When they buy a yacht it feeds that entire supply chain. not to mention all the other things along the way like docking fees, maintenance, insurance, etc...
Holding significant amounts of Amazon stock for example only benefits the billionaire, whereas if they sold the stock it could democratize ownership and allow many more to benefit from Amazon's growth.
By contrast, if you just hoard it, Warren Buffett style, none of that wealth is doing anybody any good.
Charity, building parks, funding research, giving out scholarships, are all ways of stocking rich peoples egos that are also beneficial to society.
Even if you look at adrenaline pumping adventures, you can do helium balloons, sailing yachts, or submarine voyages to the deep ocean. These do not create much pollution.
Perhaps, but I'm not really seeing it. This looks to me like it's about equally valuable, but comes with the downside of further increasing the number of launches -- and launches are pretty terrible, environmentally speaking.
In any case, here's hoping that the future will prove me wrong, since it's pretty clear that we have no choice. This is the path we're going, regardless of whether it turns out to be good or the opposite of good overall.
I haven't looked into it, but I'd guess those from yachts and the like are far less substantial.
> launches are pretty terrible, environmentally speaking
Individual launches are quite bad when compared to things like a single car. But on a macro scale, my understanding is that they are a rounding error on a rounding error.
I've heard the statistic that each orbital launch is the equivalent to the emissions of the cars of a few hundred people. There are currently about 100 orbital launches per year across the world. So even if we increased the number of launches by 100-fold (which would be absolutely bonkers -- feasible, but bonkers), it would a very small fraction of all non-commercial auto emissions in the US alone, for example.
Of course, this is only looking at greenhouse gas emissions, which I think is the most pressing issue. I'm less familiar with broader potential environmental issues with launches, so perhaps I'm missing something important there.
Edit: Fix a math error and cleaned up the comment in general.
This is true, and I'm not arguing that there's no value in space exploration. I'm arguing that making going into space something that is common is a highly questionable goal, and isn't necessary in order to get the technological advancements that come with learning how to operate in space.
And, more to the point of the topic at hand, there is no value to sending business executives into space at all.
> I've heard the statistic that each orbital launch is the equivalent to the emissions of the cars of a few hundred people.
That may be -- but an orbital launch can't carry anywhere near as many people as a few hundred cars, even if there's one driver per car.
The proper way to measure this isn't to compare # of launches with # of cars, but the amount of pollution and fuel use per a standard unit mass of payload.
And cars (as well as airplanes) are actually good examples of why the increase in space launches concerns me. Both planes and cars are very harsh on the environment. But that wasn't a real issue until using them became possible to untold millions of people.
The X Prize was publicly funded big whoop.
I’m all for subsequent efforts using no public resources aside a regulatory agency curbing the excesses of privatized space efforts.
This was not, to my understanding, connected to the X Prize. Also they didn't win the X Prize according this article [0].
[0] > A team led by Burt Rutan would [claim the X Prize eight years later](https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2004/06/3908-2/), barely within the deadline. Rutan’s team built SpaceShipOne, a small rocket-powered vehicle dropped from an aircraft.
There will always be naysayers, detractors, and people who will always question the value of exporation and human inventiveness.
Like in business, if it was obvious, it would have long been done. Yes, it does tak ea bit of brashness and self serving to do new things. and their practically is seldomly obvious at the beginning.
But this is EXACTLY how humanity moves forward!!! The crazy ones, the selfish ones. The ones that sometimes do it for the glory, or just because its' hard.
It's very easy to critique, but in the words or someone else... "what have you done that is so great?"
" In 2004, it signed a deal with Virgin Galactic to develop the Virgin SpaceShip, a suborbital spacecraft, for space tourism. Virgin Group and Scaled Composites have subsequently formed a joint venture, The Spaceship Company, to manufacture the spacecraft."[0]
I’ll use it against cynicism in the future!
Branson is doing this because he thinks there is money to be made flying rich people to space. Spaceport America was funded because the funding entities thought there was money to be made by doing it. The majority of the investment for virgin galactic’s program was private, and a lot came from people who already booked flights to space.
"The billionaires see a future in which humanity, constrained for resources such as water, food, and energy, fights ever harder for a more meager share. “We really could go down one of two paths,” Garriott said. “In a few decades we could reach a point where we have to ration birth rates, energy, food, and more in a stark way. Or, we could bring back the bounty of resources in space, and now is the time to start that process."
It's good that billionaires are looking into a distant future, I can't fault them for that. It surprises me that they're not also looking at the present and wondering how they can also have a meaningful and large impact on problems we have right now that are going to impact that future they see. Those hundreds of millions of dollars and huge number of people working on going into space could be doing some serious work on the ground here.
I get it, I really get what they're going after here, but I can't help but think there are really truly better things to do with all that money and time.
Inb4 fumes from the ship killing earth.