There’s a petty space race going on that I would like to point to and discuss. Let’s start with the two billionaires at the helm of it, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. The difference between Bezos and Musk is that Bezos wants to destroy his competitors, very much like the Walmart mentality. Musk encourages other companies to compete with Tesla because of its aim of reaching his vision. In a blog released a few years ago, Musk was frustrated with the automotive industry’s lack of interest in electric vehicles, regarding its decision to share its patents “in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology”: it is for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.” Also noted: “Tesla’s ultimate mission is to accelerate a transition to sustainable transport, so automakers’ decisions to launch their own electric are in line with what the company is trying to accomplish (https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/09/27/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-on-electric-competition-im-gla.aspx). Musk isn’t afraid of competition, he openly shares his vision with the world for the greater good of civilization.
I’d argue Bezos’ vision of Amazon.com had more adverse effects than Walmart, in which it has vanquished local and big businesses thus harming society. All the while Musk and his company Tesla take into account the preservation of the environment, meaning not accelerating the man-made effects of global warming. His other company SpaceX takes into consideration the preservation of humanity by creating the first footprints into making us an interplanetary species. An idea urged by the late physicist Stephen Hawking who warned that we must become an interplanetary species within a hundred years or we’ll all die. When Musk came onto the scene with Tesla, he was literally shaking things up, meaning people’s pockets were in jeopardy who depended on big oil companies to keep their economic machine going. It is no wonder why they wanted Musk to fail from the start, releasing bad press, and hedge fund managers shorting him to see him and his company fail.
This is not to say Jeff Bezos is a malevolent person like the Lex Luthor character (although there is a strikingly similar appearance), but he and his companies have done many questionable things. Bezos’ space company BlueOrigin filed a lawsuit with the U.S. Court of Federal Claims protesting NASA awarding SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to help return astronauts to the moon (https://qz.com/2049832/why-jeff-bezos-and-blue-origin-are-suing-nasa/). As stated in a Verge.com article by Joey Roulette, “Blue Origin’s challenge could trigger another pause to SpaceX’s contract and a new lengthy delay to NASA’s race to land astronauts on the Moon by 2024.”
Litigations are nothing new in the aerospace realm, SpaceX also had a history of doing it, but how can mankind ever achieve new heights, or benefit from the fruits of science if people are fighting over who gets awarded what and what is fair and so forth. With these petty lawsuits and billionaires competing to see who has a bigger and better rocket, or who has the unfair advantage, who cares… because in the end, how will we ever compete in the space race with other countries? I think back to when John F. Kennedy said: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.” When a science project is Government funded, indeed many great technologies come out of it, and that of course benefits the creators who are rewarded and trickles down to our daily lives who benefit from these inventions. I think it’s time to focus one’s energy and skills on the goal, instead of complaining or competing against each other in this political grab for power. Focus on the goal of the benefits of innovation, over the politics of money, monopoly, and power.
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