“I can see so many sick and impoverished children from up here!”
—Jeff Bezos, probably
this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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As though he cares to look.
They were obstructing the view.
They should have opened the door on his space travel
Look at the earliest airplanes. Little things made out of cotton and balsa that couldn't outrace a strong horse.
Look at the earliest video games.
edit = I'm not a Bezos fanboy, but if we're going to have space travel there are going to be stunts, just like there were back in barnstormer days.
Space travel is not the same.
Strictly considering low earth orbit, one needs to accelerate a payload to 25,000 km/h and like 500km above the ground. This is not computation or atmospheric flight. There's no shortcut, no engineering to work out, the physics dictates this is a hard problem. Solutions:
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You go up with a chemical rocket, where almost all the launch mass is fuel. To get the ratio in your head, think the liquid in a coke can vs the can that holds it... that's the mass/fuel ratio we're dealing with, and tricks like hybrid engines or booster returns barely soften the MASSIVE cost for even the tiniest things you send up.
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You assist it from the ground. "Gun" launches, as some are developing (and that I'm quite enthusiastic about), can't launch humans. Stratolaunches (from planes) only get you partway there, more like a booster.
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You go nuclear. This is the only way to increase energy density vs. chemical rockets enough to make a difference. Needless to say, there are significant environmental/safety concerns when doing this on the ground, and I'm as pro-nuclear as anyone you'll find. Check out Atomic Rockets for more on this, with concrete theoretical designs that are still batshit crazy: https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/engineintro.php
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You develop a space elevator or some analogue. No commercial launch research is even pretending to develop this, and it would require massive materials science breakthroughs.
...That's it. That's how you get to space. This isn't a "Wright Brothers vs modern jets" thing, that kind of cost optimization is just not physically possible. And whenever Musk lies through his teeth about practically colonizing Mars, people need to understand that...
I'm going to approach this from the perspective of someone playing Kerbal Space Program. Early on in the career mode, you need money to build new rockets, gather science, and develop new designs that take you further into space. Without early on tourists, you're sunk. They provide a lot of the hype and money so you can research/get to that next phase.
Real life is different, I get it. I doubt these celebrities paid much if anything. It's just rich people doing rich people stuff.
Yeah, low volume space tourism is fine. Bezos and such are funding quite a bit.
What I was getting at is the meme that “mass” space flight (much less interplanetary colonization) is in any way practical. It is not. It will not be, at least not until civilization is more along the lines of Orion's Arm or similar sci-fi. KSP is a fantastic illustration of that, as (even with a much smaller planet than Earth) one pays for every ounce that has to move in space.
Play Kerbal Space Program Realism Overhaul if you want a ... much closer to 'real' taste of how much more complicated and difficult an orbital flight is than a subortial flight, a lunar flight is than an orbital flight, an extraplanetary flight is than a lunar flight.
I'm not sure if it is still the unofficial motto of the mod... but it used to be 'if you cannot figure out how to install this mod, you will not be capable of playing it anyway', or something to that effect.
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Planes now: a huge waste of resources because people believe they're entitled to traveling around the globe
How about we don't repeat the same mistake with space travel?
Edit: always funny to see that progressives aren't ready to question their first world privilege to travel around the globe to go meet people that will never be able to afford to do the same thing
I mean, people should get to experience the wonders of the world around them.
"Sorry, due to the circumstances of your birth beyond your control you only get to experience corn fields and the local grainary. If your parents had more opportunities maybe you would have been born where there's cultural artifacts to experience, diversity and education, but you don't and never will" is a pretty bleak standard.
What if instead of focusing on the people who want to see the world we focus on the people who made it so you can't do so by train or boat?
Being able to go spend a week 5000km away from home at a moment's notice wasn't a thing 100 years ago, it's a privilege, not a right and it's an extremely wasteful privilege that can be afforded by a small minority of the world's population. What you're saying to ridicule what I said is exactly how the vast majority of the world will live their lives.
Exposure to other cultures is extremely important for building a just society. We have other options to make it more sustainable.
Edit: We've always been a mobile species. Sedentary lifestyles are extremely new to us, we are meant to travel and meet others. It's healthy. Otherwise populations get isolated and weird.
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I think there's a solution in taxing the heavy users while not punishing people who only fly every 1~3 years. This specifically needs to start with the abuse of private planes with ridiculously high carbon use per capita.
In the end those heavy users represent nothing compared to the planes used by regular tourists. On an individual basis then sure, they're worse, but that's like saying African countries need to stop using old cars because they don't have modern emission equipment while you're stuck in traffic in LA in your 2020 Honda Civic.
Traveling thousands of miles for a few days of vacation isn't a right, it's a privilege that people are abusing. People act like they can't live without it but it's a small minority of people who will take a plane in their lifetime.
Emissions at altitude are worse than the same emissions at ground level and planes don't have any filtering equipment.
