NASA Is Relying On Elon Musk And Jeff Bezos To Get Us Back To The Moon

NASA on Friday announced the second spacecraft it hopes will help return astronauts to the surface of the moon later this decade. Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander joins the SpaceX Starship as the two vehicles the space agency aims to use for its Artemis program to once again put boots on lunar regolith.

Over a half-century after NASA used a massive investment of US GDP to fund the Apollo program and build the Saturn V rocket, humanity’s next chapter in space is largely in the hands of two of the richest men in the world, SpaceX founder and chief twit Elon Musk and Amazon and Blue Origin head Jeff Bezos.

The shift in the provenance of Apollo’s mission architecture versus that of Artemis is, at the very least, a symbolic representation of a key shift in American society over the last few generations. Hot off the heels of successful collective action in Europe and elsewhere during World War II, the Americans again came together to catch up to — and then surpass — the Soviet Union in the space race.

Today we are living in the wake of a... less than stellar collective performance in the face of a global pandemic that killed millions; many of those surely died needlessly thanks in part to failures in communication, coordination and leadership.

So perhaps it’s not a surprise at this juncture in history that as we finally embark to return to the moon to setup a permanent base and plan to go onwards to Mars, we are calling on the wealthy rather than our public servants or collective action to get us there.

Of course, it’s not such a straight line from our recent social strife to billionaires in space. The move to privatize space has been in motion since the end of the Apollo program, when a stagflation-strapped nation grew weary of spending so much treasure on more rounds of golf on the moon.

Humanity’s Destiny or a Legacy Project for the Wealthy?

I nonetheless find it disturbing that we seem to have turned over our collective imagination to two tech dudes when it comes to designing our future as explorers. Musk claims to be a visionary set on working for the good of our species, but also shows a disdain for manifestations of things that actually represent the public good, like the SEC, labor or the FCC’s requirement that he actually wait to receive a license before launching a rocket prototype.

The Bezos vision for space starts with sending the rich and famous on joy rides to experience a few minutes of weightlessness and builds toward his magnum opus vision of moving as much heavy industry as possible off planet to better preserve the planet. It’s not a bad long-term vision, but it’s easy to see an industrialist’s plan to expand industry beyond the limitations of a single planet through a lens tinted grey by cynicism.

Perhaps the worst bit of putting NASA and humanity’s futures in the hands of two billionaires is the optics, to use a worn-out phrase.

It makes it all too easy for a certain type of person with a particular view of billionaires, the wealthy or the tech power center more broadly to dismiss the entire venture of expanding further into space. The fashionable cynic’s retort goes something like: “We’re already ruining this planet, we should clean it up instead of going to trash another world.”

There’s an obvious kernel of truth here. You might fairly point out at this juncture that our history of exploitation is also littered with the horrors of colonialism, slavery and genocide. This is, however, an indictment of those practices rather than exploration itself and exploration is dependent on none of those things.

Contrary to popular cynicism, we are capable of learning from past mistakes and moving forward responsibly. Given how our history of exploration has improved our quality of life and extended our lifespan, I’d argue that moving forward with clear eyes is the only responsible path. Our panicked race to orbit and the moon with the Soviets may have been driven by a certain kind of fear at the time, but it yielded technological developments that transformed society into the satellite-based existence we all rely on every day.

It’s entirely plausible — if not probable — that the key to a cure for cancer lies in future research around how to ensure astronauts can survive on the moon and Mars amid the constant radiation of the solar wind.

The question is - who should be the driver, the manager and the keeper of these critical missions and the breakthroughs they come by? Elon and Jeff or all of us?

Billionaires might be providing our transport off this world for now, I just hope the vision for what we do at these new destinations is more of a collective one.