![]() But there are no guarantees! When Star Trek icon William Shatner returned from a jaunt in a Blue Origin rocket in October, he was “overwhelmed” with emotion. Because there’s very little to actually do during a few minutes of weightlessness in the upper atmosphere, these companies are really selling bragging rights, as well as a chance at a rare experience called the overview effect, an epiphany said to affect those who behold Mother Gaia from above. ![]() Having “The Right Stuff” now means having the cash to buy a ticket ($250,000 at the low end, running up to tens of millions of dollars for a first-class experience). Most of the hype around SpaceX and Blue Origin, along with Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, has served these companies’ principal marketing strategy: space tourism. Such is the mission we’re asked to cheer, and to finance. But it’s billionaires who are driving policy, and what they offer is a gloomier future of all-powerful corporations that cement their dominance on Earth by laying claim to the heavens. Kennedy pitched in his final address to the United Nations in 1963. Many scientists still advocate for “peaceful cooperation” among nations to better understand our universe, a program of the kind that President John F. That’s how they expect to keep winning at capitalism and, eventually, to appropriate the powers of government. It is no accident that the two men who perennially compete for the title of world’s wealthiest have chosen to funnel their fortunes into rockets, satellites, space stations, and plans for off-world colonies. The pursuit of profit has subsumed the pursuit of knowledge. But it is clear the objectives of the civilian space program have already shifted. edge in space, or whether corporations, given generous subsidy, can surpass the achievements of the 1960s. It’s too soon to say whether decades of unchecked privatization have blunted the U.S. More significantly, an endeavor once led by rule-bound bureaucrats now champions the dubious values of Silicon Valley: cost-cutting, disruption, disdain for regulations, and boundless monopoly. The personality cults around these billionaire space lords make the nationalistic spectacle of the Apollo program seem stodgy. A new class of spacefaring oligarchs, most notably Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, whose space company is called Blue Origin, have been granted a kind of royal charter by Congress, the White House, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. But nations are no longer the only leading actors. China has replaced Russia as America’s cosmic bogeyman. As in the Cold War, this contest is ideological as well as technological. The stakes are the expansion of military, economic, and political dominion. space program-once the envy of the world-that while its generals were figuratively pissing themselves over a Chinese rocket, its astronauts were literally pissing themselves because a profit-hungry contractor screwed up? Red Scares, Blue Origins, and Little Green Men Fortunately, the structure wasn’t compromised, but the snafu forced the crew to resort to diapers for twenty hours during descent, which the pilot called “suboptimal.”Ĭall that a “SpaceX moment.” What does it say about the U.S. A toilet seal broke, spilling pools of urine below the floorboards. But, as Tesla owners have come to expect, there was a problem with Musk’s design. In November, a capsule made by SpaceX, the company owned by PayPal lottery winner and Tesla head Elon Musk, returned four astronauts to Earth from the ISS. Meanwhile, American capitalism carved its own venturesome path into the final frontier. Chinese officials claimed it was not a weapon, but a peaceful spacecraft-part of a flourishing national program that recently launched a probe to Mars, landed the first robotic spacecraft on the dark side of the Moon, and commenced orbital assembly of a space station, just as the funded lifetime of the U.S.-backed International Space Station (ISS) nears an end. military and intelligence officials feared the test vehicle could allow China to launch an unstoppable nuclear first strike. The strategic implications were overblown, but the Sputnik comparison was apt in that a rival power-a communist one no less-had outperformed the United States in space. It was reported to have been fired from a so-called hypersonic glide vehicle that circled the planet at speeds exceeding Mach 5 before landing within twenty-five miles of its target. They called it a “Sputnik moment.” In October, the Financial Times reported that over the summer of 2021, the Chinese government tested a new missile.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |