Musk and Bezos are trashing space as we subsidize their rise to trillionaire status.
With Amazon subsidiary Blue Origin successfully landing its New Glenn rocket, SpaceX has competition in the reusable launch market. On its face this may seem like a win: SpaceX no longer has a monopoly over cheap launches, and there’s additional redundancy in case the company fails or its leader goes rogue. There are certainly short term benefits to SpaceX losing its monopoly, but in the medium to long run, the competition between corporations (which may contribute to making the first trillionaires) is on a trajectory to make space unusable.
The New Glenn rocket that successfully landed was carrying NASA’S ESCAPADE Mars satellite mission. So this event is a perfect microcosm of the privatization of the space in industry: a trillion dollar company gets its new product on the market, essentially using taxpayer dollars to subsidize the development of something which taxpayers will not get to reap the benefits of. This trajectory towards privatization has pervaded the space industry for decades now, and it’s only getting worse under directors like Jared Isaacman, who openly want NASA to be “self-funding” and to divvy up space based fiefdoms to corporations.
Space should be primarily a vantage point from which to improve life on Earth—monitoring climate change, providing GPS, doing science that can’t be done on Earth—not one that fuels the rise of trillionaires as the world burns. While NASA is being illegally cut and bulldozed, Amazon and other companies are rampaging through the space environment, concerned only with exponential returns. That rampaging pursuit of profits at all costs is directly correlated to the exponential increase of privately owned and operated satellites in prime orbits. Because of this set of incentives, we are advancing quickly into a future where important orbits become completely unusable as space debris exponentially accumulates. We can and should imagine a world in which government organizations like NASA responsibly use space to make life on Earth better, instead of corporations fighting an autophagous war over who can extract the most value from humans all across this planet.
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