The Race to Leave Planet Earth
“Jeff Bezos is going into space. Would you?” Amol Rajan, of the BBC, asked Sundar Pichai, the C.E.O. of Google, last week. “Well,” Pichai said, smiling, “I’m jealous, a bit. I would love to look at Earth from space.” Unlike most people, Pichai can probably afford to do so. Bezos, the founder of Amazon, sold a seat on his Blue Origin space company’s New Shepard rocket, set to launch this Tuesday, to someone who bid twenty-eight million dollars for it in an online auction and then cancelled, citing “scheduling conflicts.” The eighteen-year-old son of a Dutch investment-firm executive will be joining Bezos as “the first paying customer,” instead.
The theatrics surrounding Bezos’s trip—which involves just a few minutes in space—contribute to the impression that we are not so much in a space age as in an era of billionaire rocketeers. Right before Richard Branson, the Virgin entrepreneur, took off on his own near-space jaunt, on July 11th, Bezos’s company tweeted that, among other things, its spaceship has bigger windows. (Branson’s are “airplane-sized,” it said; but he’s charging only a quarter of a million dollars per seat.) Elon Musk, the C.E.O. of Tesla and SpaceX, who has his own plans to leave the planet, has tweeted that Bezos is a “copycat,” using a cat emoji.
Yet it would be a misapprehension to think that, after centuries of humans dreaming about worlds beyond ours, outer space has been reduced to just another stage for rivalries among the super-rich—a Southampton in the sky. The larger and far more interesting story is that the planet has, somewhat abruptly, embarked on a new and rapidly accelerating space race. The protagonists include private companies and a growing number of nations, among them China, India, and the United Arab Emirates. As General John Raymond, the head of the U.S. Space Force, which Donald Trump designated a separate branch of the military—a decision that President Biden has affirmed—said at a Council on Foreign Relations event last month, “Space is a very dynamic domain right now. There’s a lot happening.”
