THE THING ABOUT BILLIONAIRES IN SPACE

 We were recently treated to news footage of 90-year-old Canadian-born actor William Shatner emoting over his first real trip into space after, decades earlier in his career, playing the lead role of Captain Kirk, skipper of the space station USS Enterprise, in the wildly popular Star Trek franchise. The cameras made sure they captured the moment when he returned from space and talked to Amazon tycoon and now private space race point man Jeff Bezos, and thanked him profusely for this “most profound experience”.

A emotional William Shatner with Jeff Bezos

And well he might have thanked Bezos, since the Blue Origin flight that Shatner took for free would have cost another passenger between two hundred and three hundred thousand dollars. And only because it was already the firm’s second flight. A seat on the first one, in July, for which Bezos was also a passenger, was auctioned for twenty-eight million dollars.

But, hey, the hype seems to have been worth it to Bezos and Blue Origin. It’s not every day that you get to launch the emblematic Captain Kirk on a real-life star trek. And the kicker was that the actor also became the oldest man in history to travel in space—a flight reminiscent of America’s very first space adventure, when NASA astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American to travel into space in 1961. Although, the erstwhile Captain Kirk’s flight was only eleven minutes long and reached an altitude of sixty nautical miles, while Shepard traveled slightly more than a hundred miles into space and was there for fifteen minutes before splashing down.

Another billionaire in the growing private space race, Sir Richard Branson, had earlier offered Shatner a ride on his Virgin Galactic spacecraft. But Branson blew his chance to tap into the Star Trek franchise by telling Shatner that the seat would cost him a quarter of a million dollars—Virgin recently raised the price of a space ticket to four hundred fifty thousand dollars. It’s not like Shatner, whose net worth is around a hundred million dollars, couldn’t afford it. He knew, however, that he wasn’t just some actor, but the space hero of several generations—the inimitable Captain Kirk—and decided to hold out for a better deal. Bezos gave it to him and bested Branson once again.

Sir Richard Branson - Virgin Galactic

In all fairness, when it comes to the space race, Bezos is lightyears ahead of Branson who “only” has a net worth of 4.2 billion dollars compared to the Amazon CEO’s more than two hundred billion. Which places Sir Richard in the category of only minor billionaires, like Donald Trump (although Branson has almost double the money Trump does—that is, if you actually believe how much Trump says he has, since he lies about absolutely everything, and we’re still waiting to see his tax records). So perhaps Branson felt he simply couldn’t afford to give Captain Kirk a freebie.

The other billionaire who is deeply involved in the space race is Elon Musk, who just this past month surpassed Bezos as the richest man on earth. He did that by increasing his net worth some twenty-five billion dollars in a single day, when the car rental giant, Hertz, announced that it was replacing its fleet with Musk’s Tesla automobiles. Pay attention now, because it’s hard to keep up, but just in the last week, he increased his fortune by a similar amount, so that he now has somewhere in the neighborhood (a really nice neighborhood, clearly) of two hundred ninety-two billion dollars.

Soaring at the top of the ten wealthiest billionaires list, he could now, literally, buy Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffet and Mike Bloomberg and still have seventeen billion in change left over.  He could also match the GDP of Chile and have enough left to buy Stephen Spielberg, George Soros, Sir Richard Branson and Donald Trump, and still have some pocket change.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk - richest of all

Speaking seriously, there are a lot of reasons why a private space race among billionaires is a really, really bad idea. And the biggest one is the inordinate and indomitable mega-power that kind of wealth provides.

To start with, even though each major country, to a greater or lesser extent, has some sort of “space law”, for the most part, the Solar System is currently, more or less, the new Wild West. The most urgent need for restrictive legislation is in the area of environmental protection. No one—among those with the power to do something about it—seems to be giving any serious thought to this, but there are major consequences looming in the minds of those who know the science.

By 2030, just a little more than eight years from now, the billionaire space race is expected to have spawned a four-billion-dollar industry just in “space tourism—read: billionaires fleecing millionaires for a ride with “the magnificent men and their flying machines.” Bezos, Branson and the flamboyant and unpredictable Elon Musk are already committed to the private space race, and if it takes off as a lucrative industry, other billionaires will surely follow.

While Bezos, for example, recently paid lip-service to his climate change commitment, the new industry, of which he has become a clear leader, promises to have a major impact. The worst for the moment involves the fact that the amount of propellant needed to blast a rocket into space is enormous. While some analysts agree that calculating the impact of each specific craft (billionaires order the building of their own rockets since NASA has been largely relieved of its regulatory powers) is not an easy process. It is clear, however, that as space tourism and other expanded private commercial uses of aerospace technology—asteroid, lunar and planetary mining, for instance—become ever more abundant, they will contribute in a major way to pollution and greenhouse gases.

