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“Jeff Bezos blasted into space Tuesday on his rocket company’s first flight with people on board, becoming the second billionaire in just over a week to ride his own spacecraft.” AP News
The right celebrates the launch, arguing that private competition in space flight will reduce costs and lead to technological breakthroughs.
“It’s easy to dismiss this as a joy ride, which in part it was, or as the indulgence of a rich man with attention-deficit disorder. But as billionaires’ hobbies go, this is more productive than, well, owning the Washington Post…
“As these companies strive to outdo each other, costs will fall. Engineering advances, such as reusable rockets that land vertically, have already slashed the price of getting cargo to space. The money paid by wealthy passengers will also help these companies go higher. Blue Origin has other projects in the works, including a New Glenn rocket that will be big enough to put satellites into orbit. Mr. Musk, as everyone knows, is aiming for Mars. The benefits of all this are hard to say precisely, but that’s the nature of exploration and entrepreneurial risk-taking…
“Several companies are working on constellations of small satellites that could beam fast internet to remote areas that lack it. Novel uses of technology are harder to predict, but surprises happen when smart people are trying to be the first to achieve some milestone. Nobody working on America’s first satellite missions in the 1950s and ’60s could have ever imagined that the Global Positioning System, or GPS, would one day keep millions of people and Uber drivers from getting lost.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“There are three big reasons why [this] should be welcomed. First, it sets up a competition. The last great achievements in space came in the 1960s, when the race to get into orbit — and then to land the first man on the Moon — was a proxy for the Cold War, with the Soviet Union and the United States, competing to get there first. Nothing ever happens without some form of contest to spur it forward, and the competition between the world’s billionaires provides that…
“Next, they have the money, and more importantly the commercial awareness. European explorers only opened up the New World because there was money in it. To explore space properly, it will have to be commercially viable, as well as intellectually interesting. We will need business models as well as scientific ones. Finally, exploring space will require ambition, vision, endurance and innovation, especially when it comes to establishing colonies on Mars (one of Elon Musk’s pet projects). The qualities that make for a great entrepreneur are the same that make for a great explorer.”
Matthew Lynn, Spectator World
Regarding Bezos’s critics, let’s “leave aside the fact that the government spent massively more money fighting poverty in the 1960s than it did sending a man to the moon, yet five decades later, poverty remains undefeated. Leave aside also the incoherence of arguing that we should be spending more money on various social programs and yet finding it worse, not better, that this round of space exploration has not asked for taxpayer support. The fact is, we can feel national pride in the accomplishments of our fellow citizens — inventors, athletes, artists, healers, explorers, captains of industry — even if they were not funded by forced exactions from our pockets by the taxman…
“Yes, this is a vanity project by rich men. So what? It’s their money. Rich men’s vanity projects have a long history in this country, a history that often led to progress and to public benefit. Who owns your local sports team? Who commissions works of art? Who slapped their names and fortunes on museums and universities?”
Dan McLaughlin, National Review
“If Branson and Bezos want to build personal rockets that take them up to the edge of space, they can. If they want to lie in a golden bath and drink champagne all day, they can. If they want to live in a tree and collect snakes in a barrel, that’s fine too. They’ve made enormous amounts of money selling legal products and services that people want, and now they are spending some of that money on things that they want themselves — all while revolutionizing the private space industry…
“That isn’t a flaw or a problem or a failure; it’s how the system works, and how the system should work. That Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos are extremely rich does not mean that they have an obligation to consider how you would use their property if you were in their position… The thing is — and this seems to be the part that far too many people seem to struggle with — it’s their money. It’s not your money; it’s theirs. And you don’t get a say in how they spend it.”
Charles C. W. Cooke, National Review
The left is generally critical of the launch, arguing that Bezos’s fortune was earned through exploiting workers and that he should face higher taxes.
The left is generally critical of the launch, arguing that Bezos’s fortune was earned through exploiting workers and that he should face higher taxes.
