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Jeon Chi-hyung

By Jeon Chi-hyung, professor of science and technology policy at KAIST

When Amazon founder Jeff Bezos funded a brief trip into space on July 20, the most frequent criticism was that he ought to use his money to save the planet rather than to escape the planet.

On top of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, many places on earth lack basic medical services and hygiene, even as poverty and inequality worsen. But it looked like Bezos, the world’s wealthiest person, was pretending to ignore all that earthly suffering and pouring his money into an outer space adventure that would last a matter of minutes.

Others accused Bezos of funding his outer space joyride with money ultimately earned by exploiting his workers and dodging his fair share of taxes. There were also concerns that more frequent trips to space by the wealthy would increase carbon emissions, further compromising a global ecosystem that’s already being battered by climate change.

Critics of Bezos can take some comfort from the fact that, while he may have briefly left the planet, he doesn’t qualify as an astronaut as defined by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The FAA’s newly updated definition makes it harder for space tourists like Bezos to gain astronaut status: astronauts are those who perform duties related to operating the spacecraft, including launch and reentry.

Bezos only received 14 hours of training before boarding the spacecraft. Needless to say, he wasn’t involved in navigating the craft. Nor was he in a position to take responsibility for the safety of people aboard the spacecraft in the event of an accident. His role was to enjoy the flight into space and the state of weightlessness from the safety of the cabin.

That was the outcome of the decision by Bezos and his spaceflight company Blue Origin to design completely automated spacecraft that don’t need a pilot. Bezos and the other three passengers went into space without any pilots to navigate or respond to an emergency.

Bezos has designed space travel without the kind of “astronaut heroes” like Neil Armstrong, who landed on the Moon in Apollo 11.

That contrasts with the piloted spaceship that took billionaire Richard Branson into space just one week earlier. Branson’s spaceflight company Virgin Galactic said its passengers should be recognized as astronauts because they were in charge of assessing the experience of spaceflight, the New York Times reported.

Philosophy about space travel depends on the billionaire, I guess.

I doubt Bezos will be too perturbed by questions about his qualifications as an astronaut. In lieu of an answer, he’ll probably just point to Wally Funk, the 82-year-old woman who flew with him into space.

Funk finished the training for NASA’s space program in the 1960s but was repeatedly passed over when astronauts were being selected. She had chalked up a lot of flight time as a pilot and was also qualified to train younger astronauts, but she ran into the gender barrier when it came to space flight.

By choosing a woman who could have become an astronaut in her youth to join him on his flight, Bezos appeared to be distancing himself once again from the age of heroic male astronauts. All those decisions were made by Bezos himself since he’s funding the entire project.

Is Bezos privatizing space, or is he turning it into a place of new opportunity? On the one hand, he has total freedom to decide how to travel to space and who gets to go, without concern for the national agenda or humanity’s wishes. That’s possible because he’s the world’s richest man.

On the other hand, Bezos enables people to dream of going into space even if they aren’t elite male pilots, as Neil Armstrong was. One of the passengers on the flight with Bezos was an 18-year-old Dutch student who became the youngest person ever to reach space. To be sure, that’s only feasible for the world’s richest person and others who are slightly less rich.

A story in the New York Times about Bezos’s flight to space was titled, “The Amazonification of space begins in earnest.”

The Amazon empire that Bezos has built brings everyone the convenience of one-click purchases of a huge range of items. But it has also created an era in which huge internet corporations constrain and monitor workers and consumers.

We’ll soon find out whether space will be opened up to more people or whether it will become a zero-gravity playground for the wealthy. We can’t let Bezos and his rich friends write the new rules of space.

Please direct comments or questions to [english@hani.co.kr]