Space used to be the final frontier.  Now it’s just another playground for the rich.  This week, rebel billionaire Richard Branson unveiled WhiteKnightTwo, the mothership that could make commercial space flight available as soon as next year.

The price for a two and a half hour flight that includes five minutes of weightlessness is projected to be $200,000.  That comes to $666.66 per second of actual time spent in space, and is equivalent to what the average American household makes in about four or five years.

I must admit that I have mixed feelings about this announcement.  On the one hand, I’m thrilled.  When I was in grade school, I can remember watching the Space Shuttle launches on televison and thinking that maybe, just maybe, I could one day ride a rocket up into space.  I could only imagine the places that our space program would soar to during my lifetime. 

Much to my horror, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986.  Since then, between funding controversies and love triangle scandals and another Shuttle disaster, government-sponsored space flight has lost its luster and its romantic appeal.  I have come to believe that NASA is good for nothing more than sending up spy satellites, as nothing truly compelling has been accomplished in nearly two decades.

But then, in 2004, the space game started to change.  That was the year that Branson’s SpaceShipOne claimed the $10 million Ansari X-Prize, awarded to the first privately funded vehicle to achieve space flight.  The goal of the X-Prize was to promote the development of commercial space flight, and it appears that their vision is being fulfilled in the WhiteKnightTwo.

To a grown-up child like myself, the news out of the Mojave Desert this week rekindles those old romantic dreams.  I can’t afford to pay $200,000 to go up next year, but perhaps by the time I’m old and gray, the price will have come down and I’ll actually be able to experience that magical feeling of weightlessness in space.  

But on the other hand, since those idealistic grade school years, I have developed an awareness for the dynamics of rich and poor in our society.  I have learned how our class system is becoming more and more stratified.  I have seen us become less of a culture that values intelligence and hard work and honesty, and more of a culture that lives by the credo, “Money talks.”

I have seen the interests of big business and the quest for never-ending profits replace the quest for a just and equitable society that meets the needs of all its people.  I have seen terms like “free market” and “privatization” and “ownership society” be used as euphemisms for turning the almighty dollar into the only thing that matters.  I have seen the percentage of Americans who are millionaires and the percentage of Americans who live in poverty grow at the same time.  And I have learned that anyone who cries foul in the face of these injustices will be branded as socialist and un-American.

For all of these reasons, and for many more,  I feel compelled to resist this new phenomenon of commercial space travel, despite the dreams of my youth.  Do we really need to take something as awesome, as precious, and as sacred as the advancement of humanity into outer space - and just turn it over to the highest bidder, to the people that can pony up the most cash? 

When space travel was a function of the government, we could as least pretend that it was a democratic activity - that it was something that somehow rose above all of our earthly differences and prejudices.  Now, with being rich being the one requirement for going to space, all of the romance is gone.  Oh well.  I still want to be on one of Branson’s first flights…

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