by Julianne Tveten
The Washington Post (5/16/19) touts “the birthplace of America’s Space Age…bouncing back, fueled by private industry.”
“NASA lost its ability to launch humans from US soil when the space shuttle retired,” read a starry-eyed subhead under “Companies in the Cosmos,” a special section of the Washington Post (9/11/18) dedicated to the business of outer space. “Now, companies and billionaire entrepreneurs are defining a new space age.”
“The birthplace of America’s Space Age fell into decay once the shuttle retired,” another Post article (5/16/19) declared. “Now it’s bouncing back, fueled by private industry.”
Therein lies the premise of the Post’s general coverage of space exploration: Businesses can, must and will shepherd the future of the US’s space-exploration program. By parroting the propaganda of an emergent class of “space capitalists,” the Post extols the virtues of the private sector, its repackaged press releases masquerading as inspirational musings on American scientific progress.
Peppered throughout “Companies in the Cosmos” was a series of paeans to spaceflight firms: Boeing, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin. The last of those four, aptly, is owned by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and owner, since 2013, of the Washington Post. (The Post consistently discloses Bezos’ ownership in articles related to him, though not when the paper discusses the space business more generally.)
The Post couched these profiles in lofty Kennedy-era bromides about human advancement. Shortly after Bezos peddled a Blue Origin Moon lander earlier this month, his newspaper (5/9/19) exulted in his presentation:
He made an emotional case for humanity to expand out into the cosmos, a passion he has held since he was a child and has called the most important work he is doing today.
A profile on Chris Ferguson (7/24/18), a test pilot for Boeing commercial spacecraft, asserted that Boeing seeks to make space “more accessible to civilians,” while a similar proclamation (8/14/18) was made for SpaceX, which allegedly seeks to “make space accessible to large numbers of people.”
The “accessibility” narrative translates to the lucrative prospect of space tourism—which the Post depicts as an unstoppable innovation. In 2017, the Post (12/15/17) published Blue Origin’s “released footage” from inside a Texas crew capsule it planned to use to launch tourists into space. Last summer, the Post (8/14/18) invited readers to take an “inside view” of a SpaceX rocket factory intended to send private citizens into space; whimsically, the paper likened it to Willy Wonka’s factory, touting its “sleek” spacesuits and the enthusiasm of NASA astronauts “decked out in matching SpaceX T-shirts.”
That spaceflight tickets are projected to cost $200,000 to $300,000 might discredit any notion of “accessibility”; the Post, however, countered this with a bizarre op-ed (9/18/18) claiming space will be accessible to all of us, eventually, because a wealthy art collector might board one of SpaceX’s rockets in 2023.
If you want your sales pitch for a Moon rocket to be written up as a news article in the Washington Post (5/9/19), it helps to own the Washington Post.
Just as it insists companies are breaching new frontiers, the Post also uncritically republishes Bezos’ glib professions that a space industry would “benefit Earth.” Bezos aspires to what’s essentially cosmic imperialism—that is, colonization and resource extraction of interplanetary bodies. “The Earth’s resources are limited, while the population and its appetite for energy, continue to grow,” the Post (5/9/19) stated this month.
The newspaper made no mention of what ecological effects Bezos’ and other companies have already had on Earth and may have on space; instead, it offered a pretext for Blue Origin and other firms to “exploit the limitless resources” in space, as humans, according to Bezos, inevitably move away from Earth. Bezos’ first target: The Moon, whose ice could be turned into rocket fuel.
Bezos’ interest in profiting from the “oil of the solar system,” as capitalists have long described the Moon’s water, comes at a fortuitous time for commercial space travel. The US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, or SPACE Act, of 2015 gives companies rights to the non-living resources they extract from space, including water and minerals. Upon the legislation’s passage, the Post (5/22/15) again framed a shift toward a billionaire-controlled solar system as a predestined good, declaring, “The future is here.”
The Post’s coverage also celebrates a third goal of commercial space travel: military contracts. Last fall, the paper (9/27/18) repurposed a press release from United Launch Alliance (ULA), a government spacecraft contractor formed by Lockheed Martin and Boeing, announcing ULA’s use of a Blue Origin rocket engine. Calling Lockheed and Boeing “stalwarts in the national security launch business,” the Post welcomed the “new line of business” for Blue Origin, which already had plans for military launches–or, in Post-speak, “national security launches.” Shortly after, the US Air Force announced a $500 million deal with Blue Origin.
While the Post offers occasional criticism, most of its skepticism relates to mechanical safety. Several articles alert readers to failures and potential safety risks posed by companies such as Virgin Galactic, whose spacecraft crashed during a test flight in the Mojave Desert in 2014, and SpaceX, two of whose rockets have exploded. Even then, the Post frames these fatal events as the cost of doing business, “setbacks” from which to recover. Its omission of other criticism—the environmental costs of space exploration, the private ownership of space resources, the expansion of US military aggression (FAIR.org, 5/17/19) and the exploitative notion of celestial manifest destiny, to name just a few—is a clear indication of where the paper’s allegiances lie.
