As tears of joy flowed in a Houston control room, Texas startup Intuitive Machines successfully landed on the moon. Their unmanned lander, known as Odysseus, boarded a SpaceX rocket last week and landed near the moon's south pole on Thursday. After many failed attempts by various private parties, Intuitive Machines became the first private company to plant a free market flag on the moon.
In the weeks leading up to its launch, the company's stock price soared more than 300 percent. “I've never seen a publicly traded company try to land on the moon,” one financial analyst told CNBC. “My family was absent from school,” said a Twitter/X user. tweeted. “On this day in history, we will remember where we were and who we were with.”
The company dropped a number of expensive monoscopes as well as rare Jeff Koon marbles. This collection, known as Moon Phases, is a set of 125 of his 1-inch balls depicting his eight phases of the moon in different colors, associated with various deceased rich men. “But how can I buy the expensive marble on the moon?” I hear you cry. Now, each Koon marble corresponds to a non-fungible token (NFT), which is a crypto-art token sold as an entry on the blockchain.will never actually be reached have One.
In January, another U.S. civilian project crashed and returned to Earth. Astrobotic's Peregrine lander was supposed to dispose of at least 70 dead rich men (and one rich man's dog) on the moon.
Spending billions of dollars and dumping strange things into space has become a tradition among the lunar class. Elon Musk famously sent a Tesla Roadster as a dummy payload for the 2018 Falcon Heavy test flight. The car, driven by a mannequin wearing a spacesuit named Starman, is now a satellite of the Eternal Sun. You can track him down if you want.
Japanese isotonic beverage company Pocari Sweat has been trying to leave popcorn cans on the moon since 2014. It collided with Astrobotic's $100 million lander, which ultimately failed. Despite some explosive setbacks, the Japanese military still plans to send a hydrogen-powered Toyota “lunar cruiser” there.
The value of going to the moon for all humanity is not at all clear, except that billionaires and private corporations can profit from taxpayer-funded fanfiction and advertising. British astronaut Tim Peake has suggested that his microgravity may one day enable rare treatments for all sorts of illnesses, but treatments are expensive for those who can afford them. It becomes law. Aside from body parts, fizzy pop, and “art,” the $100 lander also has equipment designed to help you explore the unknown before others pick up their mitts. It's fully loaded.
So-called “new space” companies are on the prowl for lucrative rare earth metals, helium-3, and water. Like the spice of Arrakis, helium-3 is touted as “the most precious resource in the universe.” At least it might if someone invents a use for it. Transporting large amounts of water into space is expensive. Having a stable reservoir will allow you to stay alive while the plebs mine for spice. And both hydrogen and oxygen can make the rocket fuel needed to search for distant glowing objects.
It's all very exciting. But realizing these fantasies comes at a cost for the rest of us. Early spaceflight organizations should typically expect 30% of their launches to fail catastrophically, according to Atrium, a leading insurance company for rocket manufacturers. When two SpaceX Starships launched in Texas last year and headed south, toxic particles rained down on people's homes. Debris broke windows and set off a fire in Boca Chica Park, home to endangered birds and ocelot cats.
“We never agreed,” said one indigenous Cariso Comecrude representative at a SpaceX protest in South Texas. “Yet they [SpaceX] We are moving forward. It is a colonial genocide of indigenous peoples and indigenous peoples. Bekah Hinojosa of Another Gulf Is Possible, a Texas environmental group, argues that the Texas government is using environmental deregulation, tax breaks and subsidies to attract SpaceX. Meanwhile, local indigenous communities who depend on Boca Chica's fish for their families' meals feel it is customary. Land is being sacrificed.
For the Navajo Nation, costly failure is not a bad thing. The Navajo Nation considers the moon sacred and considers it a grave sacrilege to fly or mine there. According to Navajo Nation President Dr. Boo Nygren, “The sanctity of the moon is deeply embedded in the spirituality and heritage of many Indigenous cultures, including our own.”
But despite the turmoil they're making, SpaceX has plans to get bigger and bigger.
