The world's most expensive wank

“I can see so many sick and impoverished children from up here!”
—Jeff Bezos, probably
- As though he cares to look.
  
  They were obstructing the view.
- They should have opened the door on his space travel

Look at the earliest airplanes. Little things made out of cotton and balsa that couldn't outrace a strong horse.
Look at the earliest video games.
edit = I'm not a Bezos fanboy, but if we're going to have space travel there are going to be stunts, just like there were back in barnstormer days.
- Space travel is not the same.
  Strictly considering low earth orbit, one needs to accelerate a payload to 25,000 km/h and like 500km above the ground. This is not computation or atmospheric flight. There's no shortcut, no engineering to work out, the physics dictates this is a hard problem. Solutions:
  You go up with a chemical rocket, where almost all the launch mass is fuel. To get the ratio in your head, think the liquid in a coke can vs the can that holds it... that's the mass/fuel ratio we're dealing with, and tricks like hybrid engines or booster returns barely soften the MASSIVE cost for even the tiniest things you send up.
  You assist it from the ground. "Gun" launches, as some are developing (and that I'm quite enthusiastic about), can't launch humans. Stratolaunches (from planes) only get you partway there, more like a booster.
  You go nuclear. This is the only way to increase energy density vs. chemical rockets enough to make a difference. Needless to say, there are significant environmental/safety concerns when doing this on the ground, and I'm as pro-nuclear as anyone you'll find. Check out Atomic Rockets for more on this, with concrete theoretical designs that are still batshit crazy: https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/engineintro.php
  You develop a space elevator or some analogue. No commercial launch research is even pretending to develop this, and it would require massive materials science breakthroughs.
  ...That's it. That's how you get to space. This isn't a "Wright Brothers vs modern jets" thing, that kind of cost optimization is just not physically possible. And whenever Musk lies through his teeth about practically colonizing Mars, people need to understand that...
  
  I'm going to approach this from the perspective of someone playing Kerbal Space Program. Early on in the career mode, you need money to build new rockets, gather science, and develop new designs that take you further into space. Without early on tourists, you're sunk. They provide a lot of the hype and money so you can research/get to that next phase.
  Real life is different, I get it. I doubt these celebrities paid much if anything. It's just rich people doing rich people stuff.
  
  Oh how I wish the X-33 / VentureStar had actually worked out...
  https://wikipedia.org/wiki/VentureStar
  Either something like that, or somekind of... craft that has both a RAMJet and also some kind of rocket propulsion... that or a SCRAMJet that actually works... could maybe help get us to, or toward, at least an SSTO craft, or system.
  Hah, or we can go full conspiracy theorist and find and publicize the anti gravity field generator equipped TR 3B in Hangar 18 or whatever, haha.
  
  So, you've never heard of asteroid mining?
  And remember, there was a time when "Around The World In Eighty Days" was science fiction.
- Planes have a fucking destination and are designed to move volumes of people from A to B, and still can't compete with rail over 1000km distances (see: France).
  Video games were designed to be replayable and accessible to the masses, running on the common hardware at the time.
  
  The Wright brothers didn't have a fucking destination they were just trying to fly.
  
  You want to build a train from Japan to San Francisco? Bring back ocean liners like the Titanic?
- Planes now: a huge waste of resources because people believe they're entitled to traveling around the globe
  How about we don't repeat the same mistake with space travel?
  Edit: always funny to see that progressives aren't ready to question their first world privilege to travel around the globe to go meet people that will never be able to afford to do the same thing
  
  I mean, people should get to experience the wonders of the world around them.
  "Sorry, due to the circumstances of your birth beyond your control you only get to experience corn fields and the local grainary. If your parents had more opportunities maybe you would have been born where there's cultural artifacts to experience, diversity and education, but you don't and never will" is a pretty bleak standard.
  What if instead of focusing on the people who want to see the world we focus on the people who made it so you can't do so by train or boat?
  
  I think there's a solution in taxing the heavy users while not punishing people who only fly every 1~3 years. This specifically needs to start with the abuse of private planes with ridiculously high carbon use per capita.
  
  You do realize that tourism is a big part of a lot of 'third world' countries economy?
  Stopping or restricting air travel means that the poorest places would lose a big part of their income.

