Trump official to Katy Perry and Bezos’ fiancée: “You cannot identify as an astronaut”
Ok, let me set aside for one moment the depressing question of celebs taking glam space joyrides versus soulless misogynists only denying credit for those after women got involved. That article talks about how “the spectacle trivializes the important work of commercial space”. What exactly is that work? He says he’s happy about there being space tourism – is this what that’s supposed to look like or not? Is there something more serious than rich people having a chance to literally look down on the rest of us supposed to be happening?
The spectacle is the commercial, in fact… The ONLY way forward is a non-commercial, human centered space program. Controversial, I know…
I get the impression that there’s a weird thing where not only is commercialization presented as the way forward, but as if it’s an incredible advance in itself. Like learning about the space race things like satellites and spacewalks and moon landings might have been done by the Soviets or Americans first, but they weren’t fundamentally different achievements. But now a private company repeats one of the things from the 60s and it’s treated like a technological breakthrough because this time it’s a commercial whatever and that’s totally different.
I had also seen something on generative “AI” that made a distinction between democratization and commercialization, which I thought was an insightful way to talk about things. A lot of people treat them as equivalent but they’re really not. To me handing space travel over to the millionaires to play with only confirms the rest of us will not go to space today.
Right?! and in some cases, fucking it up or doing it worse. Like how many fucking satellites do we actually need in the sky?
Yes, lots of rhetoric conflates the two, but it’s just not the same thing at all… That thinking is really a hold over from the Cold War, me thinks.
We will when they need us to scrub their toilets or mine their asteroids or provide some expertise of some kind that they can commercialize.
I swear to god, will people go back and refer to the sci-fi of old that talked about this shit a bit more thoughtfully? Torment nexus, etc, etc…
Haven’t humans always looked up at the stars and dreamt that someday, those boring dots could be replaced by the glow of an oligarch-controlled internet connection instead? 
Yeah… such a lack of actual imagination from these corporate drones…
They could at least arrange them so that they look like proper constellations.
Given that those constellations would probably be corporate logos or other metaphorical depictions of oligarchs’ penises, I don’t think that would help.
How about an Orion that looks like Jeff Bezos?
