Do All the Billionaires Belong in Space? – The Wall Street Journal

If you’re a billionaire, everybody’s probably asking you when you’re going up to space, and I bet it’s starting to get irritating. You’ve made all this money: You’ve bought the mansion, the other mansion, the other other mansion, the aerie, the idyll, the plane, the seaplane, the helicopter, the yacht, the vineyard, the NFL team, the Renoir, the T-Rex fossil…and now, suddenly, you’re supposed to build a rocket, put on a goofy suit and shoot yourself into space.

Space has become all the plutocrat rage. Richard Branson launched the other day, now it’s Jeff Bezos’s turn to project himself heavenward. Elon Musk is primed to go. I’m not sure about the plans of Oprah Winfrey and Warren Buffett, but who knows? Maybe Oprah and Warren are in Omaha, doing zero-gravity training as we speak.

Not long ago, billionaires used to argue about simple matters, like Aspen driveways and whose plane could fly from Singapore to Vegas without a refuel. Now it’s all about hiring aeronautical engineers, crafting bespoke space ships, and spending too much time in the desert. The goal posts for personal extravagance have shot skyward, and I’m sure not every billionaire is on board. I bet there are some billionaires who are like, Space? Can’t I just buy a remote archipelago, fund some really bad movies and wallpaper my bedroom with 1952 Mickey Mantle cards?

There’s also this: The public seems mixed about billionaire space travel. A lot of people think it’s an enormous waste of money. They worry that this private space race is bad for the environment. Branson is facing criticism for pretending to ride a bicycle to his launchpad the other day (his prelaunch bike ride, it turns out, was prerecorded). Imagine that! You managed to get yourself to space, and everyone’s mad at you about a bike ride.

Then there’s the whole argument about whether or not the billionaires are actually reaching bona fide “space.” Bezos is set to fly higher than Branson did, crossing something called the “Kármán line,” but neither one is barreling into spacey-space-space, like Buzz Aldrin did, or Sigourney Weaver. It’s more like space-adjacent, space-ish, space on the verge, or “technically space”—not the Moon, definitely not Mars, but slightly more exotic than the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut.