There are these three billionaires, each of them has a rocket….. It sounds like the start of a joke, but it isn’t. It’s a deadly serious, and very expensive business, but is it a helpful pushing of the boundaries of science ultimately for the betterment of mankind?, or a willy waggling contest? Perhaps it’s a bit early to say.
Richard, Elon and Jeff have all done very nicely. Richard sold a lot of records, ran an airline and fiddled about with F1 teams and fizzy drinks along the way. Elon started Paypal, makes electric cars, has a lot of satellites, and is experimenting with firing people to San Francisco in an underground tube, and Jeff started out selling books on the internet and now owns… well, pretty much everything really these days.
They are all aiming for the stars in one form or another and last month, two of them lit the blue touch paper and put their money where their mouths are. Richard, went up in Virgin Galactic a vehicle launched at high altitude from a carrier plane took him to the upper atmosphere, a little bit of weighless mucking about, and a controlled return to terra firma in his reusable craft. A week or so later it was Jeff’s turn. This time Blue Origin, a reusable rocket took him and a small crew to a similar altitude, the rocket returned on autopilot for reuse, while the crew capsule returned by parachute.
Elon meanwhile was having no part of this, showing off. After launching his convertible Tesla sports car, with dummy astronaut in the driver’s seat into a slow orbit of the sun in 2018 he’s got down to the more serious issues of filling a low earth orbit with 1600 satellites and counting, to provide a continuous data network for the entire planet, and running a commercial satellite launching service working with NASA and the international space station.
Richard and Jeff’s joyrides on the face of it have realistically proven very little. They effectively replicated the very same feat managed almost exactly 60 years ago by Alan Shepard, the first American in space, albeit that they managed to reuse the spacecraft, so they are not really pushing science forward all that forcefully. Ostensibly this is about space tourism, a fairground ride for the seriously wealthy, mainly though it’s about marketing. Richard’s Virgin brand is aiming for suborbital commercial air travel. Potentially cutting the flight time from London to Australia to 2 hours. Jeff meanwhile wants to muscle in on Elon’s commercial activities, he wants to put a permanent base on the moon, and see us all living in biospheres floating about in the void. His long term vision is to move us humans away from their reliance on planet Earth. It’s one of the few things he sees eye to eye with Elon on… except Elon wants us to go and live on Mars.
There have been many critical voices saying that the money being blown on these vanity projects could have improved conditions on Earth for many millions of the poorest of us. Seemingly pointless projects are the stock in trade of human beings however, the original space race between the USA and Soviet Union was a vanity project, but out of it came many new scientific discoveries, not least of which was a massive advance in computing. The CERN project in Switzerland, the biggest machine ever built by mankind aimed at identifying a particle that may, or may not exist, will tell us a little about the origins of the universe. Out of this project was born the World Wide Web. Without either of these neither Elon nor Jeff would be quite so loaded.
Will this space race benefit us all eventually, or will it turn out to be rich boys showing off? Hard to say right now, but there is one name missing from the list. Another billionaire beneficiary of the microchip and the internet. Bill.
Around the same time that Richard and Jeff were boldly going where somebody already went sixty years ago, Bill signed another cheque for 1.5 billion dollars from his climate change investment fund to match federal spending on green future projects, while funding numerous startups aimed at reversing global warming, and averting the climate disaster that looms in the very near future.
Leg it to another planet, or have a crack at saving this one? I’ll let you make your own mind up on that one, but I’m with Bill on this one.
By Phill McCoffers – The Islander’s Economic Correspondent
