![]() ![]() What may be worse is the impulse to sell space travel as a way to forget about Earth’s problems, as if the planet were disposable. ![]() ![]() Some of the early rhetoric applied to space-colonization, the final frontier, resource mining, conquest-has a more unsettling ring to it now. That last plan recalls some of the suspicions that arise when billionaires and politicians rhapsodize about space travel: that it is all about projecting prestige and power, and bringing our conflicts and dysfunctions into another arena. Also this year, it announced that it will send a human crew to Mars in 2033, and set up a base there coöperate with Russia to build a base on the moon (where it already has plans to send astronauts) and launch a spaceship that will reach a distance of a hundred astronomical units (about nine billion miles) away from Earth in time to mark the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, in 2049. (The I.S.S., meanwhile, is nearing the end of its useful life.) In May, China successfully landed and deployed a rover on Mars. a decade ago-sent the first crew to its own space station, named Tiangong, or Heavenly Palace, which is still under construction. Last month, China-whose presence on the I.S.S. There may be an even tougher operator on the space scene: Xi Jinping. Blue Origin, which was part of a consortium that lost out to SpaceX, filed a formal protest with the Government Accountability Office, claiming that the process was unfair a ruling is expected next month. There’s a lot happening.”įor a start, the most consequential conflict between Bezos and Musk is not about space tourism but about a nearly three-billion-dollar contract that NASA awarded SpaceX, in April, to build a human lunar lander for its Artemis program, which aims, before the decade is out, to resume flying people to the moon for the first time since 1972. 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. As General John Raymond, the head of the U.S. The protagonists include private companies and a growing number of nations, among them China, India, and the United Arab Emirates. The larger and far more interesting story is that the planet has, somewhat abruptly, embarked on a new and rapidly accelerating space race. 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. of Tesla and SpaceX, who has his own plans to leave the planet, has tweeted that Bezos is a “copycat,” using a cat emoji. ![]() (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. 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. 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. 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. I would love to look at Earth from space.” Unlike most people, Pichai can probably afford to do so. “Well,” Pichai said, smiling, “I’m jealous, a bit. Would you?” Amol Rajan, of the BBC, asked Sundar Pichai, the C.E.O. ![]()
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