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Jeff Bezos with rocket: moral painting in obscene splendor
Photo: BLUE ORIGIN HANDOUT / EPA
When daredevil men penetrate heavenly space in their flying boxes, and at that with a competition, then that can only be criticized to a limited extent.
Your success is to be granted to the successful.
All the more if they spend their money in public, for global fun, and thus, as if by the way, take humanity as a whole one step further.
Unfortunately, both are a lie.
They don't fly with "their" money.
And they throw back humanity.
Let's forget Richard Branson, the comparatively poor man who won the race the other day.
During his space flight he looked like an excited pensioner who, when looking out the window of a Concorde, stammered the most expected: "The view is breathtaking!"
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But when Jeff Bezos shoots himself into space this Tuesday, to the admiration of an admiring public, one should pause for a second and look at the moral painting on offer in all its obscene glory.
So while for the first time entire cities are uninhabitable for climatic reasons, a heat bell cremates large parts of North America, elsewhere cloudbursts drown entire landscapes, while people kill themselves because they cannot afford overpriced insulin and people even in affluent countries with three jobs cannot To make ends meet, while a majority is fighting for bare survival on all possible fronts, an elitist minority is leaving the planet without further ado - even if only for a short time.
As if he were standing in line in front of Mount Everest
Jeff Bezos dreams of outsourcing entire industries to gigantic structures that will one day produce their waste and added value in orbit.
His competitor Elon Musk is already laying a satellite ring for the global Internet, even in remote areas.
His long-term goal is not colonies on the moon, but a colonization of Mars.
He is supposedly already taking care of the earth down here, with electric vehicles, pneumatic tubes for transporting people and advanced photovoltaics.
Even when it was still a national effort, space travel was in the end just an overwhelming routine.
What is really exciting about the International Space Station is that it is international.
A Richard Branson in orbit is a pioneer only in that he can raise the financial means to make his dream come true. Gagarin was a pioneer, Branson is only a tourist - who treats his role model like one of the millionaires who queue in line below the summit of Mount Everest, to Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.
The current spectacle has nothing to do with past races against borders - the first flight across the Atlantic, the first flag at the South Pole, the first man on the moon.
The virtues and also the insanity that it needed in the past, from the thirst for adventure to the willingness to take risks, the visionary and the lust for fame, all of this is now wrapped in an ideal of entrepreneurship, as represented by Bezos or Musk.
The record is also commodified.
Whoever can afford it wins.
Those who can afford that could also pay their employees sensibly - and still still afford the trip to the moon.
Anyone who has heavenly ambitions privately and is able to implement them could also make a whole series of earthly problems disappear with the snap of a finger.
And don't.
With China, capitalism has already changed its host.
Under dictatorial conditions it thrives much more rapidly than in the "western democracies" to which it was linked for so long.
In the West, on the other hand, capital is already trying to reach areas where - on asteroids or distant planets - resources are supposedly as unlimited as the spaces themselves.
"Grand Theft Capitalism" played through
Basically, Jeff Bezos should be arrested by the tax authorities immediately after a hopefully successful landing at the latest.
Marxist curmudgeons could add that now, at the latest, evidence has been provided that billionaires should absolutely not exist.
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Maximum tax instead of minimum tax, such an idea, and the earth would be a better place.
Anyone who, let's say, owns ten million dollars (not to mention Jeff Bezos' 200 billion) would have played through the "Grand Theft Capitalism", so to speak, and won, they would get a medal and would be allowed to go home.
Anything that was generated beyond a certain amount would fall to the community.
But that would again be naive scribbling by envious people and other idlers.
Sober economists patiently explain that not only space travel, but recently even the dream of space travel, has already been privatized.
The nonsense with the cosmos, apart from lying human bells, is of course a business model.
It is also public money, i.e. tax funds, with which an Elon Musk builds his rockets for the clammy US space agency, with which a Jeff Bezos tackles advanced armament projects.
It is public attention that serves as the lubricant for this coup.
And should the matter really become profitable at some point, it will certainly not be for the general public.
This would be the painting viewed in a bad mood. Wealth is so absurdly unevenly distributed that a few clowns can set off into the cosmos with great fanfare. While the majority have to remain on a planet that is tumbling towards apocalyptic conditions from an economic and ecological point of view - and is asked to applaud the obscene spectacle with which its money is literally being burned.