“Jeff Bezos is going into space. Would you?” Amol Rajan, of the BBC, asked Sundar Pichai, the C.E.O. of Google, last week. “Well,” Pichai said, smiling, “I’m jealous, a bit. I would love to look at Earth from space.” Unlike most people, Pichai can probably afford to do so. 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.
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. 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. (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. of Tesla and SpaceX, who has his own plans to leave the planet, has tweeted that Bezos is a “copycat,” using a cat emoji.
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. The larger and far more interesting story is that the planet has, somewhat abruptly, embarked on a new and rapidly accelerating space race. The protagonists include private companies and a growing number of nations, among them China, India, and the United Arab Emirates. As General John Raymond, the head of the U.S. 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. There’s a lot happening.”
For 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. 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.
NASA also hired SpaceX to shuttle astronauts to and from the International Space Station on the company’s reusable Crew Dragon spacecraft line. (The second such mission is currently under way, and this month Boeing’s Starliner is also set to dock at the station, for the first time.) NASA hasn’t had its own means of getting people to the I.S.S. since the Space Shuttle program ended, in 2011. For years, it bought seats on Russian Soyuz rockets, an option that has become geopolitically untenable. Musk likes to play fast and loose—some of his tweets about Tesla’s stock prices have got him in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission—but he’s more reliable than Vladimir Putin.
There may be an even tougher operator on the space scene: Xi Jinping. Last month, China—whose presence on the I.S.S. was vetoed by the U.S. a decade ago—sent the first crew to its own space station, named Tiangong, or Heavenly Palace, which is still under construction. (The I.S.S., meanwhile, is nearing the end of its useful life.) In May, China successfully landed and deployed a rover on Mars. 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.
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. Some of the early rhetoric applied to space—colonization, the final frontier, resource mining, conquest—has a more unsettling ring to it now. 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. One fear is that those who have the resources to help effect action on climate change will instead busy themselves with building their own escape pods. Taking that route would be a betrayal of what it means to be part of the human community. At the same time, the longing to explore and learn is quintessentially human. We can surely embrace space without abandoning one another.
It does seem incomprehensible that, while we’ve crammed orbital space with satellites, and had uncrewed triumphs such as the Hubble Space Telescope, we are only now matching human exploration milestones laid down two generations ago. Alan Shepard, for whom Blue Origin’s vessel is named, flew into space in 1961, right behind the Russian Yuri Gagarin. On Tuesday, when Bezos sets off on what is still a risky endeavor, Sotheby’s will conclude an auction on the theme of “Space Exploration.” Among the items is an unused spacesuit from “the ill-fated N-1/L-3 Soviet lunar program,” which was officially abandoned in 1976. Only twelve humans have ever walked on the moon; all were white men, and none of them were born later than 1935. No one has been to Mars. The upcoming American and Chinese lunar expeditions will have crews that look very different from their predecessors and, with any luck, will do much more.
But what have we been waiting for—an invitation, perhaps? One of the more intriguing aspects of this summer of space was the release of a preliminary report by the office of the director of National Intelligence on unidentified flying objects, or, as the government now calls them, unidentified aerial phenomena. It turns out that, between 2004 and 2021, government sources reported a hundred and forty-four such sightings, only one of which it could definitively dismiss. But a deeper question than whether we have been visited by U.F.O.s may be why we ourselves haven’t been U.F.O.s—looking down on some of the thousands of planets that astronomers have identified in other solar systems in the past three decades, and bringing them news from Earth. ♦
