Senator Bernie Sanders has been talking about Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk’s race with their exploration companies. Both the companies have been consistently competing to get NASA contracts. The Senator said that he is worried about NASA becoming ATM for these companies.
Sanders further argues that the US taxpayer dollars are used for these launches. Lucrative NASA contracts are being used by space exploration firms, which majorly include SpaceX and Blue Origin. Evidently, the senator is against swinging against the money being spent on these space launches.
Sanders wrote, “I am concerned that NASA has become little more than an ATM machine to fuel a space race not between the US and other countries, but between the two wealthiest men in America – Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who are worth more than $450bn combined,” According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, at that time Musk’s net worth clocks in at $260 billion. When Bezos’ net worth was standing at $173 billion. Furthermore, the billionaires have been competing with each other, so much that Jeff Bezos also filed a complaint against NASA. Also, Elon Musk is known for mocking Jeff Bezos’s space company.
The extra budget
Sanders specifically took issue with an additional fund that Congress is debating which would add an extra $10 billion to NASA’s moon lander budget. Sanders referred to the proposed provision as a “bailout fund” for Bezos, whose company Blue Origin lost out on a NASA moon lander contract to SpaceX in November.
“At a time when over half of the people in this country live paycheck to paycheck, when more than 70 million are uninsured or underinsured, and when some 600,000 Americans are homeless, should we really be providing a multibillion-dollar taxpayer bailout for Bezos to fuel his space hobby?” Sanders wrote. Sanders has a long history of criticizing the Amazon founder, but in his piece, he emphasized the problem goes beyond Bezos.
“The reality is that the space economy – which today mostly consists of private companies utilizing NASA facilities and technology essentially free of charge to launch satellites into orbit – is already very profitable and has the potential to become exponentially more profitable in the future,” Sanders wrote. He pointed to SpaceX’s commercial satellite venture Starlink and the burgeoning market of space tourism.
“The time is now to have a serious debate in Congress and throughout our country as to how to develop a rational space policy that does not simply socialize all of the risks and privatize all of the profits,” Sanders wrote. He further added, “Space exploration is very exciting. Its potential to improve life here on planet Earth is limitless. But it also has the potential to make the richest people in the world incredibly richer and unimaginably more powerful. When we take that next giant leap into space let us do it to benefit all of humanity, not to turn a handful of billionaires into trillionaires.”