Maybe we get to see a rocket full of billionaires go pop. That'd be neat.
- 🤞

First flight of an airplane: 1903 First landing on the Moon: 1969
67 years. Not even a single average lifetime.
- I remember there being a newspaper interview with an old lady. She was a child and saw one of the wright brothers first flights. She then got to see man land on the moon, at the other end of her life.
- 66.5, even. Wright flyer flew in December, Eagle landed in July.
  
  Technically correcter, therefore bester.

Both the "space" and "travel" parts of "space travel" are disputable there. It's not even "space tourism". I'll maybe give you "high altitude tourism". Space tourism, to me, implies spending an extended period in space, not a minute or two. That's barely enough time for a satisfying wank.

Awesome song about this that becomes increasingly more relevant every day:
King Gizzard and the Lizzard Wizard - Mars for the Rich

I mean it was never going to magically go from highly selective to anyone being able to go to space overnight. As time goes on and technology advances the "too much money" bar drops lower and lower.
Hopefully if society doesn't collapse, it might be feasible for an average person to do it as a once in a lifetime experience.

I hear there's nuttin in space anyway

Human testing, obviously.

What about Strauss-Kahn who lost the french presidency election because he wanked in front an hotel employee ?

You get to see dead rocks and when you come back, you can't walk anymore (because you spent too much time in Zero-G).
What a perfect idea of a vacation... 🙃

Such negative sentiment. Not everything is about rebelling against billionaires you know? Space travel is following the same innovation curve as any other mode of travel. Remember how expensive a car used to be, or flying? Those used to be only for the wealthy, now you can hop on a flight to the other side of the content for less than 100 Euro. It will eventually be the same for space travel. The cost of space cargo is coming down quickly, which will enable us to explore "the final frontier". I hope I get to experience it in my lifetime and it isn't really outside the realm of possibility either.

According to space, the end goal is

It's to fund development of commercial grade space travel.
It's gonna be expensive at start, but as it's economised, less dangerous, more accessible, demand picks up, more infrastructure, even more accessible and bam commercial air travel/EV/Cars only in space.
- Travel to where exactly?
  
  So bored rich people can piss away a shitload of cash to look at the unrelenting blackness of space for a few moments before coming back to earth and continuing their lives of wasteful excess in a vacuum of ignorance, duh
  While doing this they will emit the carbon dioxide equivalent of 395 transatlantic flights, or the c02 emissions equivalent of what 22-24 Americans output in an entire year from their average daily life. Meanwhile sabotaging an oil pipeline is called ecoterrorism but their behavior is called a fun experience. But that’s okay, katy perry had to see space! We don’t need those ice caps, really. Sorry your children will grow up in a post apocalyptic wasteland
  
  Currently as a novelty attraction, you go for the experience. This was the same for the other exampled, and is the same for flying cars where they're being tested.
  Even electricity was launched in much the same way.
- Bruh...
  You realize private planes are already a huge environmental hit, right?
  Do you have any idea how much worse it is so some rich asshat can go to space?
  Or that if they used it for "travel" it would still be much worse than private planes?
  Just for the ultra wealthy to save a few hours when covering over like 25% of the planet.
  You have put zero thought into this and it shows
  
  All development is spending superflous resources at low efficiency.
  I agree it's totally tone deaf in the climate crisis, I'm just saying it's business as usual. Billionaires gonna billionaire until someone stops them.
  
  So in your mind there can be no good that comes out of this?
  What about continually advancing the tech on a celebrities dollar so we can get people living on the moon and elsewhere eventually. What about the learned experiences from launches so we can eventually start sending up mining equipment for all the minerals in asteroids?
  Yes it sucks for the Earth. I wish it didn't. But if celebrities keep going up to space for a short amount of time, there going to eventually want to stay there. And when in the hotel they'll want to go to the moon, and so on and so on.
  I would love for this to be done through NASA or done do more good come come from it faster, but they literally stopped because public interest wasn't high enough
- Yup, this is the sad reality of the system we live in. If we want space travel, it has to receive funding, and we have to hope that billionaires really want that wank.
- I know the chances of me going to space are slim to none at best
  I'll still root for the advancements of space travel cause not everything is about me