Billionaires in Space
Bezos and Branson went to space within days of each other, and the discourse tells us more about Earth than about orbit
Within nine days of each other, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos each rode their own rockets to the edge of space. Branson went first on July 11 aboard Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity, reaching about 86 kilometers altitude. Bezos followed on July 20 aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard, crossing the Karman line at 100 kilometers. Both flights lasted minutes. Both men returned safely. And the internet could not decide whether to celebrate or rage.
I have been thinking about this for the past couple of days, and my feelings are more complicated than I expected.
What Actually Happened
Branson's flight was suborbital in the most technical sense. VSS Unity is a spaceplane carried aloft by a mothership, then released to fire its rocket motor and arc upward before gliding back to a runway landing. The passengers experienced a few minutes of weightlessness and saw the curvature of the Earth. Whether 86 kilometers counts as "space" depends on which definition you use; the FAA says yes, the Karman line purists say no.
Bezos's flight was more conventional. New Shepard is a vertical-launch rocket with a capsule that separates, coasts above 100 kilometers, and returns under parachute. The booster lands vertically in the style that SpaceX popularized. The whole flight, from launch to landing, took about ten minutes.
In both cases, the billionaire founder was aboard alongside a small crew, including Wally Funk on the Blue Origin flight, the 82-year-old aviator who was part of the Mercury 13 program in the 1960s and had waited sixty years for her chance to reach space. Her presence on the flight was, to me, the most moving part of either mission.
The Celebration View
There is a genuine case to be made that these flights represent progress. Reusable rocket technology has advanced enormously in the past decade, driven in significant part by private investment from exactly these billionaires. SpaceX has transformed the economics of orbital launch. Blue Origin is developing heavy-lift rockets. Virgin Galactic is pursuing suborbital tourism. The cumulative effect has been to reduce the cost of accessing space and to create commercial demand that funds further development.
The analogy to early aviation is not unreasonable. The first airplane passengers were wealthy, the flights were short and impractical, and critics questioned why anyone would bother when trains and ships already existed. Over time, the technology improved, costs dropped, and air travel became accessible to ordinary people. Space tourism could follow a similar trajectory, if the economics work out.
From a pure engineering perspective, both flights were impressive. Blue Origin's booster landing is a beautiful piece of automated guidance and control. Virgin Galactic's spaceplane design, while less powerful, is elegant in its simplicity. The fact that private companies are routinely doing what only nation-states could accomplish a generation ago is remarkable.
The Criticism View
But I understand why many people watched these flights and felt anger rather than inspiration.
We are in the middle of a pandemic that has killed millions of people worldwide. Climate change is accelerating, with unprecedented heat waves, wildfires, and flooding making headlines weekly. Income inequality is at levels not seen since the Gilded Age. And in the middle of all this, two of the wealthiest men on the planet spent hundreds of millions of dollars to experience four minutes of weightlessness.
The optics are terrible, and the optics matter because public perception shapes policy, and policy shapes funding for the kind of science and infrastructure that actually addresses the problems facing most people on Earth.
Bezos thanked Amazon employees and customers after his flight, saying "you guys paid for all this." He meant it as gratitude. Many people heard it as an indictment. When Amazon warehouse workers struggle with working conditions and wages while the founder rides a rocket, the contrast writes itself.
The "we need to become a multi-planetary species" argument, which both Bezos and Branson have invoked, also feels hollow in this context. Suborbital tourism flights have nothing to do with establishing human settlements on Mars or the Moon. They are joyrides for the ultra-wealthy. Conflating them with species-level survival is a rhetorical sleight of hand.
Where I Land
I find myself in an uncomfortable middle position, which is probably where honest analysis usually ends up.
I believe the technology is genuinely valuable. Reusable rockets, commercial space infrastructure, and the reduction of launch costs are legitimate achievements that will benefit humanity over time. The path from "rich people as early customers" to "broadly accessible service" is well-established in the history of technology, from automobiles to cell phones to air travel.
At the same time, I believe the spectacle of billionaires racing to space while the world burns is a symptom of a system that has produced extraordinary concentrations of wealth alongside persistent poverty. The technology is not the problem. The distribution of who benefits from it, and when, is the problem.
What strikes me most is the discourse itself. A decade ago, a successful private spaceflight would have been met with near-universal admiration. The fact that the reaction is so divided tells us something important about where society stands right now. Trust in institutions, in billionaires, in the idea that technological progress automatically translates to shared prosperity; all of that trust has eroded significantly. These space flights did not cause that erosion, but they exposed it.
The Person I Keep Thinking About
In all the arguments about billionaires and their rockets, the person I keep coming back to is Wally Funk. She trained for spaceflight in 1961 as part of an unofficial program that tested women for astronaut suitability. She passed every test, often outperforming her male counterparts. NASA never gave her a chance. The program was canceled, and the women were told to go home.
Sixty years later, at 82, she finally got her flight. She was the oldest person ever to reach space, and the joy on her face during the zero-gravity portion of the flight was the most genuine moment in either mission.
That is the complexity of this whole thing. A system of extreme wealth concentration produced the rocket that carried a woman whose dreams were denied by institutional sexism for six decades. The same system that generates valid criticism also generated a moment of profound, personal justice.
I do not know how to reconcile those things neatly, and I suspect anyone who claims to has not thought about it hard enough. The billionaires went to space. The discourse revealed how we feel about everything happening on the ground. Both of those things are worth paying attention to.