SpaceX will soon move its monster Starship booster from Boca Chica to the much larger Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Like the Falcon 9, SpaceX's Starship is designed to withstand frequent repeated flights. Instead of launching only a few times a year, Kennedy becomes more like an airport. The same powerful and destructive super-heavy-lift rockets that devastated Boca Chica will be launched from the Florida coast almost every day.
The U.S. military has also expressed interest in renting Starship for Space Force cargo and troops, which could deliver war to poor countries around the world within an hour.
NewSpace is expanding U.S. geopolitical influence behind the guise of free market competition. In Indonesia, SpaceX beat Beijing to become the country's first choice for satellite launch partner. The partnership was made possible through Musk's personal relationship with outgoing Indonesian President Joko Widodo. The deal marks a rare foray by a U.S. company into Indonesia, where the telecommunications sector is dominated by Chinese companies that offer low costs and easy financing. Some see the SpaceX deal as just a sweetener for Musk to build a new Tesla factory somewhere in Indonesia. The electric car maker has previously signed contracts worth billions of dollars for Indonesian nickel and other materials needed for its car batteries.
In addition to clearing Indonesia's pristine forests for luxury car parts, plans to give Mr. Musk a new spaceport on Papua's Biak island have also fueled the anger of the indigenous Waubon people. The spaceport permit has reignited ethnic tensions and military violence. Between 40 and 150 Papuans protesting against the spaceport have been killed by Indonesian forces since the plan was first announced.
Despite the havoc occurring on the planet, investing in new space is becoming increasingly popular among self-made ultra-high-net-worth techies. For them, addressing today's real social and environmental problems tends to require paying higher taxes and paying workers fairly. On the other hand, finding solutions to potential future problems is much more beneficial. For billionaires, “long-termism” neatly packages this predicament.
Incorporating future populations into decision-making models is a great sustainable endeavor. On the other hand, long-termism is too good to be true. This is an extreme utilitarian and accelerationist ideology that calls for massive increases in economic growth rates and technological progress to ensure humanity's long-term survival as a multiplanetary species.
On the other hand, taxes and government intervention are believed to impede growth and innovation. For these long-termists, a person who may not be born on Mars in the distant future is in many ways far worse than someone who actually dies from preventable disease or poverty today. Martians are very smart and have a lot going for them. Unlike stinky humans in real life, Martian Man is likely to live a long and happy life without becoming red-hot. He's white, as rich people tend to be.
If this sounds a bit fascist, it is. As Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, widely known as the founder of long-termism, once said on a Gentile community message board, “Black people are stupider than white people.” “I like that sentence and I think it's true.” Bostrom then used an offensive slur starting with “N.” “There appears to be a negative correlation between intellectual achievement and fertility in some places,” he argued. “If such selection continues over a long period of time, we may evolve into a less intelligent but more fertile species.'' apologized.
Thanks in part to masks, the cost of space travel has dropped significantly. A seat on the Falcon 9 rocket and her eight-day stay on the International Space Station (ISS) currently costs just $82 million. Musk predicted that a one-way ticket to Mars would cost between $500,000 and $1 million, and at that price, “there is a very real possibility that there will be a self-sustaining Mars colony.” “It's expensive,” he thinks. Mr. Musk has created an indentured servitude system for the poor, where workers take out loans to pay for flights and later repay by mining spices and other items.
Life on Earth will end someday (life span is between 1 billion and 5 billion years). But the universe will also end. So what? We can just keep running in the vacuum of a dying universe. Or, instead of living as a slave to the spices and birthplaces of an abominable cosmic king, we could sanctify the moon, as well as mountains, lakes, and rivers, from the Navajo books. If we treat the earth right, we may live longer and better.
I admit it honestly. I wrote his two versions of this article, depending on the fate of the Intuitive Machines lander. In 1969, President Richard Nixon did something similar in case everyone died on Apollo 11. But when it comes to New Space, there's no need for tears or alternative endings.
Civil space missions will only serve billionaires, not us.
