Yes. But in a good way.
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Had the two collaborated, and gone up together in the same flight, could they have made a better rocket, for significantly less money?
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Ha, ha, ha. How long has Branson been saying that commercial space flight is just around the corner?
Can we get a think tank working on ways to make landfill, ocean, and space cleanup seem sexy to billionaires and world leaders? 
Asking for a planet…
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OR, you could invest in things that will do more for people dying right now, who won’t live to have their hearts lifted. Mosquito netting is cheap, especially if you’re a billionaire.
i have. after having read The Mouse That Roared (which was a bit better). Pretty good comedy/satire novels, even better films.
And STAY out!
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“Ordinary people” are not going to be able to go to space on these rockets. Not now, not ever. As for seeing the planet from a new perspective, try watching an episode of NOVA or something. Carl Sagan never went to space but that never dimmed his sense of wonder for the cosmos.
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Send all the parasite class to space, in staggered order according to wealth if that’s what helps make it happen. It’s the closest we’ll ever get to the Rapture.
Or buy a telescope. You’ll see much more than you would as sub-orbital Spam-in-a-can, and it’s a lot cheaper, to boot.
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(quoting The Register)
Here, I can fix that for them:
The difference may be significant, depending on whether you think there is a line between the atmosphere and space, or whether you understand the idea of “arbitrarily precise division of an imprecise continuum.”
Space begins at your feet. The atmosphere doesn’t really end, but where it stops being significant depends on your purposes and the solar weather.
There’s no line.
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No, the USAF only awards astronaut wings to Air Force personnel. Other US military services, (including USSF going forward) do the same.
NASA awards astronaut wings to non-military crew who fly aboard NASA missions, including other countries’ citizens.
Commercial crews on non-NASA flights are awarded Commercial Astronaut wings by the FAA.
To all US agencies, flight above 50 miles qualifies.
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Anyone for Crochet?
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Pro tip: anyone who parses the current state of commercial spaceflight as “billionaires having a dick-measuring contest” is so uninformed about the motives of the players that you can safely ignore any “space commentary” they emit, going forward.
And anyone who attributes the current competition to billionaires…
…Is really so far out of their depth as to be sadly comical.
There are plenty of reasons to complain about private spaceflight, but this is not one of them.
In particular, the space billionaires in the news today – Bezos and Branson – have no planetary colonial ambitions at all. Bezos has openly dismissed Musk’s colonial plans.
Bezos wants to build the infrastructure to permit heavy, energy-intensive, polluting industries to be moved into cislunar space - out of our precious biosphere – to allow Earth itself, as he repeatedly says, to be “re-zoned for residential, retail, and light industry.”.
Now, whether you think that’s a reasonable approach or not, it’ still bears no resemblance to “colonize other planets so us richies can escape there after we fuck up earth.”
And Branson? I can’t say for sure what his long-term horizon goals are, but he mostly seems to want to have fun going to space, and to generate new revenue streams to prop up the struggling Virgin Group. In fact, those may be his horizon goals. He’s already 71, so by the time we manage to fuck up the Earth so badly that liiving on Mars seems more attractive, he’ll be way too old and infirm to be an astronaut.
(As for Musk, even he is not motivated by “flee a dying planet,” and he has repeatedly explained his motives to anyone who would listen. But most people seem to prefer smug judgmentalism, informed only by base ignorance papered over with stereotypes and rumor . Makes much better fodder for the Daily Two-Minute Hate.)
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Are they really? Spacex (say what you will about Elon musk, I will) is building a real space business based on dramatically increasing access to space. Building rockets that are launching communications and weather satellites that benefit everyone, taking astronauts to the ISS and launching scientific payloads that expand our knowledge of the world. And they aren’t launching musk on a suborbital vanity flight.
Blue origin is kind of trying to do that but so far it hasn’t done any of that. This isn’t a self aggrandizing victory lap, it’s show boating before you have even started the race. And Virgin Galactic has seemed like nothing but a vanity project for years and even their actual business plan is basically taking billionaires to space to fund development so they can send millionaires to space.
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So you’re suggesting it’s coincidence rather than hubris that motivated these two particular individuals to nominate themselves as some of the first passengers on their shiny new spaceships instead of any other members of humanity? And it’s also coincidence that Branson just happened to plan the timing of his own trip to beat Bezos?
Give me a break, man.
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