THE CASE FOR SPACE BILLIONAIRES: WHAT CRITICS OF THE PRIVATE SPACE RACE GET WRONG.

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine

STATISTICALLY, AMERICANS LOVE space. Anecdotally, they hate it when billionaires go there. Majorities of all parties, genders, and geographies tell pollsters they support U.S. missions to the moon and Mars, and three-quarters say that the effort to land the first men on the moon was worth it. But last year, when the big three spacefaring billionaires--Virgin's Richard Branson, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and Tesla's Elon Musk--managed successful manned missions in rapid succession, Twitter (and Congress) were bursting with rage.

Every corner of the internet was filled with the same hot takes. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) made a choleric announcement, for example, that "it's time to tax the billionaires" because "here on Earth, in the richest country on the planet, half our people live paycheck to paycheck, people are struggling to feed themselves, struggling to see a doctor--but hey, the richest guys in the world are off in outer space!" This tweet from a self-described anti-capitalist went viral: "I actually don't think we're angry enough about rich people going to space while the world burns." Another Twitter user requested in poem form that "perhaps billionaires/Could solve problems on earth/Rather/than race to space/For their egos." There were also an astonishingly large number of dick jokes.

But the case against space billionaires falls apart on closer scrutiny. At worst, the private space race is no more frivolous or wasteful than other, more mundane business, philanthropic, or government projects. At best, what began as a luxury pursuit opens a new frontier and kick-starts a new industry that will dramatically expand humanity's prospects.

EARTH FIRST

LET'S BEGIN BY addressing the most common and perhaps the most defensible objection--call it the "there are problems here on Earth" complaint. This is the idea that space travel is difficult and expensive, and that the resources billionaires are using to leave the planet should be used instead to improve life here first.

The concern makes intuitive sense, and it's not a new argument. Even the Apollo program was rather unpopular in its early days--when government space ventures were the only game in town--with only 22 percent of Americans agreeing that there was a "great and urgent" need to get to the moon in 1962. Gil Scott-Heron's 1970 poem "Whitey on the Moon" laments the misuse of resources in the face of poverty and racial injustice (and complains about the taxes that take his "whole damn check" while he's at it).

Money is fungible, so every dollar spent on space is, indeed, a dollar not spent elsewhere. But investments in the space sector total about $264 billion, according to Space Investment Quarterly, with the vast majority of that figure going toward satellites. Satellites tend not to elicit the kind of ire that still-rare private manned space travel inspires, perhaps because their utility to ordinary people for...