Billionaires in Space: The Strange Politics of Rocketry for the Mega-​Rich

Robert Reich, former Labor secretary in the Clinton administration, remarked, “No one needs Bezos to launch rockets into outer space. We need him to pay his fair share of taxes so people can thrive here on Earth,” insisting “no one can privatize heroism.” Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman and presidential candidate, tweeted, “The only problem I have with Bezos’ Blue Origin space rocket ship [going] into outer space is that it’s going to come back.” Sen. Bernie Sanders even created a video to accompany his tweet mocking the idea that people would be “be impressed that a billionaire went to space”; instead, billionaires should be taxed more heavily in order “to invest in working people here on Earth.”

Manned spaceflight has always attracted the criticism that it wastes exorbitant amounts of money for little concrete benefit—both from progressives who would rather spend that money on social programs and libertarians who bristle at funding that spending through taxation. But the reaction to the “Billionaire’s Space Race” has focused more on hostility to billionaires than hostility to spaceflight. Some, such as Reich, even pined for the bygone glory days of NASA before these damnable private-​sector dilettantes took to space.

On the surface, it does seem to be a discomforting example of the unfathomably wealthy pouring billions of dollars into an ostentatious display for their own mere personal amusement. It is like owning a mega-​yacht or private island on steroids. Thus, it’s an easy target for those whose main political goal is pursuing soak-​the-​rich tax policies.

And in one sense it’s true—Branson and Bezos have been openly motivated by their own personal desire to fly in space. That’s even more true of the grandiose visions of Elon Musk, whose SpaceX has far outstripped other billionaire space projects, and who talks of his intention to “die on Mars” as part of an eventual wave of colonists. Joining them is hotelier Robert Bigelow, founder of Bigelow Airspace, which has already put innovative inflatable modules on the International Space Station with hopes to eventually use them to build the first hotel in orbit.

Outside of space policy wonks, people might not realize that the attention-​grabbing amount of money being spent on space tourism companies is a relative drop in the bucket on the scale of national economies, government budgets, and state spending on public space programs. NASA’s annual budget is currently $22.6 billion and its own post-​Space Shuttle plans have been plagued by endless delays, political wrangling, and massive cost overruns. Outside of NASA, there are a great many line items that governments spend money on which progressives tend not to support. For example, trimming the Pentagon’s budget by just 1% could save more money each year than the two billionaires have spent in two decades designing and building tourism spacecraft.

If the goal is to spend more money on things like healthcare and welfare, there is a much bigger pot of money available, and it’s money that the government already has and spends on other things. The bloated military budget—projected to top $733 billion in FY2021-​-​is the largest and most obvious, but there are also relatively cheaper wrongs like mass incarceration. Governments at all levels spend almost $85 billion a year on prisons and jails in the United States. Exactly how much of their own money Branson and Bezos have spent isn’t public, but it is reasonably estimated to be in the low-​single-​digit billions.

Though Democrats sometimes offer a perfunctory nod towards reducing military spending or at least slowing its growth, they expend little political capital and messaging focus on the topic. Nor does it rank as a high priority for activists on the left, who are typically more eager to talk about raising taxes on the wealthy than redirecting existing spending. The annual passage of ever-​ballooning defense authorization acts generates a small fraction of the negative commentary that flowed regarding these two 10-​minute flights.

Commercial space ventures might not produce anything as revolutionary as the airplane or the steam engine or electricity, but that does not mean they have no upsides. For one thing, the much-​derided “tourism” angle is actually worth something. There are entire states and countries whose economies are built on tourism. What’s wrong with tourism? Traveling and engaging in new experiences simply for the pleasure of it is an entirely normal human desire and a common activity. A new industry that employs some tens of thousands of people and could soon have thousands of high-​paying customers is not frivolous, even if frivolity is what they are selling.

