October 14, 2021 - 1:00pm
Jeff Bezos has spent something like $7 billion on going to space. Fortune put it at “at least” $5.5 billion in July, but Bezos has said he was spending about a billion a year since about 2015, so I think it’s probably a bit more than that.
And Bezos is not the only billionaire spending some of his billions on putting rockets into space. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, depending how you measure these things, has probably spent a billion or so too. Richard Branson’s at it as well.
You can understand that it feels indulgent, especially when you’re taking William Shatner to space for four minutes. So I understand Prince William’s response that: “We need some of the world’s greatest brains and minds fixed on trying to repair this planet, not trying to find the next place to go and live.”
But while I understand it, I think it is — on quite a profound level — wrong and silly.
First, cheap space flight is not in itself unhelpful to climate change. Yes, each rocket launch puts a fair amount of carbon into the atmosphere; but it’s negligible in real terms. It’s about 300 tonnes of carbon per launch. That’s roughly the equivalent of one passenger plane flying back and forth across the Atlantic, which happens nearly two thousand times a day, not a few times a year. It’s just not a significant contributor. (Obviously that will change if it becomes mass-market, but that’s not something we need to worry about imminently.)
And if Blue Origin and SpaceX manage to reduce the cost of space flight significantly, then it becomes much cheaper to get climate-monitoring satellites into space. I’d be somewhat surprised if the new space programmes actually hindered the fight against climate change.
But more importantly, it’s weird to present it as either-or. You could say to Jeff Bezos that all the money he’s spent on Blue Origin could have been spent on developing green energy. If he’d done that, the $7 billion he’s spent might have covered … a bit more than 20% of the cost of the Hinckley Point C nuclear power plant. Or he could have built about 14,000 acres of solar farms, probably producing about 5,000 megawatt hours of electricity a year. That’s a little more than 0.0001% of the US’s total electricity use in 2020.
Seven billion is a rounding error — less than a rounding error — in the effort to prevent climate change. Complaining that we’re wasting money on it is like worrying you’ll empty the sea with a teaspoon.
Also, it’s almost certainly better that Bezos spends his money on developing cheap reusable space flight than on almost anything else. He could buy himself a dozen massive yachts and a gigantic island in the Caribbean. You’d probably never read about that, but they’d do a lot less good for the world than the development of cheap space flight would. It’s the XKCD Charity cartoon made flesh: if you do something good, you get told off for not doing something better, but if you do something nakedly selfish no one comments.
Yes, it’s self-indulgent. But the world will probably be slightly better in the long run if we have cheap ways of getting off its surface.
And also: as with every new technology, it gets cheaper. A Cray 2 supercomputer cost $32 million in 1985 and performed a bit less than two billion operations per second. Your iPhone 12 is about 5,000 times faster and costs less than one-30,000th as much. The cost of space flight probably won’t fall that much, that quickly. But it will probably fall an awful lot, and carbon-neutral rocket fuels do exist. Maybe my children will be able to go into space, safely, at non-ruinous prices, and without damaging the climate. I think that would be amazing, and you have to start somewhere.
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SubscribeThe answer to climate change? Doing something about the fact we now have 7 BILLION humans on this planet and counting. There were 3 billion in the 70s. That is simply staggering growth and completely unsustainable. Attenborough was talking about overpopulation back then and the pressure being put on the environment trying to accommodate it, both in terms of sheer volume and in our increasing consumption of resources. If we’d listened, stopped saving everyone, made it unattractive to have more than 2 kids, instead of subsidising feckless breeding or artificially inflating the population through mass immigration (turning 3rd world immigrants into 1st world consumers), climate change would be a blip, nothing more. That’s the elephant in the room that Greta and her virtue signalling neo Marxist friends simply will not acknowledge because it means that capitalism has been TOO SUCCESSFUL.
And world leaders are too lily livered to address it.
The World Leaders, the Davos Crowd, the WEF (World Economic Forum and Claus Schwab, the Bilderberg, the Hedge Fund Owners, the Behind the scenes super wealthy who’s power stretched back to King Henry VIII, the Pharma Industrial Complex, The Military Industrial Complex, the Tech/Social Media Complex, the Banksters, the Energy people, the very President and Primiers and Prime Ministers –
They all are the Global Elite and their servants, they are producing ‘The Great Reset’, or Build Back Better’, if you prefer, same thing. Their plan to to create a new and perpetual Serfdom in the world. The very defination of a Serf is to own nothing and be bound to his place.