“Bezos rode one of his Blue Origin rockets to just above what’s known as the Kármán line, the technical border of what we consider ‘space’. He was up there for approximately 3 minutes and then fell back down to Earth because he didn’t go high enough to even establish a stable orbit. In my opinion [that] doesn’t count! Look at the stats on Sputnik 2, the Soviet space mission that famously sent a very brave dog named Laika to space (and then promptly killed her from asphyxiation because they [screwed] something up). The Kármán line is set at 100 kilometers, or about 62 miles. Sputnik 2 went 211 kilometers up!…
“Jeff, buddy, you couldn’t even beat a dog astronaut that flew almost 64 years ago. All of you need to simmer down a little here… The elephant in the room of course is that Elon Musk’s space company actually goes to real space and does real space [things], and has successfully bridged the gap between ‘disgusting vanity project’ and ‘disgusting privatization of what was once a nationalized industry.’”
Jack Crosbie, Discourse Blog
“It’s easy to be cynical about all of this, but in fairness, no one could put it more cynically than Jeff Bezos… ‘I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this,’ he said… it’s tough to find the error in Bezos’ statement. It was a tremendous collective effort principally for the benefit of one person…
“This is the end product of all that sweat and sacrifice—of delivery workers peeing in bottles, of warehouse workers staring at propaganda about their boss while they [use the restroom], of people doing manual labor for $15 an hour, of humans getting injured at his factories and then being forced into a Kafkaesque company healthcare system, of Amazon employees working to hide their co-workers’ injuries, of economic concentration and runaway inequality, of a tax system that is designed to allow someone to become the world’s richest person while sometimes paying no income tax at all.”
Tim Murphy, Mother Jones
“[Bezos] isn’t the only billionaire to take advantage of the tax system that treats labor worse than capital. Nor is he the only tycoon whose workers report chaotic, even dangerous conditions from within the company he built. But Bezos is the world’s richest man, and the gap between his life and the lives he’s created for his workers is thus especially stark… If Bezos really is in a position to usher mankind to the stars, the civilizational vision he possesses isn’t one we should want for ourselves. It’s too lopsided and unfair.”
Sarah Jones, New York Magazine
“Former US secretary of labor Robert Reich, a noted economist, says, ‘Don’t listen to Republicans claiming we can’t afford to pass [the budget] reconciliation package. Jeff Bezos added $8 billion to his wealth in a single day last week. If we actually tax the billionaires, we can give the American people what they need and deserve.’ That could require Bezos to curtail some of his extraterrestrial activities. But it will allow the rest of us to make this corner of Planet Earth a little more habitable.”
John Nichols, The Nation
Some note that “It would be a misapprehension to think that, after centuries of humans dreaming about worlds beyond ours, outer space has been reduced to just another stage for rivalries among the super-rich—a Southampton in the sky. The larger and far more interesting story is that the planet has, somewhat abruptly, embarked on a new and rapidly accelerating space race. The protagonists include private companies and a growing number of nations, among them China, India, and the United Arab Emirates…
“For a start, the most consequential conflict between Bezos and Musk is not about space tourism but about a nearly three-billion-dollar contract that nasa awarded SpaceX, in April, to build a human lunar lander for its Artemis program, which aims, before the decade is out, to resume flying people to the moon for the first time since 1972… It does seem incomprehensible that, while we’ve crammed orbital space with satellites, and had uncrewed triumphs such as the Hubble Space Telescope, we are only now matching human exploration milestones laid down two generations ago.”
Amy Davidson Sorkin, New Yorker
A libertarian's take
“The technologies created by billionaires' space fantasies will propel many of us, rich and poor alike, to better standards of living in ways we haven't yet fully realized. As NASA fans constantly tell us, the agency's spinoff technologies have improved the world. Sensors developed to measure and remove harmful moon dust have since been used to better detect air pollution here on Earth; advances in aerodynamics have made semi-trucks faster and more fuel-efficient than before; a more durable polymer material developed by NASA scientists is now used for hip replacements…
“But a scientist need not be a public employee to make discoveries that better mankind. Musk and Bezos are competing to develop a satellite internet service that could drastically improve internet access and speed for unserved parts of the globe. SpaceX has been focused on improving the reusability of rocket components (while spending a fraction of what it would cost NASA to put similar rockets into flight), making space exploration cheaper and less wasteful. And that's just the beginning.”
Liz Wolfe, Reason
