One could hardly have expected such rage and discontent at the fact that billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson should dare go to space on their own dime.
When both men did so, leftists fumed in response. Some raged over the supposed environmental damage of such trips. This evinces an incredible lack of self-awareness and intellectual consistency. Their own alarmist credo holds that the Earth will soon be uninhabitable unless a series of impossible changes is made. This necessarily implies an urgent need for mass-consumption space travel, and the early versions are probably going to pollute more than their successors.
Several liberal members of Congress were triggered — at least one has proposed a bill to single out private space travel for special taxation, even though it does not receive most of the benefits from government that commercial air travel enjoys. Others acted as if it somehow cheapens space to have the uber-wealthy visit it or use it for a profit. This unwittingly enumerates one of private space travel’s most important benefits.
Wealthy individuals who invest in space travel, including the still-earthbound Elon Musk, are really just making space travel cheaper for everyone. They are engaging in space travel at a time when many governments have shied away from it. They are shouldering risks and costs that might otherwise fall to taxpayers and be carried out far more timidly by much smaller-minded bureaucrats.
This is just like so many other areas of historical progress, in which government played only the most limited role. The West was not won in the 19th century because government officials forced westward movement of the population. Rather, poorer individuals, often beaten down by circumstance, aspired to build new lives and consequently undertook a grueling journey in which there were no guarantees.
Throughout history, the profit motive has induced ordinary people to assume extraordinary risks that ultimately benefited not only themselves but the rest of society. More recent examples would include the earliest investors in both successful and failed Silicon Valley ventures, including today’s biggest Big Tech companies.
In the course of doing what was advantageous to themselves, risk-takers in every era have conferred enormous benefits on their government and their society. The fact that they made people’s lives appreciably better is evinced by the heap of cash that consumers have voluntarily handed over in exchange for the goods and services they created and produced — including, in many cases, improvements to the environment.
This same process is occurring now but in the field of space travel. In the coming decades, it is possible that short-distance space travel will become common and available to people with lower and lower incomes, the same way air travel did in the 20th century. Among other things, best practices will be developed for engineering modern vehicles capable of easy and cheap Earth orbit, followed by interplanetary journeys.
For space travel to become commonplace, someone is going to have to be the guinea pig. Someone has to iron out all the kinks in an expensive and potentially perilous process of trial and error.
Why should taxpayers be forced to do this when billionaires are generously prepared to take the risks and do the work on their own dime?
This is why, even if governments have eventual designs to return to space in earnest, they should welcome the advent of private space travel and even encourage more of it.
