Space Is Bigger Than Billionaires

The orbital economy goes way beyond the ambitions of Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk

- By Ashlee Vance

Richard Branson has been to space. Jeff Bezos just visited, too. Rich people have done this sort of thing before, but Branson and Bezos didn’t just pay for a ticket—they paid for the spaceships. Individuals, if they’re wealthy enough, are no longer beholden to a government craft when they want to leave the planet for a little while.

These two voyages have generated an awful lot of takes. Some have celebrated the engineering and persistence required to fly a bunch of humans into space and bring them back safely, or the wonder of pushing the boundaries of possibility. Mostly, though, they’ve proved an irresistible occasion to vent frustrations about billionaires doing billionaire things instead of focusing their resources on the pandemic, or climate change, or any of the other rolling crises here on Earth. People are dying. The planet is broken. Maybe these guys, and fellow billionaire space enthusiast Elon Musk, ought to tuck their space phalluses away and focus on some of our more immediate concerns.

A couple of decades ago, when the three men’s respective space companies were just getting started, they were taken as evidence that these nouveau riche types were dreaming too big. Now, notwithstanding some legitimate arguments about effective tax rates and who makes public policy, it’s the critics who are thinking too small. The billionaire joyrides into space are just the brightest, shiniest objects in a much larger field.