Furthermore, while space tourism initially caters to the entertainment of the wealthy, that is likely just a step to broader access to space. In this regard, private spaceflight can been compared to the early development of airplanes-​-​at first playthings for rich dilettantes before evolving into an ordinary means of mass transportation. The first airline seats were only affordable by the upper crust of the income scale: it cost $4,539.24 in today’s money to take a 15-​hour flight with 12 stops from Los Angeles to Boston in 1941, for example. Affordability only came later with technical innovations and economies of scale (and the repeal of some highly anti-​competitive regulations).

Nor are the new space companies technologically stagnant. Despite some critical assertions, they are not just reusing the same technologies that NASA developed decades ago. Private-​sector space startups have already made radical innovations around reusability, which is the main key to affordability. Imagine if airlines couldn’t “re-​use” their airplanes and instead had to buy a new one for each flight; yet that’s what governments have mostly been doing in space for the past six decades.

This technological innovation is most notable with SpaceX, which has already lowered the cost of a kilogram by an order of magnitude. NASA’s space shuttle cost $54,500 per kilogram to boost things into orbit; SpaceX does the same job for just $2,720. They did this by taking the seemingly crazy idea of flying the launch vehicle back to the pad and then landing it upright—long dismissed by NASA as infeasible—and made it a reality. Blue Origin is using the same technology for its suborbital flights in a 100% reusable system. All three companies, including Virgin Galactic, have also made advancements in spacecraft reusability, with Virgin pursuing a different path of air-​launched spaceplanes.

Lowering the price of access to space has real benefits for all of us, and not just in the future. Most immediately, it reduces the burden on taxpayers to pay for government space programs. It allows us to do more in space for less expense, including expanding the constellation of satellites that provide us with so many useful services such as communications, navigation, and meteorology. It allows more and cheaper deep-​space scientific exploration to be conducted. It opens the door to mineral extraction in space by allowing the development of spacecraft and equipment inexpensive enough for such mining to be feasible. Both SpaceX and Virgin Galactic plan to develop point-​to-​point suborbital transportation for prices comparable to current airlines; in other words, traveling between Los Angeles and Sydney in about 45 minutes instead of the current 15 hours.

And none of this has been accomplished by scions of inherited wealth, a common but largely inaccurate complaint about the planet’s wealthiest individuals. Branson, Bezos, and Musk are all more or less self-​made men from middle-​class families. They built enterprises from the ground up that remade a broad range of industries, from popular music to the availability of physical goods, online payments, and electric cars. In all of these cases, it is notable they didn’t invent the basic idea. There was online shopping before Amazon. There were electric cars before Tesla. Instead, the value they added was entrepreneurial: expanding the quality and diversity of what was offered and to whom it was available and affordable, growing small industries into large ones. None of this justifies the public backlash against them, and the reality is that their personal profits are a tiny percentage of the consumer surpluses and new wealth they’ve generated for society.

Of course, it is possible none of this will pan out. Manned spaceflight may never provide more benefits than costs; these nascent industries may sputter out and die; we might eventually lose interest; it might really just be the passing fad of the mega-​rich. But that is the case with most attempts at innovation and entrepreneurship-​-​most new businesses fail, most schemes for possible future industries don’t work, and only one in a million companies become the next Amazon or PayPal.

It is true that the extent to which commercial spaceflight has relied on government subsidies and contracts does not exactly make them paragons of totally laissez-​faire free markets, even if much of their funding comes from private sources. It’s also true that the accumulation of wealth fueling them was partly (though not primarily) built on government largesse and market distortion. Those are fair criticisms. The state of New Mexico, for example, put a significant financial albatross around its neck building a ludicrous “spaceport” in the desert for some $300 million, which has gone mostly unused for many years when the expected wave of commercial tenants never materialized. Virgin Galactic now uses it, but they could just as easily fly from nearly any place with a runway.

Even with those factors taken into consideration, there’s no good reason to be so angry at billionaires in space, and certainly not to put such energy and political focus behind that anger. They’re trying something new, producing tangible benefits, and spending a tiny sliver of the resources that government expends on much more objectionable projects. The ire of those looking to improve the world ought to be aimed elsewhere.