The race for space travel and the wrangling that’s going on with the big boys makes me shake my head and say, “truly?”
You probably already know that the great almighty Amazon leader, Jeff Bezos, is to fly into space at the end of July. Now that’s Amazon, the conglomerate retail company, not an indigenous leader from the Amazon rain forest.
And in a big publicity stunt, he asked his brother to join him. And I say publicity stunt because who takes cameras and records the whole thing to put out on social media?
Check it out – I mean, this thing’s been edited to give it all the warm fuzzies. INSTAGRAM POST
There’s a great deal of activity going on surrounding this space flight. Jeff is being roasted online by people saying he should take his extremely pricey space visit and just “stay there”. Then a chap, Ric G, started up a change.org petition and called it “Do not allow Jeff Bezos to return to Earth”. Bit harsh but funny. At the time of writing this, the signatures were up to 148,000 and climbing.
You can sign if you want: Sign Here.
Ric stated:
“Billionaires should not exist…on earth, or in space, but should they decide the latter, they should stay there.“
Now there is a third seat in this rocket and, instead of asking his other sibling, it was auctioned off.
Disclaimer: he may have asked his sister, and she refused; I’m not privy to Bezos family talk.
The winner (whose identity still hasn’t been revealed) paid $US28 million for the privilege of flying up to the edge of space and being weightless for about 10 minutes.
Now let’s look at the overall private race. There are three billionaires vying to be the top dog with the old space travel. Jeff, Elon Musk and Richard Branson. Elon has already ferried astronauts to the ISS, put a Tesla in space and landed and reused its 1st stage rockets – so I reckon he has the leap. The next thing to watch out for is to see if Richard can get in before Jeff does.
I wonder if Jeff deliberately shaped his rocket into a phallic symbol to try and strut the macho stuff to his competitors?
The race doesn’t end there. You see, NASA decided to ‘go private’ so to speak, and create a contract for the space lunar lander. Both Elon and Jeff put in their intent, and Elon won. This is a $2.9 billion contract that Musk will be paid to build the spacecraft that will land astronauts on the moon.
Oh dear, Jeff was not a happy chappy. Both he and another Alabama-based defence contractor cried foul and filed protests against NASA.
The upshot was that the Senate agreed to spend $US10billion over the next five years, which means that NASA can now award the contract to two companies – and the second one? Well, it’s not a dead cert, but Jeff’s is currently in the lead.
Senator Bernie Sanders said
“It does not make a lot of sense to me that we would provide billions of dollars to a company owned by the wealthiest guy in America.“
You have to admit he’s got a point.
Oh, and when Elon won the original contract, he sent out a tweet to Jeff … 🤣🤣🤣
Well played, Elon.
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