In what only socialists and spoilsports will begrudge as a PR coup for latest-stage capitalism, online shopping mogul Jeff Bezos has at last savoured a delicacy on offer to only the very richest, that priceless feeling of weightlessness — if they care to pay for it. In doing so, Bezos emulated the feat first performed by old-style Soviet communism when Yuri Gagarin, an upskilled steelworker, blasted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on April 12 1961, and spent 118 minutes gazing down on the great blue ball of tears and regret we call Earth.
And who better to serenade the Amazon billionaire on his way this week than CNN’s Anderson Cooper, scion of the Vanderbilt family of the Gilded Age of New York? Cooper’s late mom was Gloria Vanderbilt, heir to a big chunk of the Vanderbilt railroad fortune, amassed during the golden age of primitive accumulation in early industrial America.
Cooper looked every bit the gilded Tintin as he offered coverage from a desert in East Texas. Not a filament of the titanium hairdo he wears to such effect was out of place. You’d think bald-as-a-washed-river-rock Bezos with all his loot would make Cooper an offer for his crowning glory. But it’s not hair that Bezos wants, it’s weightlessness, and a footnote in human history.
The live coverage also featured an expert in gastrophysics (I think), who said one reason the dinosaurs died out was because they didn’t have a space programme. Talk ill of the dead if you must, but it’s a low blow to our predecessors, who until last week held the record for the speed at which they could strip an area the size of a Game warehouse.
Just as one cannot fault the dinosaurs for not building Vostok 1, which carried Gagarin into space, one can hardly blame the fossil Karl Marx for not anticipating the chutzpah of this latest effort to save mankind, and capitalism. The CNN expert also said Earth and the solar system cannot endure forever. So what better way to save the species than to charge its richest members millions to go into space, while claiming it as a way to colonise the void beyond? For that is where our destiny lies, in a silent vacuum at -200°C, with no CNN. Or Julius Malema.
For that is where our destiny lies, in a silent vacuum at -200°C, with no CNN. Or Julius Malema.
To this end, the three richest men on Earth, yes, all men, are putting their best foot forward for humanity. Richard Branson, who once gave capitalism a long-haired rock n roll edge, before becoming frightfully rich on rail and air concessions, and Elon Musk, the once-bullied schoolboy from Pretoria, are also in the game. Branson had a flip last week, but with crew on-board, which one expects from an upper-class Englishman. Bezos went higher, in an unmanned craft, giving his trip an all-American DIY feel. Musk? He’s already had a hair transplant, and he just scoffed, hinting anyway he wants to take us straight to the moon. Return fare upfront, please.
As for Bezos’s flight, it was so 21st century and sanitised. Occurring on the 52nd anniversary of the moon landing, those old enough to remember will have felt let down by the launch spectacle. It was like the sort of thing the unpractised online buyer gets when ordering a cut-price rocket launch: you expect a big thing in a crate, but a guy arrives on a scooter with a tiny offering rattling around in a cardboard box.
Fifty-two years ago, a to-hell-with-global warming Saturn V rocket incinerated the air in a flash that emitted enough exhaust fumes to obliterate a virgin forest the size of Vosloorus. This week? A puny little cylinder looking like an abandoned diesel tank outside Beaufort West huffed and puffed, and at best sounded like a late-seventies Hoover. The little craft worked, though, even without the muscular rocketry of an earlier age. So capitalism, and humanity, may be saved after all, but it's without the bravado of earlier decades. Style and swagger have been replaced by a bland utilitarian minimalism.
And, in this gender-free age, how disappointing to realise “Roger” has been dropped from the blast-off circus. There was a time you couldn’t go into space without rogering this, or that, now replaced with the much-less-colourful, but gender-sensitive “Copy”. RIP Roger. And just to emphasise the point: the person communicating with the rich guys (and one woman) was not a cigarette-smoking man in a Blues Brothers black tie, short sleeves and a crew cut. It was, you guessed it, a woman.
As for the capsule in which Bezos experienced his 10 minutes of ecstasy, it was not the right stuff at all. It looked like it had been copied from a Little Prince cartoon, and when it finally settled back on Earth, it sat, quite abandoned, in the desert, and later young women in skimpy skirts ran around with bottles of sparkling wine. It was, like, take us to your liquor.
Bezos, talking afterwards, thanked Amazon staff and customers, which CNN captured in a headline: “You guys paid for this”, which is possibly not quite how he meant it.
You have to wonder, though, whether we in SA couldn’t have got in on the act by strapping our own Johann Rupert into a cigar-shaped capsule attached to one of the rockets we must have lying around after the battle of Cuito Cuanavale. Lift-off in Stellenbosch, and dump him near Malmesbury. Undignified, perhaps, but that’s the cost of a place in history. We were once a nuclear power, after all.
With the going rate for weightlessness being what it is, Bezos would no doubt be jealous to know he could have got the same for a fraction of the price he paid right here in SA, by merely serving in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s cabinet. Such duty, if that is what it is, imparts to the lucky incumbent an exhilarating feeling of lightnessness, and a total absence of any burden of responsibility. Best of all, one gets well-paid to enjoy the lack of gravity that comes with being anointed to high executive office in SA. Unbearable? Not a bit of it.
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