The Covid responce was nothing about health – it was to break the Middle Class and successful Working Class and Small Business Owners. Covid was their ‘disaster’ to cause such breaking of the global economic system that all savings will go to inflation, all pensions – the rest will be lost when the equity Bubble breaks…..
They are not too lilly livered, they are owned.
Absolutely right. And as you say, it is the only solution but no politician will talk about it
For once I agree with Chivers, but I wish he’d get off his hobby horse of nonsensical climate change. It’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is that space exploration opens up new frontiers, just as Drake and Columbus opened new frontiers in the New World. Why is this important. Well for one thing the moon and the various planets have a ton of natural resources that could be put to good use on earth (including I would assume the various rare earths required to power EVs). For another, it just might be that eventually humanity might have to colonize planets well outside out solar system simply to survive. A long long way away, of course, but still one has to start somewhere. And finally, the technological advances required for cheap space flight will trickle down into many other technologies. And those advances may indeed be astounding: I actually did work in the late80s on a Cray supercomputer and calculations that took 24 hours then take literally a minute or so on a MacBook. The advances in speed have just been astounding and well beyond predictions as supposed upper limits in speed have been broken time and time again. Indeed, it’s amazing that NASA was even able to land a man on the moon in the 1970s given the technology then available.
AND, virtually the entire sillicone tech came out of NASA R&D seeding the Universities and industry with money directed that way, seeking miniturization and computing power. The Moon landing changed the world.
AND Taking Shatner up – anyone who did not LOVE that is just an empty husk.
Agreeing with Mr Chilvers’ view isn’t my default position. However I also disagree with Prince William on this. It is the spirit of adventure and invention which has advanced us as a species. Unlike his brother and father, I am a fan of Prince William and his wife but think he and the rest of the Royal Family should give the rest of us a break from their opinions on potentially controversial topics.
I LIKE THEM ALL. (excepting the Markle disaster).
Bezos always reminds me of the geeky, gawky unpopular guy at school who makes good and then wants to take on the real cowboy swashbuckling gazillionaires, new imitation trophy wife and all. He gives me the screaming abdabs.
He reminds me of Dorian Grey and Doctor Faustus. Like Robert Johnson I suspect he met the Devil on some lonely Mississippi Delta crossroads at midnight, and sold his soul for ultimate power….
“Unfortunately, the Royal Family have that breathy-voiced wildlife-documentary-maker-turned-prophet-of-doom,”
No they do not. I admire the Royal Family greatly.
But you are right about Attenborough. His endless set and staged films of rutting things inter-spaced with creatures being torn apart by predators is not for me, all done to the theme of hard Liberalism.
Yes, there’s too much violence on TV 🙂
Spot on. The Prince seems a jolly nice bloke and undoubtedly means very well indeed, but alas, in his job, not his place to say. He can only be controversial on things that are not controversial. Try standards of architecture in modern housing, worked for his father.
Ah, so that’s what the opinion piece is all about, projection. What a surprise. Have you given your kids Tamiflu yet to protect them and society from the deadly influenza? Or better yet: Have you uploaded their souls to the cloud yet?
On-topic: Why not have a special space exploration fund to which those wonderful philanthropists can donate their billions, without them being at the centre of it all? That will never happen, because they want control, they want their ego pleased orally, and they want to make a buck out of it in the future (so they can sell useless space travel trips to Tom’s kids and billions of others). There is no such thing as philanthropy.
Icarus is flying high. Look at him go. Look at him… Whoops.
The efforts of Bezos and Musk to develop better rocket engines is a job well done after the military failed to get the staid defense contractors to do the job. Their R&D has been successful but the bumbling government/industry has failed. Perhaps PR for now, but a step toward the future.
If only Prince William were wrong. I started campaigning on these issues in the early 1980s and, after 15 years moved on with the feeling “the human race is too stupid to save itself.”
I remember writing policy-documents in the LibDems in the early 90s: the insulation of houses was an obvious priority, but it was impossible to get press interest. Had we started to act then, not only would people have warm houses, they would be able to survive these high fuel prices today. (Those of us with insulated houses know how much less we are paying.
Besides the ‘best minds’ from space travel, we also need to redirect the efforts of our best brains from fascinating subjects like the Large Hadron Collider or research into galaxy rotation. We need everyone to focus on the main task.
This is not the time to have 1000s of people studying gender studies etc. We need the main effort focused.
We certainly DON’T need people disrupting the traffic, claiming they are in favour of Insulate. Why don’t they do some insulation – that’s not rocket science.