Brian Stelter Worries About Climate After Virgin Galactic Launch: ‘Is It Ethical to Be Launching Rockets and Flying Off to Space?’

CNN’s Brian Stelter questioned whether space travel was “ethical” when funding dedicated to it could instead be devoted to issues related to climate change.

He made the comment on Sunday’s edition of Reliable Sources, the same day Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson took a test flight 53.5 miles above the Earth’s surface to reach the region technically considered by NASA as space.

“Is it moral?” Stelter asked in an interview with journalist Miles O’Brien. “Is it ethical to be launching rockets and flying off to space and spending all this money and burning all this fuel in an age of climate crisis?”

“I don’t think it’s mutually exclusive, Brian,” O’Brien replied. “I think we can afford to continue to push our frontier.”

O’Brien said he believed space could be utilized for natural resources before becoming more philosophical, opining, “Let’s face it. The human race, eventually, Earth and the solar system [are] going to end. The idea of extending humanity beyond our solar system someday sounds like science fiction, but if we don’t continue these incremental steps now, we’re never going to get there. … We never will continue the human race beyond Earth and beyond the solar system. We’re talking billions of years off, but if we’re going to make it, thread the needle right now — and we’re in a crisis where we face extinction much sooner, we need to think in both fields right now.”

Watch above via CNN.