Billionaires in space: What are they achieving?
“The space race used to be between superpowers,” said Chandra Steele in NBCNews .com. “Now it’s between the super-rich.” British billionaire Richard Branson fired the starting gun this week, joining five Virgin Galactic employees on a rocket that ascended 53.5 miles above New Mexico to the edge of space, giving passengers several minutes of weightlessness. “Honestly, nothing could prepare you for the view of Earth from space,” said Branson, 70. He leapfrogged ahead of Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos, who will achieve his “boyhood dream” next week by traveling to suborbital space for 11 minutes aboard his Blue Origin shuttle. Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, meanwhile, will charge a lucky few $55 million apiece for a ride on its Dragon capsule and an eight-day stay on the International Space Station. Space travel once fostered scientific curiosity and national pride, but billionaires using their astronomical wealth “to leave the planet” isn’t exactly inspirational.
It’s easy to scoff at these “boys and their toys,” said Eric Berger in ArsTechnica.com. But Bezos, Branson, and Musk have committed two decades of work and billions of their personal fortunes to open “space tourism” to private citizens. Branson “put his billion-dollar ass on the line to demonstrate the safety of Virgin Galactic’s vehicle. That is no small thing.” Soon, people willing to spend $250,000 will be able to repeat Branson’s experience, said Michael Greshko in NationalGeographic.com. And ticket prices will drop over time, bringing us closer to the dream of “democratizing space.”
It’s an empty dream, said Jacob Silverman in NewRepublic.com. The superwealthy may enjoy a chance to take the world’s most expensive Instagram photos, but we’ve already discovered that radiation and low gravity damage the body and make sustained human presence in space unlikely for generations, “if ever.” And while megabillionaires squander fortunes on their childhood fantasies, Earthlings are struggling to meet the urgent issues of climate change, health care, housing, and a growing, grotesque wealth gap. The new space race is “scientifically useless”—a mere repeat of what NASA achieved 60 years ago, said Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times. The real future of space is robotic exploration, like NASA’s missions to Mars, which is vastly cheaper and more practical. Establishing colonies on other worlds is “the dream of schoolchildren, and it’s time that the billionaires grew up.”