastructure is an eclectic mix of faith and capital.
If you misunderstand how to savor it, you'll get heartburn, but in the right amount, it can be a spice for life.
The angle at which you look up at the sky and the width to which you open your wallet—who decides that balance? The answer, like a glowing trajectory, is still wavering.

Next time, I plan to cover the theme of "Prediction Markets and Crowd Psychology—Humanity's Habit of Betting on the Future." When stock prices and fortunes dance on the same board, how far can our rationality hold up?

※1 AXIOS https://www.axios.com/2024/01/08/peregrine-moon-lander-launch-human-remains

I am currently exploring my writing style. Things I thought wouldn't be well-received were, and things I wrote using packaged words—Japanese is a highly compressed language, after all—without unpacking them, leaving them in complicated phrasing, which I regretted, were actually well-read... The act of actually writing is a continuous series of discoveries and surprises.

If you read this and thought, "This isn't bad," please actively press the ♡ button. I want to find the rhythm of what gets read.