Ever since COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns started easing up, billionaires have been eager to spread their wings. Last month, then-Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos a

The Billionaire ‘Space Race’ Has Nothing to Do With Space

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2021-07-13 12:30:08

Ever since COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns started easing up, billionaires have been eager to spread their wings. Last month, then-Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced he was going to suborbital space in a Blue Origin vehicle two weeks after his last day on the job. Virgin Galactic CEO Richard Branson saw an opening and announced he would beat Bezos by 9 days and take flight on his company's spaceplane on July 11.

On Sunday, Branson, along with two pilots and three other passengers, took off on the VSS Unity and soared up 86 kilometers for a few minutes before returning to Earth. Virgin made a big deal out of this flight, releasing a company promo video with the tagline, "If we can do this, imagine what else we can do," and many celebrated Branson's space travel as being an important step for humanity—except it wasn’t, unless you're an investor.

The euphoria around the dual billionaire space trips has very little to do with space. In the days leading up to the flight, a pissing match between Bezos’s and Branson’s PR teams ensued over whether space begins 55 miles up (as defined by the US government, and the milestone that Branson would hit) or 62 miles (as defined by the Karman line which is observed internationally, and above which Bezos will fly). In other words, the billionaires were fighting over the nuances of who was going to technically-space. It's worth noting that millionaire Dennis Tito already paid his own way to the International Space Station , 240 miles above Earth, in 2001. Rather than representing some new human achievement in spaceflight, Branson's stunt announced an industry: commercial space tourism for the wealthy, led by Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, and Elon Musk's SpaceX.