The Future of Space Is Bigger Than Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, or Elon Musk
The orbital economy goes way beyond the dreams of billionaire spacemen.
Richard Branson has been to space. Jeff Bezos will soon visit, too. Rich people have done this sort of thing before, but Branson and Bezos didn’t just pay for a ticket—they paid for the spaceships. Individuals, if they’re wealthy enough, are no longer beholden to government craft when they want to leave the planet for a little while.
These two voyages have generated an awful lot of takes. Some have celebrated the engineering and persistence required to fly a bunch of humans into space and bring them back safely, or the wonder of pushing the boundaries of possibility. Mostly, though, this has proven an irresistible occasion to vent frustrations about billionaires doing billionaire things instead of focusing their resources on the pandemic, or climate change, or any of the other rolling crises here on Earth. People are dying. The planet is broken. Maybe these guys, and fellow billionaire space enthusiast Elon Musk, ought to tuck their space phalluses away for a couple of decades and focus on some of our more immediate concerns.