Billionaires pave ‘road to space’
Jeff Bezos’ space adventures will benefit us all, so stop the whining
On Tuesday, a Blue Origins New Shepard rocket blasted off from Texas and successfully carried four humans over 100 kilometres above Earth’s surface, across the recognized limit where “space” begins. The flight, the company’s first attempt at a manned mission, was a total success; the rocket returned to its launch pad for a safe landing, and the four passengers landed shortly thereafter, in a capsule beneath parachutes, having just joined the exclusive club of humans who’ve reached, even if just briefly, the final frontier.
It was a remarkable feat by any standard. And, predictably, it led immediately to much grousing.
The first two sentences at the start of this column were written as neutrally as possible. They’re a form of inkblot test. Some people would read that and think, “Huh, wow, cool.” Others would roll their eyes and scoff, or lament the entire enterprise (ahem) as a waste of effort that could be better spent on priorities here on Earth. This is especially true because Jeff Bezos, of Amazon fame and wealth, owns Blue Origin, and was a passenger on Tuesday’s flight.
But it’s not just about a controversial billionaire taking a joyride into space. Competing reactions are as much a part of the space age as rockets, capsules and satellites.
There has never been a moment in our history of space flight when there haven’t been self-styled pragmatists insisting the whole thing is a waste of money squaring off with starry-eyed boosters of spaceflight. The original moon landing skeptics weren’t the people who doubt it happened, but the ones who doubted it was worth trying. So yeah, it’s an old debate.
Here’s the core of the issue: we don’t know what future, if any, man has in space. Mastering manned spaceflight could literally save humanity. Or maybe it amounts to absolutely nothing at all, and by already figuring out communication satellites and robotic exploration rovers, we’ve already made about as much use of space as we ever will.
You may have seen a quote being passed around on social media on Tuesday, from American astronomer William H. Pickering, who, over 100 years ago, had this to say after the Wright Brothers took flight: “The popular mind often pictures gigantic flying machines speeding across the Atlantic and carrying innumerable passengers in a way analogous to our modern steamships ... It seems safe to say that such ideas must be wholly visionary, and even if a machine could get across with one or two passengers the expense would be prohibitive to any but the capitalist who could own his own yacht.”
As anyone who’s ever flown to Europe can attest, this prediction did not age well.
The point here isn’t to make a guess at what man’s future in space will look like. Space flight is likely the most technically complex thing that humans ever attempt.
If we truly became a space-faring society, we could shift power generation and resource extraction largely off the Earth’s surface, leaving our homeworld “zoned for residential and light industrial” use, as Bezos has speculated before. If we succeeded in establishing a sustainable human presence on another world, then that would “back up the harddrive” of human technological, cultural and social progress, as Elon Musk, of Spacex, has similarly mused.
Blue Origin and Spacex are not just duplicating the accomplishments of the national space agencies of decades ago. They’re improving on them, making them safer, more reliable and vastly less expensive. The primary obstacle to widespread human presence in space is the enormous cost and complexity of getting stuff off the ground into orbit (or beyond). But Musk and Bezos are working steadily at solving these programs. Indeed, if Spacex’s proposed Starship (and its super-heavy booster) proves successful — they’re in the testing phase now — then Spacex will have essentially completely overshot what NASA has spent years and billions of taxpayer dollars trying to do.
Sir Richard Branson’s space tourism company, Virgin Galactic, is admittedly a different story — it’s explicitly about catering to wealthy tourists, and can be fairly judged by that standard. But for Spacex and Blue Origins, high-profile tourism isn’t the point — providing relatively cheap access to space is. The tourists are just good PR.
And guess what? Their success will be to our collective benefit, because this technology is here to stay. Bezos could slash Amazon worker pay even more and Musk could baselessly accuse a bunch of other people of being pedophiles and it wouldn’t change the fact that they have advanced human technological capability in ways that won’t be undone. All those rolling their eyes at Bezos’s few minutes in space should remember that it took 44 years to go from the Wright brothers getting off the ground to Chuck Yeager breaking Mach 1 in powered flight, and another 22 years after that to put a man on the moon.
It’s true that we face real challenges on Earth, including poverty, war, disease and climate change. These issues deserve attention, too. But no progress would ever be made if we waited for a moment in time when there was literally nothing else to worry about. And it will never cease to be strange that when it comes to new space technology, it’s often the self-styled progressives who turn into the small-c conservatives, insisting that unless the value of something is immediately apparent, it’s not worth trying, since it’ll never pan out anyway. But we live the lives we do today because smart people took chances with new ideas, some of which didn’t pan out for decades or centuries. We forget that at our peril.