When Blue Origin, the space launch company owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, announced that someone had won an auction to ride into space on the company’s New Shepard rocket, a lot of bandwidth was expended on social media about what appeared to be a case of conspicuous consumption. The amount of money, $28 million, paid for a few minutes in space, seemed, to many, to be excessive.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, the “democratic socialist” from Vermont, was especially bothered. He said so on Twitter: “Space travel, heavily funded by taxpayers, should not be a plaything for the very rich.”
Sanders has never been an enthusiastic supporter of space travel. His 2020 campaign website stated, “Bernie believes space exploration is beneficial and exciting, and generally supports the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, but when it comes to a limited federal budget, Bernie’s vote is to take care of the needs of struggling Americans on this planet first.”
The senator is also irate at the idea of rich people flying into space with their own money. In response to a tweet by Elon Musk discussing his desire to make our species an interplanetary one, Sanders replied caustically: “Space travel is an exciting idea, but right now we need to focus on Earth and create a progressive tax system so that children don’t go hungry, people are not homeless, and all Americans have healthcare. The level of inequality in America is obscene and a threat to our democracy.”
Sanders is approaching space travel, whether funded by NASA or by rich people such as Bezos and Musk, the same way that the far Left has always done. The recently deceased Walter Mondale used to inveigh against money spent on the space program on the floor of the Senate 50 years ago, when men were still walking on the moon, using some of the same excuses that Sanders employs.
Mondale and others like him were successful in curtailing the Apollo-era space program. However, since Sanders is still complaining about the social ills that Mondale once did, the idea that not spending money on space exploration would cause such ills to be solved seems to have been disproven.
Sanders is doing Mondale one better by opposing space travel funded by billionaires as well as the government. He also made a number of errors that undermine his position.
First, neither SpaceX nor Blue Origin has been “subsidized” by the government. However, NASA has funded the development of the SpaceX Dragon capsule that is now being used to transport cargo and astronauts to and from the International Space Station. In return, the space agency is getting a service that now costs far less than when NASA used the space shuttle for those purposes.
More recently, NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to build a lunar lander version of its Starship rocket. Since Musk is also paying for the Starship’s development, the space agency has gotten a bargain. Meanwhile, Congress is working on funding for a second lunar lander that may or may not be developed by Blue Origin. The cost is far cheaper than if NASA had undertaken the project in-house.
And the $28 million being paid for the suborbital jaunt on the New Shepard is not going into Bezos’s pocket. The money is going to charity.
In the meantime, SpaceX is going into space tourism in a big way. Axiom has contracted for four flights of the Crew Dragon to the space station, paid for by the well-heeled and adventurous. A separate Crew Dragon flight, called Inspiration 4, has been arranged to raise money for the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. The flight will include a physician’s assistant from the hospital, who, as a child, was a patient there.
Sanders’s inveighing about space travel comes at a time when a rare, bipartisan consensus has developed on the issue. President Joe Biden has adopted the Artemis project to return to the moon and go on to Mars, despite the fact that it was started under President Donald Trump. Thus, Sanders is out of step with both Republicans and Democrats.
Mark Whittington, who writes frequently about space and politics, has published a political study of space exploration titled Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon? as well as The Moon, Mars and Beyond, and, most recently, Why is America Going Back to the Moon. He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.
