Billionaires Are Traveling to Space. Should Christians Celebrate?

Jul 22, 2021

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This Tuesday, Amazon founder and the richest man on the planet, Jeff Bezos, entered space for the first time. This was the virgin flight for Blue Origin, the space travel company that Bezos founded, and lasted 10 minutes and 10 seconds.

Bezos's trip came just days after billionaire Richard Branson reached the edge of space on board his Virgin Galactic rocket plane. The company currently has more than 600 reservations, a trip that costs his commercial passengers, $250,000 apiece. The company hopes to launch to the public next year.

While the White House called Bezos’s flight a “moment of American exceptionalism,” others have been less than thrilled to see the wealthiest in the country head into the heavens.

“Watching the coverage of the billionaires going to space and the notion that it may pave the way for all of us to go in the future. Can I just ask why they think everyone would want to go to space for 8 minutes? And how is this a good use of millions of $? How bout curing cancer?,” wrote former World Vision head Richard Stearns in a series of tweets. “It is estimated that Bezos spent $5.5 billion to achieve his space flight. That same amount of money could have brought clean water to 110 million people who currently have no access. It could also have given a $4000 raise to every one of Amazon’s 1.3mm employees.”

After his flight, Bezos thanked “every Amazon employee, and every Amazon customer. Because you guys paid for all this.” Bezos says he funds Blue Origin by selling $1 billion of Amazon stock annually.

Mark J. Shelhamer is former chief scientist of NASA’s Human Research Program. He is professor of otolaryngology, head and neck surgery, at Johns Hopkins University, where he is also director of the Human Spaceflight Lab. He most recently also became the director and founder of the Bioastronautics@Hopkins initiative. Shelhamer has been involved in human spaceflight research since the 1980s and serves as an adviser to commercial spaceflight federation.

Shelhamer joined global media manager Morgan Lee and executive editor Ted Olsen to discuss whether Christians should celebrate billionaires in space, why not everyone was a fan of spaceflight when it first took off, and and how working in this industry has affected his relationship with God.