Given some recent posts on this blog, this opinion piece is timely:
https://www.space.com/elysium-effect-billionaire-space-revolution
It’s fairly long (as such things go), but the summary is this: billionaires are working to open the space frontier… and Certain Groups are demonizing them for it. They believe that the Evil 1% will develop spaceships and take off and live in luxury in space while plunging the rest of us schmoes back on Earth into permanent dystopian grinding poverty. Th best evidence that these sort of people can come up with is that space flight will be expensive, that it’ll cost a couple hundred grand just to pop up above the atmosphere, millions to go to orbit, hundreds of millions to circle the moon. And this, for the first generation of truly commercial space tourists, will be true. But this is *always* the way of things. The first home computers? Blisteringly expensive. Now you have a 1970’s supercomputer in your pocket. Jet travel? it was originally so expensive that it gave us the term “jet set,” because it was so expensive that it was *necessarily* fancy. Space travel will start of expensive and, if allowed to progress through the normal course of evolution that the free market provides, will eventually become cheap enough that at least a sizable fraction of the public could at least reasonably consider a trip to Space Station V.
Given the current dismal state of public discourse, I can easily imagine a future where SpaceX gets Starship up and running… and the US government, perhaps under pressure from special interest groups, perhaps due to it’s own grasping nature, will throw up regulations and laws that demand that commercial spaceflight be cheap enough for everyone right then and there (likely impossible thus killing off commercial passenger spaceflight), or that passengers – especially colonists to Mars – demographically match the population (or perhaps some particular politically-chosen ratio), or that spaceflight be proven so safe that it’s impossible to actually be allowed. If this happens, it doesn’t mean that space won’t get colonized… I’m sure the Chinese and Indians will be happy to do it without us. From the standpoint of those who are protesting in the US, that’ll be just as well given how much they hate western civilization.
And given the trajectory that 2020 has been on, I *really* hope that SpaceX has a fantastic security system in place. It would suuuuuuuuuck if the CCP managed to convince their running dog lackeys in Antifa to swarm the place and burn down the Starship facilities.
What I find especially amusing is the title “The Elysium Effect,” taken from the now largely forgotten sci-fi flick “Elysium.” In that, the richest of the rich toddle off to a vast and physics-defying space station while Earth turns to garbage. The general understanding is that this is some sort of critique of capitalism and wealth inequality… but if you pay attention to the movie, it’s anything but. The rich left and live in luxury, yes. But Earth didn’t turn to crap because the rich made it so… but because the *poor* made it so. Los Angeles is depicted as essentially Mexico City North… vast slums, a population probably measured around a hundred million, the English language being a rarity on the ground. Enlightenment values have evaporated. Western civilization, engineering rigor, all the things that Certain People decry but that make a society rich and successful were wiped away in a flood of refugees and unassimilated immigrants. “Elysium” is not a cautionary tale of wealth inequality, but a cautionary tale of a society that doesn’t control its borders. *Of* *course* those who can will flee in the face of collapse. And we are all better off if the means of escape is available.