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Earl bucko andweaon race into space5/17/2023 Elon Musk - the son of an emerald mine owner - increased his fortunes with PayPal. Banks’s Culture novels like Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games depict a post-scarcity anarchist utopia in which capitalism has been eliminated. What is fascinating is that Musk and Bezos behave more like the villains than the heroes of these works. In The Atlantic’s new cover story, Franklin Foer reports that Jeff Bezos almost named Amazon, “a favored utterance of a man Bezos idolizes: the captain of the starship USS Enterprise-D, Jean-Luc Picard.” (Bezos also named his dog after Picard’s “ perfect mate” that he’s unable to marry, a fact whose significance is best left to Bezos’s therapist.) Elon Musk has named several of his SpaceX spaceships after the spaceships in Iain M Banks’s Culture novels. Tech titans don’t usually hide their science fiction inspirations. “Corporation could soon rule the cosmos,” Ward writes, “and for all the dramatic warnings in science fiction, nobody is paying enough attention to the consequences.” It all sounds like something out of a dystopian SF movie. At the same time that climate change is destroying planet Earth, business tycoons are turning to other planets with plans for everything from interstellar mining operations to space cruises for rich vacationers. Ward’s book provides a detailed history of how control of space changed from a taxpayer-funded contest of national pride between Cold War superpowers to an emerging market fought over by CEOs, corporations and lobbyists. The race to own space between private companies like Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’s Blue Origin, as well as authoritarian governments with ambitious space programs like China, is explored in a carefully researched new book by Peter Ward called The Consequential Frontier: Challenging the Privatization of Space. And no one is doing anything to slow them down. In the last decade, a race has heated up between billionaire titans - and noted science fiction fans - like Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Elon Musk to add space itself to their Borg-like empires. Shanter's new record as the oldest person to fly to space one-ups the record set just three months ago by 82-year-old Wally Funk, who was previously denied the opportunity to fly by NASA in the 1960s before she joined Bezos on his July flight.The opening words of Star Trek have inspired generations of fans to dream big and reach for the stars, but they also encouraged a handful of super-billionaires to reach for the stars, grab the stars and use them for profit. The crew experienced about three minutes of weightlessness at the top of their flight path before their capsule deployed parachutes to slow their descent and touched back down near their Texas launch site. The trip took just 10 minutes from takeoff to landing. With him were three crewmates: Chris Boshuizen, a co-founder of satellite company Planet Labs, and software executive Glen de Vries, who are both paying customers, and Audrey Powers, Blue Origin's vice president of mission and flight operations. ET from Blue Origin’s West Texas launch site.īezos, a lifelong "Star Trek" fan, flew Shatner as a comped guest. Shatner took off aboard a New Shepard spacecraft - the one developed by Jeff Bezos' rocket company, Blue Origin, and the same vehicle that took Bezos himself to space this summer - just before 10:50 a.m. Ninety-year-old William Shatner, who gained fame portraying Captain Kirk on the original "Star Trek," just hitched a ride aboard a suborbital spacecraft that grazed the edge of outer space before parachuting to a landing, making Shatner the oldest person ever to travel to space.
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