“Best. Day. Ever.” What If Jeff Bezos’s Big Space Adventure Saves Us All

Based on Jeff Bezos, Tuesday was the best day of his life. With millions of people watching, he and a group of three others, including his brother, Mark Bezos, and the youngest and oldest people to have ever flown into space, Oliver Daemen, an 18 year old student from the Netherlands, and 82 years old Mary Wallace “Wally” Funk, entered the capsule of a phallic-looking rocket, created by Blue Origin, the billionaire’s rocket company, and took off from a launch site in Van Horn, Texas, eventually traveling at Mach 3 as they headed about 66 miles above the planet. For Bezos, every aspect of the flight was a hit. Once in space, the crew unbuckled their seat belts and experienced weightlessness before free-falling for about four minutes back to Earth. “You have a very happy crew up here,” Bezos said from inside the capsule as it descended, gently setting down a cloud of TV-made dust on the Texas desert floor. “Best. Date. Used to be,” Bezos declared from the shell.

On Twitter, the bastion of Earthly views, people were largely unimpressed with Tuesday’s successful launch. “Watching NASA take off when I was a child was a moment of pride and national unity,” Written Matthew Miller, an analyst at MSNBC. “Replacing them with billionaire frivolous flights is one of the sadder highlights of this era.” Nina Turner, former Ohio senator currently running for Congress, cleverly note, “Latest news: Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, has enough disposable income to fund a multi-billion dollar vacation in space but still doesn’t pay taxes.” And leftist magazines chí Jacobin give this harsh view in the days before the flight: “Billionaires like Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk are parasites, worse yet socially useless. But somehow they have to justify their existence, so, like five-year-olds, they’re posing as astronauts.”

Although I agree that Bezos is largely a out of reach billionaire, I think the immediate and total criticism of him – in contrast to the fact that NASA is watched with national pride – not only misses the point but is also a bit of a history of judgmentalism. again. A Harris poll in 1967 showed that 54% Americans don’t think it’s worthwhile to send a man into space; only a third think it is important. Most people think that the money used for the space program would be better spent helping the people here on Earth. That poll wasn’t just a fluke at the time. About a decade later, in 1979, only 41% Americans support the space program, according to an NBC-AP poll. People look back on those launches now with more pride than at almost any other time in American history. According to a 2018 Pew Research Center survey, 72% of Americans that the United States must remain the world leader in space exploration; 80% said they think the space station is a good investment for the country. Of course, the difference now is that the billionaire is leading. The US Space Shuttle program was suspended for more than two years in 2003 after the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster killed seven astronauts while re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, and it eventually ceased to function. In 2011.

After Tuesday’s successful flight, Bezos can now use the achievement of that television moment to win government contracts, to hire technical talent who may already be working. in another industry, and develop Blue Origin in a way that will pave the way for America’s continued dominance in space travel. “What we’re really trying to do is build reusable space vehicles. It’s the only way to build a path to space, and we need to build a path to space so our children can build a future,” said Bezos. to speak By CNBC Morgan Brennan. The same is true of Musk. (Branson, the third man to compete in the billionaire space race, is just a little devil.) While the cost of a private spaceflight today seems completely absurd, the cost that, like every technology in its time, will continue to rise and fall, allowing generations to break through from now on that we can’t even imagine today, and hopefully with the ideals of The United States, not another country, is pushing them.

Over the past few years, we’ve all been looking at space race like a frivolous competition between a handful of billionaires, who seem to have mastered the art of attracting negative attention, while arguing with each other over whose rocket is bigger. And while that is true, there is also a larger space race underway, more akin to the US than to the Soviet Union, with huge consequences for the future of the planet. That race, which the US is on track to lose, is with the Chinese government.

While the United States and Russia fought each other in the 1950s to be the first in space (Russia won that battle), and then the first to go to the moon (the US apparently won that battle), the government China, under Mao Zedong, was scrambling to join the race too. It repeats itself missed the scheduled release dateand, years later, had a mission that ended in Disastrous. Now, under Xi Jinping, China is pouring resources into its space programs, clarify that it plans to establish a base on the moon (which will be a first) and eventually send a mission to Mars. The country sees great industrial development opportunities in space, with huge economic backings.

A 2019 report released by the US Defense Intelligence Agency pointed out that China is rapidly building up anti-satellite technologies in space and increasing electronic warfare capabilities that could jeopardize peaceful international uses of space. Imagine a scenario in which the Chinese government destroys American satellites or other adversaries’ satellites. There is also the more peaceful and potentially far-reaching scenario in which China defeats every other nation to the moon and Mars and establishes permanent space stations, becoming the de facto leader. economy there. It sounds crazy, but it’s completely justified.

Entrepreneurs I’ve talked to say that thinking about space as just a hobby for billionaires is depriving it of its potential. It would be like thinking that shipping was a stupid idea hundreds of years ago, if it weren’t for the foresight to realize that it would. the last is the most important aspects of the global economy. There’s also an aspect that Bezos hopes that if we continue to go further into space, we can save the Earth from the catastrophes of climate change. “We live on this beautiful planet. You cannot imagine how thin the atmosphere is when you see it from space. We live in it, and it looks huge. It seems like this atmosphere is huge and we can take it for granted and treat it badly. When you go there and see it, you will see how small and fragile it is, “Bezos say Tuesday. “We need to take all the heavy industry, all the polluting industries, and move it into space. And keep the Earth as the beautiful jewel of a planet it is. ”

Are people wrong to criticize Bezos and Musk and Branson? Absolutely not. Like ProPublica discovered last monthBezos and Musk have barely paid any taxes for years, but both recently held the title of richest person on Earth. Their philanthropic efforts are few, at best. And when it comes to Bezos, one of the reasons inequality is so extreme today is a direct result of the way he has chosen to run his business. Every accusation thrown at these men is deserved. While Bezos made a 10-minute flight to space, about 38 million won Americans live below the poverty line, with more than half a million in the country nước Homeless.

When CNN’s Rachel Crane Bezos asked what he thinks about “a cast of critics who say these spaceflights are just fun for the rich” and that the richest man on earth should settle the issues here , Bezos basically agreed. “I say most of them are right. We have to do both. We have a lot of problems here and now on Earth and we need to solve those problems, and we always need to look to the future.” One can only hope that the space launch this week, where Bezos had the rare opportunity to see the Earth from more than 60 miles above, gave him a different perspective on what needs doing, and a sense of responsibility to do it with the same drive he devoted himself to his rocket company. Although it may be a while before realizing it put in.

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