Almost everybody reading this has been an Amazon customer at least once: Bezos can have a ‘You’re welcome, I guess’ from me.
BUT YOU MIGHT SOON REVERE THE BILLIONAIRE WHO WENT TO SPACE
It’s somewhat rare for the media to catch billionaires in moments of unguarded joy. And, frankly, it’s probably not a sight anyone is really eager to see. On Tuesday morning, Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com founder thought to be the world’s wealthiest individual, flew into space on a rocket designed and built by his company Blue Origin LLC.
Bezos’s flight has divided the public. Many wonder why he isn’t doing more obviously philanthropic things with his fortune (as his ex-wife is doing with her share of it), and the source of that fortune is itself being held against him, as Amazon achieves commercial scale that threatens to rival the power of nation-states. Techno-optimists argue that his pursuit of a glamorous hobby is no less philanthropic because any benefits are for now hypothetical, and will not be delivered to humankind in general for some time.
I’m something of a techno-optimist; I think it’s kind of neat that we are having the “Should the wealthy continue to indulge themselves with private space travel?” discussion at all. There is no good answer to the point that Bezos’s suborbital flight was, in itself, less impressive than the first American space flight, piloted by Alan Shepard 50 years ago. Shepard’s Freedom 7 capsule reached an altitude of 187.5 km; Bezos’s First Step got only to 107.
But Alan Shepard was a test pilot ushered into a tin can and bolted to the top of a Redstone rocket — an engine developed, through the concerted effort of the U.S. military-industrial complex, to carry nuclear warheads over relatively short distances. The manned “launch vehicle” versions of the Redstone had been flown only four times, and the first try reached an altitude of exactly four inches before an electrical fault forced a risky shutdown.
The Bezosmobile of 2021, by contrast, is a reusable spacecraft whose cabin and engines had already been flown together twice. A used car, so to speak, with one owner. The phalloid New Shepard rockets have flown a total of 16 times now without any catastrophic failure. Alan Shepard, it must be emphasized, was a military man consciously accepting a solid one-in-five or one-in-six chance of meeting a gruesome death. Bezos is a middle-aged guy taking about the same risk to which being halfdragged up Everest by Sherpas would have exposed him.
When Bezos exited the craft in one piece, he started giving ebullient quotes that enraged his haters further. “I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer,” he told the press scrum, “because you guys paid for all of this. Seriously, for every Amazon customer out there, and every Amazon employee, thank you from the bottom of my heart very much.”
This comment naturally made things harder for Bezos’s defenders, who might have been justified in pointing out that he already has the money, and that his propensity for rockets should be evaluated separately from the way in which he accumulated the cash to nourish one. It seems like one of those social situations in which Bezos cannot possibly win.
If he failed to thank the workers and customers who made his orgiastic fortune possible (because he built an incredible business), they’d hang him for that. Almost everybody reading this has been an Amazon customer at least once: Bezos can have a “You’re welcome, I guess” from me.
Later, he tried an environmental message with a strong flavour of techno-optimism. After seeing how thin and gauzy Earth’s atmosphere really is compared to the disc of the planet itself, he urged that “We need to take all heavy industry, all polluting industry, and move it into space. And keep Earth as this beautiful gem of a planet that it is.” He added that this is a project that will take “decades to achieve.”
This is an old dream. If you have read your Robert A. Heinlein, as you ought to if you seek to understand the mindset of billionaire space-travel fetishists, you know that his Future History story series envisioned atomic energy being generated extraterrestrially because it proved too dangerous to handle on Earth’s surface. Who is to say that this very thing cannot still happen? In early science fiction, Earth is often depicted as a sort of nature preserve for the original home of the species, long since dispersed through the galaxy.
Maybe such dreams were illusions, and private research into space flight will do no more than to make robot asteroid mining cheaper — for Amazon? — in the year 2121. It has already made the carrying of payloads into Earth orbit cheaper by many orders of magnitude, and critics of American billionaire space hobbyists should remember that the prior situation was “Only Russia can execute manned space flight because the U.S. government totally lost the plot.”
We may eventually reach a situation in which adding more satellites to the cloud of fly-like detritus swarming around Earth becomes impossible. There is still deep space to be explored, and possibly exploited; and in the meantime these rich goofballs have already broken an unhealthy government monopoly on space travel, restored technological leadership in the sector to the mostly-pretty-democratic U.S., and expanded our capabilities for ad hoc planetary defence missions.
Such as our ability to deflect space rocks whose orbits intersect with ours. Which might legitimately be the biggest existential threat our species faces! We can’t predict how space travel — even in cheesy tourist forms — might pay off, but it is not really hard to think of ways we might end up hating Jeff Bezos for Amazon and revering him for his avocation.
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