But What If the Billionaire Spaceships are a GOOD Idea?

The three faces of the Billionaire Space Race: Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk

Watching the current Billionaire Space Race, I have multiple reactions. I grew up reading science fiction, so privatized spaceflight isn’t new to me. But depending on whose interpretation you favor, we could be facing a massive dystopian folderol—the position favored by much of Blue Twitter—or the dawning of a new Golden Age. Unfortunately, there’s too much at stake to gamble now.

I remember reading, clear back in the 1980s, thrilling narratives of privatized spaceflight and the potential risks and benefits. Ben Bova springs immediately to mind, though countless other authors whose names I’ve forgotten also addressed the topic. Many saw privatized space travel as a libertarian extravaganza, the opportunity for flourishing human ingenuity. Bova’s Welcome To Moonbase fired my imagination with its ambitious public-private partnership.

Yet I cannot remember this vision, without remembering the other great libertarian space spitball: Star Wars. Though George Lucas depicts an autocratic one-party state, replete with Nazi-fetish costumes and ominously clicking heels, he depicts a remarkably hands-off economy. Darth Vader’s relationships with Lando Calrissian, Boba Fett, and Jabba the Hutt bespeak his galaxy’s defining economic ethos: don’t cross the state, and we’ll let you do whatever you want.

To emphasize the Star Wars economy, consider The Last Jedi, when Finn and Rose visit Canto Bight, the Monte Carlo-like carnival that dominates the movie’s middle third. Finn is initially besotted with public displays of wealth, and almost forgets his mission. Rose sees through the grotesquerie and demonstrates the planet’s moral bankruptcy. The movie not-so-subtly encourages us to see the parallels between that scene, and today’s widespread inequality.

Conventional leftist commentators have carped how today’s Billionaire Space Race proves American and EU capitalists have too damn much money. The three billionaires competing for bragging rights, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sir Richard Branson, have so much combined wealth that they could literally defeat world hunger without even noticing the outlay. Why, the commentariat asks, aren’t they competing to accomplish that?

Compelling as this argument seems, I can’t wholly support it. Because of the amortized cost of research and development, many large-scale technological innovations start out prohibitively expensive. Cars, airplanes, television, even the computer or smartphone you’re using to read this essay, were once exclusive playthings of the obscenely wealthy, condemned by populists as dangerous disruptors of good, honest values. The complaints have a redundant quality.

The three faces of the Star Wars economy: Darth Vader, Lando Calrissian, and Boba Fett

Equally importantly, the pressing terrestrial concerns which our Space Racers are purportedly ignoring—global warming, mass poverty, resource depletion, and authoritarian violence—will also be punishingly expensive. Currently, the American and British governments (where our Space Racers live) are bogged in partisan arguments about whether global warming even exists, while huge tracts are literally on fire. Conventional centralized solutions aren’t exactly forthcoming.

During the Cold War, America took pride in its research universities, scientific think tanks, and NASA. We considered spending taxpayer dollars and private grant money on these pursuits worthwhile. Then the Cold War ended, and we changed our minds about science. Capitalists decided they’d rather keep their money, and their pet legislators agreed. Now our economy resembles Bespin, rather than Moonbase.

Changing our economic presumptions would be time-consuming. We didn’t arrive at today’s economy with one tax bill or regulatory scheme, and we won’t fix today that way either. Our Star Wars protagonists didn’t bother fixing Bespin’s economy, and made only symbolic gestures on Canto Bight. Sure, the underlying system was a problem, but it wasn’t what was attempting to kill civilians at that exact moment.

Instead, like President Kennedy did when rallying America around the proposed moonshot, we have the potential to unify world citizens around flashy, high-profile technological wonders, like putting a billionaire on Mars. Perhaps, the spectacle will subsidize the necessary but unsexy quest for other solutions, too. Like how DARPA invented the Internet, and me becoming a blogger was merely a side effect.

Don’t misunderstand me. Trusting and utilizing these billionaires and their private empires might be expedient, but we can’t expect them to deliver us salvation. We have to address our problems, collectively, through economics, philosophy, and the state. Piggybacking our hopes for technological solutions on the Amazon moonshot doesn’t preclude us demanding reforms to our badly broken system.

But, like our parents and grandparents, why not tie this moonshot to other attempted remedies? Things could turn out awful, but things are awful now, and wishing for better background noise is wasteful when we have challenges right here. Maybe everything will turn into Star Wars. But maybe, just maybe, it’ll turn into Moonbase.