The goal of lustrous press for the titans of the “space industry” is to convince the public that spaceflight—as a budding “industry” spearheaded by the ruling class that transports the wealthy, extracts resources from astronomical bodies and bolsters the US military—is unequivocally good. For corporate media, domestically engineered space travel is largely immune to bad press, thanks to its profit potential and position as an arm of American hegemony. And, if the Washington Post’s Boeing advertorials and forthcoming space-race podcast are any gauge, this coverage won’t end any time soon.
Paving a (sociopath)way to the stars
Oh sad moon, a Moon for the MISBEGOTTEN power hungry CEOs and nations. I wonder how long it would take to have a fight over whose armies control the moon? Besides, if the moon is seen as easy money for its natural resources, how long would it take to look like a chopped up and ruined Earth? Oh yes, and the military—-a new way to destroy nations from afar. Leave the MOON alone, we need to see untouched Nature somewhere in our lives.
While I don’t pretend to be a ‘space expert’ (however one might define that), I have had a lifelong interest in astronomy, have read moderately about it, and still am awed by some of the facts & theories about it. That being said, it’s a whole different story when one talks about space TRAVEL and extra-terrestrial MINING. Space travel would be a long-long-long-LONG (did I mention ‘long’?) affair, and terminally BORING! They talk about a round-trip to Mars (our nearest planetary neighbor) taking something like 3 years, with most of that being couped up in a space about equal to a double-wide trailer home. The scenery would change VERY slowly since everything is so far away, there’d no night or day (other than artificially imitated), and you’d better like your crew-mates a whole lot because you’re not going to be more than ~50 ft away from them for a year at a time each-way. And mining, resource extraction on other planets would be prohibitively expensive, even IF you could find valuable minerals somewhere. Asteroids are closer, but they’re mostly just iron, which is relatively plentiful on earth.
The most ridiculous fantasies are those regarding moving excess earth populations to other worlds! How many people would ever want to leave Earth voluntarily? And once again the costs would be ‘astronomical’ (pun intended), way more than welfare payments were here, and this country was too greedy to do that after the 80’s & 90’s, so how in the hell would we ever have the political will to pay the trillions of dollars to send people to other planets?
This private space venture stuff reminds me of Tesla electric cars — not only because Elon Musk started it, but because they both seem like expensive, impractical fads aimed at overly affluent consumers.
I guess a career at NASA does make me at least an insider. I watched colleagues with decades of experience retire without passing on their knowledge. They did so because so many, in and out of the agency, have bought into the dystopian future where ‘charismatic’ billionaires determine space policy and goals. It would seem that sci-fi got it right in “Blade Runner” and “Aliens”.
As much as the corporate media touts the ‘commercial’ success of ‘newspace’, Musk openly says he built his company on tax dollars. Dollars taken from me and my colleagues as we struggled to design lunar outposts for the *public* good, not the billionaires.
The fruits of privatization are often rotten. SpaceX didn’t use aerospace grade tank supports involved in a 2015 launch failure. That failure resulted in the loss of crtitical ISS provisions, including irreplaceeable spacesuit parts. A few weeks ago, their decision to put large amounts of dangerous propellants in their Dragon capsule may be the reason it was blown apart. The end result of such failures is that the tax payer has to pay for the newspace company to relearn why NASA had the standards and inspections in the first place.
I had friends and colleagues who gave their lives for hard lessons to be learned. I pray more lives won’t be lost because newspace is ignoring those lessons.
It would seem that in the corporate media’s lucrative parroting of press releases they are unable to ask hard questions, or even to remember “you get what you pay for”.
At least SpaceX and Blue Origin are (mostly) risking their own capital. Compared to “legacy” contractors like Boeing and Lockheed who receive huge “cost plus” contracts that (somehow lol) always seemed to escalate costs tremendously.
But I understand the viewpoint from within NASA. Safety and reliability is top priority. Because space is risky. The question is the cost/benefit decision.
Humans– what a sad species we are—-Even in space—” it’s all about the benjamins.”
NASA hasn’t “lost the ability” to launch humans into space , but temporarily lost the capability, due to the obama administration directives ending the shuttle program and requiring NASA to develop a cheaper launch vehicle, which they did, easily.
Clowns like Elon Musk and the steady stream of PR drivel that launches out of the mouths of “space capitalists” should offend every American.Bezos has not launched ANYTHING except more tax havens.Space X is barely functional using 1950’s missile technology that was, essentially handed to them by the Obama administration.. To even dare compare these space hustlers , and their towering NON ACCOMPLISHMENTS to NASA is grotesque. From Apollo to Voyager, to the many Mars landings to the Space telescopes..parasites like Bezos and Musk will NEVER measure up, and when the “lofty platitudes” are taken up and real achievement is on the line again, it will be NASA which gets it done ..In the meantime whenever the “cutting edge” requires that some half-assed PT Barnum launch one of his low emission electric cars into space, and burn up 15 tons of rocket fuel to do so, we know who we can rely on.