Space Time

The Challenges of Having Children in Space

Tech titans like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk want human beings to move off-planet, but reproducing away from Earth could be incredibly difficult

Credit: World Perspectives/Getty Images

The romantic lure of space travel runs deep. It’s difficult not to look up at a sparkling night sky and wonder what it might be like to pass beyond the confines of the Earth. It’s not just science fiction — plans to colonize the moon and Mars are spreading throughout the private space industry. Jeff Bezos — who funds the rocket company Blue Origin — recently unveiled his ambitions to one day build floating space stations called O’Neill colonies. But there is one thing that is rarely discussed when we dream about a new life in the off-world colonies: what would life be like for the children.

To look deeper into this issue, Michael Oman-Reagan space anthropologist and Vanier scholar at Memorial University recently published a paper in the journal Futures where he delved into the story of a young child named David Vetter, otherwise known as “the bubble boy.” Vetter was born with a rare genetic disease called severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) that meant his immune system was so weak his body was always susceptible to infection. To stay safe, from the moment of his birth he had to be kept inside a sterilized plastic enclosure, to avoid exposure to germs.

David Vetter. Credit: AcidCow

For Oman-Reagan, Vetter was the closest thing to a proxy for what life in the alien environment of space or another planet might be like.“I started to think about what his life was like in isolation and how it would be a lot like the lives of the first generation of children on Mars or even on a space station or any space settlement,” he says. “Because the environment would be deadly. He was born into a world that was toxic to him.” Even Elton John sang, “Mars ain’t no place to raise your kids.”

If we were to move to Mars or the moon, and wanted to stay there permanently, children would inevitably have to be a part of any settlement — whether as voyagers themselves, or after…