If You Want to Get High in Space

After SpaceX founder Elon Musk smoked a blunt on Joe Rogan's podcast in 2018, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson was happy to cut him some slack. "Let the man get high if he wants to get high," Tyson told TMZ. "He's the best thing we've had since Thomas Edison."

- By Jacob Sullum

But when Tyson was asked "what it would be like smoking weed in space,” he struck a note of caution. "The problem is, in space now, many things will kill you,” he said. "So if you do anything to alter your understanding of what is reality, that’s not in the interest of your health. If you want to get high in space, lock yourself in your cabin and don’t come out, because you could break stuff inadvertently.”

If you want to get high in space, there are some other issues to consider.

Reporting on Tyson’s comments, Live Science suggested that sparking up a doobie would pose a serious hazard "in the oxygen-rich environment of a space station,” especially since fire burns and spreads unpredictably in zero gravity. A 2020 article in Fire Technology noted that "the fire risk in a spacecraft is more challenging than most terrestrial locations due to inevitable use of polymers and potential ignition sources in cramped quarters, limited resources for fire response, and limited evacuation strategy.”