This, at a time when environmentalists are warning that Earth is no longer in danger of reaching its tipping point, but has most probably already reached it. This means that environmental damage already caused by our imprudence and greed may be incapable of repair, and if world leaders ever stop admiring their own navels and actually start doing something about climate change, all that will be possible is mitigation of further damage to an already ravaged planet.

Within that context, the idea of a commercial space race, among private firms and nearly unregulated billionaires, is utterly insane. Especially when, if we remain on this path, Humankind will be well on its way toward the Sixth Great Extinction, in which future human generations may end up going the way of the dinosaurs.

In order to quantify just how selfish and damaging touristic space flight is, it’s interesting to look at a calculation worked out by University College London scientist, Dr. Eloise Marais. According to Marais, shooting four or five millionaire tourists into space for a ten or twelve-minute joy ride burns one hundred times more fuel—and hence creates a hundred times more greenhouse gases—per passenger than the amount per passenger generated by a normal long-haul jet flight, which is already a highly carbon-intensive activity.

Meanwhile, researchers at the University of New South Wales in Australia point out that there are other concerns as well. Among them, huge amounts of aluminum oxide, black carbon particles and water vapor that rocket ships release into the stratosphere. Some of the chemical compounds are obviously linked to global warming. But like many other factors, this is more about general climate change than just about global warming, considering that black carbon particles, for instance, can form a sort of screen that can have an intense cooling effect. The future consequences are, then, as unforeseeable as were those of our cavalier abuse of the environment in the past.  A fiery hell on earth or a new Ice Age: choose your poison.

The idea of degree, as I mentioned before, is also at the top of environmentalists’ mind. Dutch sustainable transport and tourism expert Paul Peeters says that the difference in environmental damage from one sort of space ship to another can be significant. He cites the example of Virgin Galactic’s manned rocket, which is a hybrid. In the best of all possible worlds, the word hybrid denotes a good thing. In this case it’s just the opposite. Branson’s space tourism rig burns both liquid and solid propellant. What that means, says Peeters, is that Virgin is releasing far more black carbon into the atmosphere and stratosphere than kerosene-burning craft do.  Says Peeters, “If hybrid rockets, which are assumed to be relatively cheap to operate, become popular, a climate disaster is looming.”

In light of the billionaire space race, many environmental scientists would like to see space launches included in worldwide environmental protocols due to the damage their increasing frequency will surely cause to the ozone layer. The international Montreal Protocol, which covers deterioration of the ozone layer, does not take space launches into account.

The ozone layer forms a sort of blanket of protection that once covered the entire Earth. It acts as a natural sunscreen to filter out UV rays from solar radiation that are harmful to human and other life on earth. Each winter for many years now, there has been one hole in that layer over South America and another over the Arctic. Scientists agree that these holes have grown due to the effects of greenhouse gases created by human activity. Recently, however, the one over South America has been growing at a faster clip. At certain seasons of the year (winter is the worst) it reaches some eight million square miles.

I happen to live in the Patagonian region where the hole is most focused. Here, doctors promote the ample use of sunscreen, hats, UV-blocking sunglasses, etc. Ophthalmologists say that they are seeing the earlier onset of cataracts in people here, especially those with light-colored eyes, who do not wear quality sunglasses. Scientists also point to the high rate of blindness among sheep on the sprawling sheep ranches in this corner of the world.

Another indicator is the deterioration of usually durable plastics. For instance, irrigation experts that I’ve spoken to tell me that durable plastic sprinklers made in Israel and used in the searing desert heat there last ten to twenty years in their country of origin, while here in Patagonia they last less than half that time until material fatigue sets in.

Vast increases in space launches as the billionaire space race and space tourism build will have a very definite impact on this serious problem that is part and parcel of the global climate change narrative. Worse still is the attitude of billionaire astro-entrepreneurs who tend to take Earth’s serious environmental problems as insoluble and are looking to the solar system as an escape route for the obscenely wealthy—significant numbers of whom got that way by raping and pillaging planet Earth—who will eventually be able to pack up and fly off to “gated communities” on the moon or Mars, while back on Earth, the poorer human race goes gradually extinct.

Bezos, specifically, has an even more nefarious idea: namely, to move all polluting industries off of Earth to other destinations. In other words, instead of fixing the problem of pollution on Earth, he figures it’s easier to write the planet off. Then he and other magnates of his ilk can blast off on voyages to other post-Columbian new worlds, where they can despoil those places as well. The idea is dystopian and unhelpful when men of such extraordinary wealth could be funding vast research with no more than pocket change for them—a billion here, a billion there—to foster ideas capable of vastly improving the environmental and humanitarian situation on Earth, rather than considering our planet “the past” and space “the future”.

