View from the North 40: Space, the final investment opportunity

When I see people celebrating three multi-billionaires racing to get into space I have that same visceral trigger I get when I watch scary movies and nobody, but nobody, turns the light on when they walk into a dark room. I know it’s an artificial plot device directors overuse to create suspense, and yet, I yell at the screen, “What the what are you doing? The light! Turn on the !@#$ light! Even a toddler knows you have to turn on the light to find the scary monsters, you moron!”

So don’t clap when private companies are getting their foothold in space. Don’t ooooh, and certainly don’t ahhhh. Anybody who watches science fiction movies can tell you, all the bad things come from private companies owning — dare I say exploiting — space, the final portfolio expansion.

Are you prepared to get as tough as Linda Hamilton to fight off a good-sized handful of terminators that, yes, I know didn’t travel through space, but the evil company did send them through time to kill that annoying young John kid? Did you not see “Wall-E” or “District 9” or “Blade Runner?” The destruction and despair the space companies caused in these fictional futures is immeasurable.

They were looking out for the best interests of their bottom line not for the best interests of all mankind. Bruce Willis will not always be there with the Fifth Element to beat the countdown clock. And eventually, Sigourney Weaver will just decide to sleep in rather than awaken in full action-mode to save the world from an acid spitting alien one last time, while still in her underwear, by the way.

Wednesday, Jeff Bezos rocketed 62 miles up into the sky so he and a few buddies could briefly hang out in space. This is the man who made his billions of dollars off of exploiting his workers at Amazon, and now he has used some of the billions to build and fly a rocket shaped like a male “kids, avert your eyes you’re too young to see this,” and only penetrated inner space for three seconds before dropping down again.

I’d be surprised to find that he has the interests of the common folk in mind with this endeavor. I’m not the only one who conjured an image of Dr. Evil and his spaceship of “Austin Powers” fame.

Bezos’ big plan is to get his rocket refurbished and back into space travel so he can make money taking other rich people into space for three seconds. Yeah, space tourism, that is really a buzzword now.

Bezos isn’t saying how much his space tickets will cost, but multi-billionaire Richard Branson is: $250,000 per ticket is what he plans to charge people for a flight in his Virgin Galactic space craft, which he debuted July 12 at 50 miles high.

Branson, of course, made a bunch of his money in the music, media and airplane businesses, and he’s not messing around. Unlike Bezos, his space craft is reusable, thus rocketing him into the lead in the space tourism industry.

Elon Musk, on the other hand, he’s the billionaire to watch out for because he is not partaking in the intergalactic kegger of space tourism.

He is pursuing some serious space ambition, in fact, he started his race to space in 2001 when he was a mere millionaire and became a billionaire while building and flying space ships.

Musk bought into the electric car manufacturing company Tesla in 2004, and helped build it into what it is today. The company sold just shy of 500,000 electric-powered autos in 2020, which seems impressive because how many of us ever sold 500,000 of anything in our whole lives. But to put the car sales into perspective, Chevrolet sold 1.7 million autos that same year, Ford 4.2 million and Toyota 9.5 million. So, well, Tesla cars didn’t make him billions … or did they. Cue the dramatic music here.

He earned carbon emission credits for making and selling a car that’s easy on the environment, and then he sold those emission credits to car manufacturers around the world. In the first quarter of 2021 alone he cleared $438 million on the emission credit sales

And he contracted with NASA to provide their space travel and gets paid tax dollars to burn about 76,000 gallons of fuel per SpaceX flight with the small ship — and up to 4 1/2 times more than that for the super heavy duty starship, Businessinsider.com said.

Like a suspenseful plot, we wonder, is he clever, or is this the birth of the evil in him?

What to make of Musk’s SpaceX launching its Starlink Communication Satellite Constellation into space. It’s that long string of evenly spaced lights that can be seen streaming through the night sky sometimes. You could say he’s given us all a unique opportunity to view a constellation with the naked eye, even in urban city-scapes where the stars are notoriously hard to see.

He has said he plans to launch more satellite constellations to fill the skies. The scary music fades to silence leaving only the sound of every astronomer ever weeping over the demise of our night skies. And so it begins.

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What’s he going to do when he gets to Mars? Cue evil laugh here, at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .