Economics/Business ... Outer Space ...
Jeff Bezos is famous as the Amazon.com venture capitalist, the guy who made billions off a good e-commerce web site. Jeff is now taking another big bet on, regarding the space race. A lot of venture capital is now going into space launch services. The government monopoly on the launching of commercial satellites has already been broken, and more and more people are putting real money on the line in order to become the WalMart of earth orbit and beyond. An offshoot of all this is space tourism, the anticipated development of a relatively safe rocket that could take ordinary people up maybe 60 or 70 miles (like the original Mercury space shots in the early 1960s), for a view from the edge of space. Actually, these ordinary people would not be entirely ordinary; they’d have to have a lot of money to afford the ticket for such a thrill ride. But the capitalists obviously see a market and smell an opportunity to get rich.
Jeff’s venture is called Blue Origin, and is aimed primarily at the sub-orbital space tourism market. He’s putting his money on the Delta Clipper rocket, which was designed and tested by the US military under the Star Wars initiative in the 1980s (the space-based missile defense system that President Reagan dreamed of). The Clipper, known as the DC-X during the tests, looks like a huge nose cone with some struts at the bottom. The Star Wars folk hoped it would turn out to be a good design for a cheap, quickly re-usable “single stage to orbit” rocket, something that could ferry a canister of supplies into orbit, then come back down, land, and be re-launched within a day or two.
Unfortunately, the basic physics and chemistry of rocketry worked against the Delta Clipper concept. Given all of the weight factors, the Clipper couldn’t take very much into orbit; it turned out to be more expensive than the regular old multi-stage, throw-away rockets. That’s what NASA and our military has returned to, after several decades of trying to get the Space Shuttle concept of re-usability to work. The Constellation project to return human beings to the Moon and eventually go to Mars is going to use regular old rockets and manned capsules just like the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo rockets of the 1960s. These will mostly be advanced versions of the Delta and Atlas designs used today, which were originally designed to lob H-bombs at Russia in the 1950s.
But hey — just because concepts like the Shuttle and the Clipper didn’t work as cost-effective ways to get stuff and people up into earth orbit, that doesn’t mean that they’re worthless. The “magic of the market” is back, taking government-reject science and finding a niche where it might still be useful. I have a lot of socialism in my blood, but sometimes I tip my hat to capitalism. The idiots who drool to get rich do, in fact, help society in some instances, despite their mindless greed. Maybe the sub-orbital joy-ride purveyors will find an engineering tweek or two that will eventually make a Shuttle or Clipper-like rocket work as a low-cost orbital ferry. So, one cheer for Jeff Bezos and capitalism.
But remember — capitalism has also left us with assorted goodies like broken-down urban centers rife with poverty, murder and drugs; industrial workplaces that sometimes maim and kill their workers; gated communities for the rich; workers with promising career tracks being relegated to the unemployment line because of foreign outsourcing; and global warming. As a social system, capitalism lavishly rewards the winners and tolerates a lot of lackeys (i.e., the American and European middle class); but it really treats the losers quite badly. And when they turn to religious fanaticism and violence, capitalism has no better answer than high-tech homeland security. Such security has made air travel the joyful experience that it now is.
As the ancient wise men (like Aristotle) had said for eons, this world needs a balance of rugged individualism and collectivism. Socialism and capitalism form an antagonistic but necessary yin and yang. Ever since the election of President Ronald Reagan back in 1980, America has been feeding its capitalism/individualism side and starving its socialism/collectivism side. And we’re starting to really feel the effects of things being out of kilter.
I believe that our successful capitalists should start speaking up for the shrinking socialist / collectivist side of our economy and society. Jeff Bezos, for instance. He made his billions on the Internet, but if government hadn’t laid the engineering groundwork for digital packet-switching networks in the 1960s, there wouldn’t have been an Internet to get rich off of. It was government that helped build the railroads, that dug the canals, that laid down the Interstate Highway system and the airports that our economy now depends on. It was our government that got us into space, that came up with the rocket designs that people like Mr. Bezos now hope to exploit for money-making upper-atmospheric joy rides. The radical capitalists want to kill the governmental goose that lays the eggs — eggs that people like them later turn into gold. That all seems a bit short-sighted.
Unfortunately, capitalists are not known for taking the long-term view. But they really should, or else the bearded outcasts may eventually take to the streets once more. Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, please tell me that there’s a better choice than the one between Lenin, Robbespierre, and Chairman Mao versus Carnegie, Vanderbilt and Krupp. Or between Hitler and Howard Dean. Where is wisdom, where is balance? Is it available on Amazon?