Their fuel economy per passenger isn't that great either, two passengers in a small car burn less gas per km than if they were using the biggest plane full of passengers to travel the same distance. Four passengers in a V8 SUV are more fuel efficient than an A380 filled with passengers.
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Planes have a fucking destination and are designed to move volumes of people from A to B, and still can't compete with rail over 1000km distances (see: France).
Video games were designed to be replayable and accessible to the masses, running on the common hardware at the time.
The Wright brothers didn't have a fucking destination they were just trying to fly.
They were trying to invent a device of practical utility that could carry passengers and payloads, not to empower the eccentric elite
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First flight of an airplane: 1903 First landing on the Moon: 1969
67 years. Not even a single average lifetime.
I remember there being a newspaper interview with an old lady. She was a child and saw one of the wright brothers first flights. She then got to see man land on the moon, at the other end of her life.
66.5, even. Wright flyer flew in December, Eagle landed in July.
Technically correcter, therefore bester.
Maybe we get to see a rocket full of billionaires go pop. That'd be neat.
🤞
Both the "space" and "travel" parts of "space travel" are disputable there. It's not even "space tourism". I'll maybe give you "high altitude tourism". Space tourism, to me, implies spending an extended period in space, not a minute or two. That's barely enough time for a satisfying wank.
It's to fund development of commercial grade space travel.
It's gonna be expensive at start, but as it's economised, less dangerous, more accessible, demand picks up, more infrastructure, even more accessible and bam commercial air travel/EV/Cars only in space.
Travel to where exactly?
So bored rich people can piss away a shitload of cash to look at the unrelenting blackness of space for a few moments before coming back to earth and continuing their lives of wasteful excess in a vacuum of ignorance, duh
While doing this they will emit the carbon dioxide equivalent of 395 transatlantic flights, or the c02 emissions equivalent of what 22-24 Americans output in an entire year from their average daily life. Meanwhile sabotaging an oil pipeline is called ecoterrorism but their behavior is called a fun experience. But that’s okay, katy perry had to see space! We don’t need those ice caps, really. Sorry your children will grow up in a post apocalyptic wasteland
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Currently as a novelty attraction, you go for the experience. This was the same for the other exampled, and is the same for flying cars where they're being tested.
Even electricity was launched in much the same way.
To do what when you arrive at this novel location? Leave Edison's electrocution of an elephant out of this.
Is your imagination really this limited?
Building a proper space station as a jumping off point for further exploration of the solar system, asteroid mining, He3 mining on the moon. These are just the basic things that are envisioned/planned. All of which would require commercial space travel to be a thing. I'd much rather we extract that funding from taking a couple rich people for a joyride as opposed to getting governments to subsidize it.
If it is a benefit for everyone I would prefer the government subsidized the development of space travel by taxing those rich fucks instead of relying on their 'good will' to selfishly experience everything themselves.
I view space development as very, very, very nice to have, but not absolutely essential. I would prefer to tax the shit out of the wealthy to pay for essential things at home (such as health care), and let private equity fund the nice to haves like commercial space travel. The exception would be for science missions. I'd prefer for the government to continue funding pure research, so that knowledge doesn't get gated behind pay walls.
GPS, solar power, and a shitload of science all benefited massively from space missions that used government funding through taxes. That is the approach that I am in favor of, not space tourism for rich fucks.
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🎶They'll say, "Aww, Topsy" at your autopsy...🎶
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Bruh...
You realize private planes are already a huge environmental hit, right?
Do you have any idea how much worse it is so some rich asshat can go to space?
Or that if they used it for "travel" it would still be much worse than private planes?
Just for the ultra wealthy to save a few hours when covering over like 25% of the planet.
You have put zero thought into this and it shows
All development is spending superflous resources at low efficiency.
I agree it's totally tone deaf in the climate crisis, I'm just saying it's business as usual. Billionaires gonna billionaire until someone stops them.
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Yup, this is the sad reality of the system we live in. If we want space travel, it has to receive funding, and we have to hope that billionaires really want that wank.
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Awesome song about this that becomes increasingly more relevant every day:
I mean it was never going to magically go from highly selective to anyone being able to go to space overnight. As time goes on and technology advances the "too much money" bar drops lower and lower.
Hopefully if society doesn't collapse, it might be feasible for an average person to do it as a once in a lifetime experience.
I hear there's nuttin in space anyway
Such negative sentiment. Not everything is about rebelling against billionaires you know? Space travel is following the same innovation curve as any other mode of travel. Remember how expensive a car used to be, or flying? Those used to be only for the wealthy, now you can hop on a flight to the other side of the content for less than 100 Euro. It will eventually be the same for space travel. The cost of space cargo is coming down quickly, which will enable us to explore "the final frontier". I hope I get to experience it in my lifetime and it isn't really outside the realm of possibility either.
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