personal finance

Branson, Bezos and the pointless billionaire space race


Imagine you’re among the very first tourists to board a rocket, shoot up to the fringes of space, and see the Earth from 86 kilometres. Then you come down, and discover that no one cares.

This is presumably the experience of Richard Branson, billionaire founder of Virgin Galactic. Some people think Branson is a self-publicist, but given that he timed his historic launch on Sunday to clash with the Euros final and the Wimbledon men’s final, they may be overestimating.

Brits would have lacked interest anyway. Branson has overpromised too often. Going to space can’t be that hard if the guy who messed up the trains from London to Liverpool has become a pioneer.

Long before he hit zero gravity, Branson hit zero gravitas. In 2007 he tried to greenwash his airline by offering a $25m prize for removing greenhouse gases from the air. The prize was never awarded.

Those who have followed Branson’s business “achievements” will be amazed to discover that arguably he didn’t go to space at all. On one definition, his VSS Unity craft was 14km short of the boundary of Earth’s atmosphere.

But some rich dude will go even further soon. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is due to take off next week, and Tesla’s Elon Musk plans to go into actual orbit. Virgin Galactic will start taking paying customers next year.

Look, if you’re desperate to pay $250,000 for four minutes of bodily contortions, there are massage parlours that can help. Space travel amazed us when the astronauts were the fittest; it won’t have the same effect when they’re simply the richest.

Billionaires are experts in self-justification, whether they are avoiding tax (I just have a “love of the beautiful British Virgin Islands” — Branson) or calling a man “pedo guy” (“I didn’t mean he was a paedophile” — Musk). Going to space is just another rhetorical challenge.

Branson says taking a highly polluting rocket trip will encourage us to save the Earth. Nonsense: the view of Earth from space has been widely available since 1968.

Musk and Bezos have a grander rationale, which is that humanity needs to become an interplanetary species. Here I’m more sympathetic. We are screwing up our planet, and even if we weren’t, we could be wiped from it by an asteroid.

Yet this is the worst possible time for their space visions. Are we really promoting space tourism while asking ordinary citizens to restrain their diets, travel and consumption to fight climate change? Will people be persuaded to cycle to work while billionaires are blasting into orbit?

Bezos’s vision involves millions of people in space settlements. Although the idea of living in an orbiting Amazon warehouse is suboptimal, I’ll accept it as a last resort. Is it realistic? I don’t know. Is it urgent? No. The sun, the wind etc can more than meet our energy needs on Earth. Bezos argues we will face energy rationing within a couple of centuries. Even if he’s right, a delay of a decade or two is immaterial.

In contrast, the next two decades are very material for climate change. We lack technologies for low-carbon flying, shipping and concrete. Large parts of the Amazon rainforest now emit more carbon dioxide than they take in, according to a study in the journal Nature. We address this now, or we enter feedback loops that may make much of Earth too hot for humans. As for intelligent life — it’s out there: for example, the orang-utans, who we’re doing our best to wipe out.

Musk, Bezos and Branson pretend that we need to explore space now for our own sake. In reality, they just want to be the ones in the history books. Let’s save our planet before we search for a much less hospitable one. Then maybe, Sir Richard, people will pay attention. 

henry.mance@ft.com



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