The big news on the spaceflight front last week was the announcement by billionaire Richard Branson that he would ride his Virgin Galactic spacecraft

Column: The Bezos-Branson-Musk space race is a huge waste of money and scientifically useless

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2021-07-11 20:30:04

The big news on the spaceflight front last week was the announcement by billionaire Richard Branson that he would ride his Virgin Galactic spacecraft aloft on July 11, beating fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos to the edge of space by nine days.

Big news, that is, for anyone mourning the demise of the TV show “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” which ran out its string more than 15 years ago.

For anyone else anchored here on planet Earth, the competition to be the first billionaire in space should mark a milestone in the towering vanity of the wealthy.

Both billionaires place their ventures in the context of the need to test humans’ resilience to spaceflight, establish the safety of their craft, and expand humankind’s reach beyond our home planet.

That’s also a theme of the third billionaire engaged in this plutocrats’ space race, Elon Musk. He hasn’t been talking about taking a flight himself but does say the goal of his company, SpaceX, is to give humankind a foothold on other planets, specifically Mars.