Jeremy Vargo
Auckland, July 26, 2021
In the last few weeks, Sir Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos have both popped up to space and experienced a few minutes of weightlessness in the first private passenger flights to go above “an invisible boundary between the planet’s atmosphere and outer space.”
This will not be news to anyone reading this, as those of us left earthside faced a barrage of news and social media postings lauding their accomplishments.
Watching these headlines and stories scroll by, I have not been inspired or impressed. Instead, I am left feeling cold, seeing the line-up of Branson, Bezos, and Musk: billionaires all consumed with personally replicating the 60-year-old accomplishments of nations.
Cultivating personal mythos
While Sputnik and the Moon-landing represented true firsts of human endeavour and the engineering and daring might of national superpowers, so far this race to be the first businessman to create viable commercial “space” tourism has served primarily to cultivate the personal mythos of these global super personas.
Not that they want to own that particular narrative.
Branson says that his efforts are “to make space more accessible to all.”
How very egalitarian. With ticket prices for the hour-long experience set at $250,000 per person (and the New York Times reports those are set to rise), this is not innovation for the masses. This is not Ford’s Model T, it is more like an NFT.
Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to “possess” a non-fungible token of a digital file that is already available to everyone for free is, at best, incredibly wasteful.
Egotistic amusement
Similarly, the idea of “space tourism” twists the immensely resource-intensive process of space travel into a paid consumer experience requiring no goal higher than personal amusement. No need to dream of becoming an astronaut, just become immensely wealthy.
While there will be some scientists that can get academic funding for a seat to conduct limited experiments, for the majority of tourists there is no great “discovery” in this adventure.
The business model for this project lies in encouraging the very wealthy to convert dollars into ever more exclusive and elusive personal highs. The benefits of this billionaire’s rollercoaster? A long flight into the sky for a few moments of weightlessness; the ultimate Instagram “you had to be there” status signifiers.
Helping the needy
In the past, billionaires like Andrew Carnegie have made immense contributions to humanity, through programmes that supported widespread literacy and participation in the arts.
Even today, Musk, Branson and Bezos’s uber-billionaire colleagues Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have understood their rare capacity to help others and have devoted significant wealth and strategic attention to the needs of the hungry, the poor, and the sick.
As I see the headlines celebrating the new space race, I keep returning to the real world opportunity costs of pursuing these personal space dreams.
Those with astronomical means would be better employed addressing the many weighty and meaningful challenges we face together here on earth, rather than seeking to escape gravity in short term adventures to the sky.
Jeremy Vargo is Head of Communications at Maxim Institute based in Auckland. This story has been sponsored by
