Billionaire Space Race

Overview

The Billionaire Space Race is a colloquial name given to the efforts of Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson, Tesla and SpaceX's Elon Musk and Amazon's Jeff Bezos to fly on commercial rockets of their companies' own making to outer space. Their efforts have divided critics, with some celebrating their achievements and others decrying them as frivolously expensive and wasteful when Earth faces crises of climate change and financial inequality. In July of 2021, Bezos and Branson both achieved brief space flight, breaching the Kármán line in their rockets but not going into orbit, before returning to Earth.

Background

In 2000, Jeff Bezos founded Blue Origin, a company that researched and worked on getting into outer space. In 2008, announced plans to launch unmanned flights into space by 2011.^[1] Elon Musk founded SpaceX in early 2002 with a similar goal as Bezos had with Blue Origin: to decrease the cost of and increase the accessibility of space travel.^[2] In July of 2005, Branson founded the space travel company Virgin Galactic.^[3]

Developments

Each company's efforts to reach space encountered delays as they faced various setbacks. In 2014, Virgin Galactic launched the VSS Enterprise, which crashed, killing one of the two pilots.^[4] Several of SpaceX's test rockets exploded in the mid-2010s.^[5]

It was not until July of 2021 that Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin were able to achieve commercial space flight. On July 11th, Richard Branson flew into space^[6] and briefly made it above the Kármán line. On July 20th, Jeff Bezos did the same.

Online Reactions

The efforts of Bezos, Branson, Musk and others to achieve space flight have faced criticism from the media and social media users for several years. In 2018, The New York Times^[7] published a scathing review of the efforts of space travel company Axiom Space to send the ultra-rich into space at $50 million a ticket. After the flights of Branson and Bezos, several media outlets posted critical pieces of their efforts, with many implying the space efforts were frivolous uses of wealth that could be better served towards the myriad challenges Earth faces, such as the COVID-19 Pandemic, climate change, and financial inequality.^[8]

Social media users were particularly unenthused about the efforts. On the day of Bezos' launch, Twitter user @GeorgeMeade13^[9] tweeted, "I miss the old days were billionaires’ vanity projects was to build 1000 public libraries or giant music venues," gaining over 37,000 retweets and 267,000 likes (shown below, left). On July 2nd, 2021, Twitter user @joshuapotash^[10] tweeted, "I actually don’t think we’re angry enough about rich people going to space while the world burns," gaining over 52,000 retweets and 299,000 likes (shown below, right).

Jeff Bezos' Penis Rocket

Jeff Bezos' Penis Rocket refers to the jokes about the phallic shape of Bezos' rocket. Shortly after the launch, memes began to trend across numerous sites and platforms, many of which dealt with the awkward shape of the rocket itself or the controversy behind Bezos’ career and treatment of workers at Amazon. The meme became especially prevalent on Twitter where it also trended that day.

Search Interest

External References