On Monday, rocket company Blue Origin sent six women to the edge of space, the first time an all-female crew made the trip since Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova completed a three-day solo mission more than six decades ago.
The flight included a pop star, a TV journalist, an aerospace engineer, a film producer and a bioastronautics research scientist-turned-activist. Also on board was Lauren Sanchez, a businesswoman, journalist, author, philanthropist and the fiancee of Jeff Bezos, the world’s second-richest person and founder of Blue Origin. The roster had “the energy of an American Girl doll collection,” as the New York Times’ Amanda Hess put it.
The outing triggered a heated debate about whether the 11-minute flight was a brave display of feminism or a major publicity stunt. (Singer-turned-passenger Katy Perry telling Elle magazine that she was going to “put the ass in astronaut” did not help the discourse.)
More than anything else though, the episode was a distraction. It accomplished little beyond diverting attention away from the fact that while women in a rocket were dominating the news cycle, the people who are really trying to conquer space are billionaire men.
There is of course Amazon.com Inc founder and executive chairman Bezos, who sees humanity’s expansion beyond Earth as a way to escape a “civilization of stasis” and the confines of the Earth’s limited resources. Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars and turn humans into a multiplanetary species through his company SpaceX. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic has the more modest goal of promoting space tourism.
The space-billionaires club is growing, too. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently bought a controlling stake in Relativity Space; he is now also running the start-up, which aims to compete with SpaceX. And crypto billionaire Jed McCaleb, who was behind the Mt. Gox Bitcoin exchange, is attempting to build the world’s first commercial space station.
“People need a new frontier,” McCaleb told Bloomberg News last month. “Otherwise, things start to feel very zero sum.”
Why are some of the richest men in the world so obsessed with space? I am far from the first to pose this question. In 2021, when Bezos and Branson rode on their respective rocket ships nine days apart, Salon.com pointed out the correlation between wealth and a desire to conquer space.
“Are they bored with Earth? Or is it a symbolic, masculine power play, an illustration of their dominance?” writer Nicole Karlis asked.
One psychologist told her that wealth and power can make a person relate to the world in a more self-centered way — that living in a cocoon of privilege makes it more difficult to see what is happening around them.
However, this year, some of the extremely rich do seem aware of the smoldering happening here on this planet: the growing social and political unrest, rising income inequality, climate change and extreme weather events, geopolitical uncertainty and the ever-present possibility of another pandemic. To prepare for it, they are building bunkers to bury themselves deep in the ground. They are exploring the possibility of colonizing the sea. And rather than invest the bulk of their resources in fixing life down here, they are hatching an exit strategy that will eventually propel those who can afford it into space.
While the space billionaires may package their exploits as furthering humanity and science, their ventures are also another way to make money in a relatively new and unregulated arena. However, lofty promises about making space accessible for all make for better messaging than the reality of rocket start-ups’ profiting from government contracts. In a real move of press savvy, Blue Origin has gotten more attention and buzz for the design of the flight suits for its all-female line-up than it has for the nearly US$2.4 billion it was awarded earlier this month by the US Department of Defense. (SpaceX made out even better, landing a US$5.9 billion deal.)
The super wealthy who have ridden in their own rockets have come back to Earth bubbling about the beauty and the fragility of the planet we live on. However, it says a lot about how disconnected they are from life on the ground if that takes a trip to the edge of space to realize.
Beth Kowitt is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering corporate America. She was previously a senior writer and editor at Fortune magazine. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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