Happy Nice Mall

Mr. Branson and Mr. Bezos have made the billionaire space race more realistic and personal, and often speak in fanciful language. Mr. Branson was first released in July, and Mr. Bezos followed days later. “If we could do this, imagine what you could do,” said Mr. Branson, addressing “all the kids down there” from the edge of space.

After landing, Mr. Bezos simply said, “Best day ever!” said.

In front of the assembled press, he tried to convey a sense of collectivity, or at least humility. “I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you paid for it all,” he said. He was clearly emotional and his performance was serious, but also a backlash this would be easy to predict from perhaps any other perspective in the world. “Amazon employees don’t need Bezos to thank them. They need him to stop collapsing the union and pay them what they deserve,” wrote former labor secretary Robert Reich. from twitter.

In all these trips, there is an explicit or implicit message: that the billionaire field is about opening up spaceflight—or sometimes “tourism”—to larger groups of people. You can already book tickets to space, and now few people have been able to use them.

The techno-optimism of this idea – that some of today’s toys for the rich will one day be accepted by millions – is not without precedent. But it can also be discerned as a product offering, as well as a persistent attempt to assure the public that things are not just as they seem today, namely that the ultra-rich are selling flights into space to the slightly less wealthy. Objection that the United States’ private space industry is the best in the country fence Against the growing space programs in other countries, even for those who find them convincing, they double as sour reminders of the general national institutional decline.

In these early stages, the conversations of billionaires about their role in space are still constantly being adjusted, never quite aligned even if they overlap. Sometimes they run emerging companies business lines. Sometimes they enjoy joking with a few of their peers. Its messages attract history and metaphors, science and fiction, nostalgia and wild speculation. Space is a bunker, a frontier, or an unused market; The world must be saved or escaped or written broadly in the cosmos.

At a conference last year, Mr. Musk summarized One of his longtime speeches is: “If there is something terrible in the world that is man-made or naturally occurring, we would like to have something like life insurance as a whole. Then there is some kind of excitement and adventure. ”