The Final Frontier

I was working this morning. MSNBC was on in the background, and the top story was a nonegenarian's imminent launch into space aboard a rocket shaped like a penis. 

Hey don't yell at me. I was not part of the design team. I didn't build the penis-shaped rocket. I'm just describing it. Accurately. 

Anyway, I was about to join a meeting, and I walked into the family room to turn off the TV, just as the liftoff countdown passed T minus one minute. OK, I thought, I have a minute. I can watch Captain Kirk cross the final frontier. So I did. 

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As a technical achievement, the launch of New Shepard is pretty remarkable. I watched, amazed, as the velocity meter passed 1,000 MPH and the altitude took the rocket out of the Earth's atmosphere, and I imagined the crew watching out the tiny windows, seeing the Earth fall into the distance, ever smaller, just a green and blue orb. I turned off the TV and got on my call just as the Amazon astronauts were about to enjoy their zero g float around the spacecraft.

But you know what they say, right? Well, here's what I say: Just because a thing can be done, doesn't mean that it should be done. 

Just because you can accumulate more money than any other person ever has, doesn't mean that you should. But if you insist on grabbing a huge portion of the world's wealth all for yourself, making it possible to establish your own private little space force, OK, fine, it still doesn't mean that you should. But OK, you're bound and determined to grab everything for yourself and then use your riches to build your own proprietary NASA, making it possible to fire a 90-year-old man out of the Earth's atmosphere, fine. It still doesn't mean that you should. But OK, fine, you have all the money and you have your space fiefdom, and the 90-year-old man really wants to get on the rocket, so just go ahead. Just go ahead now. 

But if you’re asking me and I know you’re not but if you are, then DON’T, I’m telling you, just DON’T build a spaceship that looks so much like a giant penis that when it returns to Earth it appears to be literally screwing the entire world, That’s just plain common sense. 

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I’m glad William Shatner is OK, as far as we know. If you can think of another useful or productive thing that came out of this, then you’re a better thinker than I. If you can think of anything else, ANYTHING ELSE AT ALL that billionaires could do with their ill-gotten wealth, be sure to let them know. There has to be something.