Jeff Bezos is going to space, with three others, in a re-enactment of Alan Shepherd’s suborbital Mercury flight in 1961. Elon Musk is landing reusable rockets, in practice for doing the same thing on Mars. It’s a space race between billionaires.
Bezos seems primarily motivated by the desire many of us had as eight-year-olds to be astronauts, or at least get into space. But he’s taking along an 82-year-old female aviator who trained for the Mercury program before NASA scrapped its Women in Space program, and a space tourist paying $28 million, for the 11-minute ride.
Musk is going for something bolder. He wants to send humans to Mars. Not only that, he wants some of them to stay there, to establish a permanent human presence on another planet.
Should Bezos and Musk be paying higher taxes to address the smorgasbord of social and environmental issues confronting humankind? Unquestionably. But should they be faulted for spending their own money on space projects?
They could be doing worse things. They could be running cruise ships, ferrying customers to islands and fenced-off beaches in impoverished countries, leaving a trail of waste in their wake. They could be building golf courses in the Colorado River watershed, or outfitting trophy-hunting safaris in Africa. Space, at least, is a noble calling.
Of course, it shouldn’t be just rich people who get us to Mars. It should be all of us. In the 1960s, we went to the moon in eight years, from stating the goal to achieving it. But that’s because scientists, engineers, and unheralded mathematicians were working 16-hour days on the taxpayers’ dime to get it done. Business contributed, but so did academia and other pillars of American life – because a charismatic president convinced a nation that the adventure was worthwhile.
No such consensus for going to Mars exists today. If it did, we would already be there. Yes, it’s at least an order of magnitude harder. But President Kennedy pitched the moon landing as a challenge: “We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” We had a worthy adversary back then, too: the Soviet Union had beaten the U.S. to every milestone in space. The Moon was the ultimate military high ground, and we couldn’t let the Russians get there first.
But we also did it because humans had been looking up at in the sky for two million years and wondering about it, wanting to know more. Wanting, and acting on those wants, writes futurist and science fiction author David Brin, is what humans do best. “It’s what got us to the moon two generations before the tools were ready. It’s what built Vegas. Pure, unstoppable desire.” *
Perhaps if the Chinese make a move toward sending humans to Mars, we’ll get serious about doing it first. The better option, though, is an international mission, to go in peace for all mankind.
Exploration is etched into our DNA. We will eventually go to Mars. Selfishly, I’d like to see it happen in my lifetime. If Elon Musk has the will and the wherewithal to fund some of the crucial early research, I’m not going to criticize him for it. Even a vanity project like Bezos’s can contribute. Perhaps the way to Mars will be partly paved by the dollars of space tourists.
If you want to bash Bezos and/or Musk, bash them for something other than their investment in space. We may dislike the system that pads their wealth, but we must also acknowledge that it’s possible for rich people to be forces for good.
* from Existence, 2012, Tor Books
