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The Truth About Why Bezos & Musk Are Aiming High
How a billionaires’ conspiracy that’s literally out of this world is shaping the future of space technology
It’s impossible not to be bombarded with stories and pictures about Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, each spending billions of dollars to design and build machines to blast people out of Earth’s gravity well. Musk pretends he’s doing it for the benefit of humanity. But as Musk claims everything he does is for the benefit of humanity (see his eight-hour-long TED talk on how his daily visit to his blockchain-enabled all-electric toilet makes an amazing contribution to the Earth’s biosphere) we can be excused a little skepticism. Bezos is less disingenuous, merely saying that he hopes to make space tourism affordable for the masses. Presumably he means the masses who’ve made millions from tech stock options and can thus afford a trifling $200,000 for a brief ride to the edge of space before falling rapidly back to Earth.
Although manufacturing rockets and then blasting them up into space is incredibly polluting, no one seems to mind because it evokes visions of Captain Kirk boldly going somewhere or other while enjoying all the benefits of magical artificial gravity with none of Einstein’s troublesome relativity to get in the way of the fun. (Reality is such a downer…
