I have a bit of a contrarian streak that comes out in odd ways. When I spent a lot more time in SF fan circles than I do now, I was pretty down on the whole “Private space travel is awesome!” thing that was very prominent in that community. I haven’t really shared the breathless enthusiasm for every new SpaceX launch that’s common in my social-media feeds, and have posted the occasional tweet comparing them unfavorably to the Mercury program, or noting that Rocket Science Is Hard when one of their vehicles blows up on the platform.
So it’s a little weird (though not entirely surprising; I’ve lived with me for fifty years at this point, I know how this works) that now that the online mood has decisively turned against the private space flight activities of SpaceX and Virgin and Blue Origin, with seemingly all of Twitter dunking on rich guys in phallic spaceships, I find myself saying “Hey, wait a minute…” I like to think that this isn’t really a change in my personal position (I’m still pretty lukewarm on human space flight), that I’ve stayed where I was while others shifted around me, but I could be fooling myself there. Enough of my timeline has taken up the cause of denouncing billionaires going to space, though, that I do feel a bit pushed in the opposite direction, moved to defend these operations against arguments I think are somewhere between weak and silly.
A lot of the problem is that “Billionaires Going To Space Are Bad” is a political stance that mashes together a few arguments that really ought to be separated. The simplest of these (and in many ways the strongest) is basically just “Billionaires Are Bad,” full stop. It’s nothing to do with space per se, it’s just that if you believe that billionaires are inherently bad, than anything that billionaires do is also bad. QED.
I say this is the strongest of the arguments getting mashed together not because I’m passionately anti-billionaire— I’m basically agnostic on that— but because it’s arguable that a different regulatory regime would’ve prevented these guys, particularly Jeff Bezos, from amassing enough money to bankroll private space operations. And I am 100% on board with the idea that Amazon ought to do better by their employees, paying them higher wages and providing more humane working conditions. If making them less rapacious meant we didn’t get Blue Origin, well, that’d be fine by me.
I’m not entirely convinced that reforming their business practices would actually prevent these companies from existing— losing a huge chunk of his fortune in a divorce hasn’t slowed Bezos, after all. But I do think it’s reasonable to view the badness of Amazon as putting a kind of a cap on how excited you should be about that particular space enterprise.
The other common arguments that turn up in Twitter dunks are, to my mind, substantially weaker. One of the major ones is an attempt to claim that this isn’t actually an impressive achievement at all. I think that’s largely dealt with in this Twitter thread that I re-shared yesterday:
The author of that is more enthusiastic than I am about space in general, but I think he’s absolutely right about the technical side. If Bezos and Musk and Branson were writing billion-dollar checks to Vladimir Putin to buy a ride to the ISS on an existing Russian rocket system, that would be a frivolous indulgence, but that’s not what they’ve done. They’ve developed and built entirely new capabilities that didn’t exist 10-20 years ago, and that’s a remarkable technical accomplishment. Landing and re-using boosters is incredibly difficult— Rocket Science Is Hard—and they’ve figured out how to do it. That’s not nothing.
I think it’s reasonable to question the ends to which this is directed— I’m not entirely convinced that cheaper space launch capability is a genuine game-changer for much that really matters. I could easily be wrong about that, though, and it’s maybe a conversation worth having. There are significant numbers of smart people who feel otherwise, and if these guys think there’s a worthwhile business there, I’m all for them trying it out and making it boring. And there’s a not-unreasonable chance that some of the tech they’re developing in this process will find applications elsewhere, which is nice (though not by itself a reason to do anything).
The third big argument that’s thrown out in a lot of this is that the money involved would’ve been better spent on… something else. Climate change, poverty, health care— whatever the top issue is for the person attempting the dunk.
This is basically the “Whitey’s on the Moon” argument, which I was reminded of over the weekend while watching Summer of Soul (thus the screenshot at the top of this). That’s the justly acclaimed new documentary about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, which included a segment noting that the Moon landing happened during the same period as the concerts the movie is about. The mention of Apollo came with a bunch of dismissive comments about how meaningless the space program was; I’m not sure if they actually had Gil Scott-Heron in the montage in person (I was watching while riding a stationary bike, so missed the occasional on-screen caption), but he was definitely there in spirit.
The problem with this is that it isn’t an argument against anything in particular. Or, rather, it’s an argument against everything that isn’t whatever Big Issue is being wielded as a rhetorical club. Yes, you can argue that the billion dollars Jeff Bezos sank into designing space launch systems would’ve been better spent on climate change mitigation efforts, but then, so would the three-and-a-half billion dollars Americans collectively spent on tickets to Disney movies in 2019 (to say nothing of the hundreds of millions spent making and promoting those movies). It’s a kind of all-purpose Puritan argument against anything deemed frivolous; the only way to limit it to particular Bad Things is to mash it together with some other (often implied) principle, like Billionaires Are Bad.
I use the movie-gross example deliberately, because in a lot of ways, this is where I land on the question of human space flight (and other expensive Big Science projects like space telescopes or the Large Hadron Collider): it’s essentially art. It’s a thing we as a civilization do not because it provides immediate practical benefits, or even the promise of long-term practical benefits, but because it expands our worldview beyond concerns of brute survival. In the same way that a work of art, or even just a movie where the fate of the world comes down to two dudes punching each other in front of a green screen, can brighten the day and open the mind of a person who spends a bit of cash to see it, space flight (and basic science) can encourage and inspire the people watching from the ground. Even if the specific people launching themselves to high but suborbital altitude are rich douchebags.
Yeah, it’s a lot of money, but we are the richest and most capable civilization the planet has ever seen— we can afford it. Climate change efforts aren’t underfunded because individual rich guys are indulging their whims to the tune of a few billion here and there, they’re underfunded because we have not yet mustered the political will to demand the spending of hundreds of billions of dollars that are in principle available to governments even without confiscatory taxation of the rich douchebags with the rockets. Getting rid of the space billionaires isn’t going to fix the problem any more than getting rid of Marvel movies would; either of those would just leave the world a drabber place without doing much to make the Big Problems less grim.
So, while I remain lukewarm about space travel as a general matter, and unenthusiastic about the specific people driving the current commercial efforts in that area, I don’t particularly feel moved to condemn these projects, or even join the Twitter dunk-a-thon (though I will acknowledge that the Blue Origin rocket really did look remarkably and amusingly like a penis). They exist in more or less the same space as MCU movies, or ridiculously expensive conceptual art pieces: not my bag, but I’m happy that the people who like that sort of thing have something they enjoy.
This is a post sure to displease both private-space-flight enthusiasts and the dunk-on-billionaires crowd, but if for some reason you would like to read more of this kind of thing, here’s a big button:
If you would prefer to inflict it on someone else, here’s a different button:
And if you’d like to yell at me about how my opinions are Bad, the comments are open.