No, billionaires won’t "escape" to space while the world burns
Last Friday, in the latest volley in the Billionaire Space Race, Richard Branson announced that he'll be flying to low Earth orbit on July 11, nine days before Jeff Bezos' planned visit. While some plutocrat stans cheered for their chosen corporate overlord, many on Twitter responded with renewed outrage that not one but three billionaires have managed to hoard enough wealth to start their own personal space programs. The news landed particularly viciously after a week in which hundreds of people died from a record-shattering heat dome in Canada and the Pacific Northwest and the ocean caught on fire.
What caught me by surprise was the number of folks who seem to believe that Musk, Bezos and Branson are trying to "escape" the ravages of climate change for a life in space — and might even succeed in doing so. The notion that the rich will live comfortably high above the Earth while the planet becomes an uninhabitable wasteland has been popularized by movies like "Elysium" and "WALL-E." The New York Times fueled this fantasy back in 2018 with a story about Axiom's proposed luxury space hotel, under the headline "The Rich are Planning to Leave this Wretched Planet."
But as a scifi writer and the spouse of a NASA flight controller, let me assure you that the rich escaping the earth for a space utopia is only a trope in fiction — at least in our lifetimes.