While the headline-catching billionaire space race is in its infancy and might right now look to us rather as if we were witnessing the Wright Brothers and Sir George Cayley having a contest with their flying machines at Kitty Hawk, technology is so readily available and the billionaires’ resources so vast that commercial space exploitation is coming, and coming fast. All of this might seem like an accounting of problems that are “far off in the future”—like it seemed far off to us “boomers” in the 1950s and 1960s, when scientists warned that if we kept on abusing the earth, the atmosphere and the oceans, we would face major environmental problems in the twenty-first century. But, hey, here we are. And technological developments that took decades to achieve in the past now happen in months or, at most, a few short years.

There is one other aspect of the legislative vacuum in which this is all happening, especially since the most highly developed space legislation is that of the US and, ever since the Reagan Era, it has been focused almost entirely on encouraging billionaires to claim their place in private space development. The aspect I am referring to is that of world security.

Zuckerberg - test case for billionaire ethics?

With the latest revelations about Facebook—now Meta, as if changing the name can take people’s minds off of what has been coming out—the potential for megalomania among the world’s wealthiest people has come into focus.  Mega-billionaires are powers unto themselves—unipersonal “nations” that ignore or sidestep the rules of the societies where they live, as witnessed by the fact that most of those based in the US not only don’t pay their fair share, but literally pay nothing at all in taxes.

To understand the kind of dangers that the vast expansion of private billionaires’ dominion over space pose, we need go no further than the political role of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the undermining of American democracy. Despite having sold off a lot of FB/Meta stock, Zuckerberg has maintained absolute administrative control over the company. And, by all accounts, he runs it like a dictatorial regime.

While Zuckerberg has provided the world with the quintessential social media platform and, thus, a place where the formerly voiceless can now openly express themselves on a cyber-soapbox of immense proportions, that great humanitarian achievement has been far overshadowed by the greed that has led him to not merely provide the greatest podium for free speech ever known, but also, and on the contrary, to manipulate the information that his portal receives in order to spread discord and to support false information because controversy sells. And the more likes and comments accumulated under each post the higher his advertising revenues.

Seen in this way, it is impossible not to conclude that the strategic algorithms employed by Facebook to fatten its bottom line have inversely served to undermine democratic institutions, and to promote both domestic and foreign terrorism. The fact that Zuckerberg and Facebook have systematically imposed such a strategy out of sheer greed and, worse still, have felt no ethical compunction about its results is telling. Zuckerberg has no part in the space race yet, but it’s not hard to imagine that if he sees his fellow billionaires making significant advances in that line, space could well end up on Meta’s “to do” list.

Perhaps one might have been willing to give billionaires the benefit of the doubt before the Trump Era in Washington, and indeed before revelations regarding FB’s nefarious policies. But four years of Trump and his continuing long shadow on American politics has to give any thinking person pause regarding the potential for megalomania among the world’s richest men. And I single out men advisedly, since despite the fact that there are indeed billionaire American women as well—Alice Walton, MacKenzie Scott, Julia Knoch, Miriam Adelson, etc.—none so far has demonstrated any desire to dominate this world or other worlds, a trait that would appear to be quintessentially male.

The Trump Era raises the megalomania issue

Trump has very clearly shown his tendency toward megalomania. In his case, a caricaturesque tendency so ridiculous that far too many people didn’t take it seriously until he sought to overturn free and fair voting results and to change by force the outcome of the election he unquestionably lost. The fact that he has effectively taken over one of the two main parties in the US, and that the GOP leadership has fallen in, rank and file behind him while driving out the few remaining defenders of democracy and constitutionality in their midst is chilling, and reminiscent of other authoritarian designs throughout history. It has become abundantly clear, then, that there is only one small-d democratic party in the US today. The other main party, as a direct result of the Trump Era, has become an authoritarian personality cult autocracy.

Would Donald Trump join the billionaire space race? Hard to say. But if he wanted to, he wouldn’t have to depend on his own “small fortune”, but could do what he has always done an amazing job of doing—selling his ideas to other wealthy men and then slapping the Trump brand on it. And the fact that it was under his administration that the US Space Force became one of America’s armed services demonstrates that it is at least at the back of his mind.

The Trump Era has, then, given us a lot to think about—above all, the thirst for unlimited power of obscenely wealthy men. Which leads to unavoidable connections, like the ex-president’s authoritarian hero, Vladimir Putin, who, himself, is sitting on a personal fortune of seventy billion dollars, so wouldn’t need the Russian state at all if he ever planned to join the billionaire space race.

Excuse me, then, if I can’t help wondering if these are the sort of men we want marauding unregulated through space like so many cosmic cowboys. I don’t know about you, but it makes me feel a whole lot less secure.