Stop bashing Bezos – the new space race is a marvel

It’s almost certain that Roald Dahl penned this first; the eccentric billionaire in the preposterous hat launching a competition for a place in his glass elevator. It’s won, not by Veruca Salt, the 10-year-old daughter of a peanut magnate, but by Oliver Daemen, the 17-year-old son of a hedge fund manager. But fear not, everybody’s heart will eventually belong to the outsider – in this case, the unassumingly named Wally Funk, 82 years young and (finally) a true space pioneer.

The world’s richest man going into space was always going to be a novelty to some, outrageous to others, but that is the nature of being the world’s richest man. If Jeff Bezos scratched his nose, somebody somewhere would demand that his fingers do something else; liberate the world’s poor, for a start, or at least, ensure that Amazon’s Oompa-Loompas should never have to urinate into a bottle. “Nice penis rocket now let your workers unionize,” tweeted The Daily Beast’s Molly Jong-Fast, which pretty much summed up the depth of most commentary.

Whilst there are plenty of legitimate reasons to criticise Bezos, there’s also a heavy irony around Tuesday’s space flight that can only be enjoyed if you remember the debates that raged around every NASA project of the late 20th century.

As far back as 1957, The Times reported on the visit to Russia by Dr Richard Wooley, the 11th Astronomer Royal, when he described the nascent space race as “utter bilge” and “a frightful waste of public money”. It was later claimed his words were taken out of context, but the substance of his attack became all too familiar over the subsequent six decades.

In 1961, New Scientist (No. 238) ran an “American Newsletter” from John Lear titled “Wanted: a brake on the Moon race”. It reported on the scepticism among the scientific community at the proposed cost of putting a man on the Moon. In the article, Joseph Myler, a noted science journalist, asked a now-familiar question: “What is there about space that makes it possible to obtain enormous sums of money for space mysteries that cannot be obtained to deal with the serious problems we all know a lot more about right here on Earth?”

Wasting public money “up there” rather than spending it “down here” became something of a mantra for any sceptics who saw no future for humans in space. In 1969, Apollo 11 took off to deposit humans on the lunar surface for the first time and Punch ran a cartoon by Roy Raymonde which read “Don’t you feel comforted at the thought of all the benefits it’ll bring to future generations?” The question was ostensibly being posed by the poor of Africa. We never heard the answer.

The argument was one that rarely went away. By 1995, a bulletin by the European Space Agency predicted the future when “the role of public authorities in the economy will be reduced and that a free market will be the dominant feature of the economic order up to 2020 and beyond.” The logic of the free market solution filtered through to NASA after the Shuttle era. Rather than thinking cleverly about a problem, the Shuttle had been the most complicated answer that a bureaucracy could ever devise. It was the embodiment of governmental bloat.

By the turn of the millennium, it was increasingly obvious that clever thinking would be left to the private space industry, which, of course, is exactly what happened. Space has now become the domain of commercial operations backed by private wealth.

Which is, perhaps, why cynics have found something else to complain about…

The popular wisdom of 2021 is that the three space billionaires – Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson – are irresponsible, symptoms of a civilisation – or more specifically, a capitalist system – in decline. Former US Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, spoke for every cynic when he tweeted that “Billionaires rocketing off into space while the rest of humanity suffers is a sign of a broken society, not societal progress.”

It’s not just the space billionaires who take the flak. Bill Gates gives away $36 billion (putting him second behind Jamsetji Tata as the world’s most generous philanthropist) and his reward is being targeted by conspiracy theorists who consider him the suspect of choice for their New World Order paranoia. Yet even among the less excitable, the “billionaire problem” has proved seductive in terms of popular politics. Elizabeth Warren’s bid for the Democratic nomination rested largely on her willingness to challenge the big corporations. Meanwhile, Dan Riffle, an advisor to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, turned it into a slogan: “Every Billionaire is a Policy Failure.”

Rather than a policy failure, every billionaire offers politicians a chance to indulge in the old opportunistic “beat the rich” populism, though justified by the agility of corporations in avoiding tax and the laxity of governments to keep up with the new digital economy. Reich, to be fair, is right on this point. “I don’t know who needs to hear this,” he tweeted recently, “but billionaires who pay nothing in federal income tax shouldn’t get federal contracts to rocket into space”.

There is, however, something about the commentary around the new space race that displays a certain mean-spiritedness, if not simple contrarianism. Take the piece published in The Guardian on Monday, focussing on the environmental damage of rockets going into space. “When rockets launch into space, they require a huge amount of propellants to make it out of the Earth’s atmosphere. For SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, it is kerosene, and for Nasa it is liquid hydrogen in their new Space Launch System.”

It’s hard to read this as anything but the old friction between progress and stasis. SpaceX is already transitioning to the new Raptor engines that burn Methane, thereby turning a particularly nasty greenhouse gas into CO2 and water. Musk’s aim is for “rocket flights will be zero net carbon long-term” and we can be sure any such innovation won’t merely serve billionaires. Even Bezos’s New Shepard is a pathfinder and what is a novelty today will become commonplace tomorrow.

The example is the American space program of the 1960s, which did so much more than reach the Moon. From WD-40 to satellite communications, from CMOS image sensors to the solar cell, the first space race advanced our technology and, perversely, gave us the very media that now enables those that shout the loudest about its inherent sinfulness.

Carl Sagan, still the best prophet of the millennium he didn’t live to see, put it best at the end of his Pale Blue Dot, published in 1994. “If we have been locked and bolted into a prison of the self,” he wrote, “here is an escape hatch—something worthy, something vastly larger than ourselves, a crucial act on behalf of humanity.”

Forget Bezos for a day. Forget the hype and, if you can, the odd shape of the rocket. Look instead and celebrate Wally Funk: the oldest person to have stepped through the escape hatch.