CNN has done a shameful disservice of covering Bezos’ little space trip like he’s a hero. How about the million journalistic questions they could have tackled about him?
Posted Jul 21, 2021, 3:56 PM UTC
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Trips to space by billionaires should be heavily taxed . Like, a billion dollars
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Yeah, I guess Bezos putting money into advancing science makes him a loser. Obviously, he should have bought casinos and put his name on gaudy towers. That would have been a less shameful endeavor. /s
BTW, I saw several CNN anchors bring up the point that billionaires going on joyrides was less impressive than using that same money for directly humanitarian issues. I didn't catch the FOX news take, but I find it hard to believe that they were any more critical. After all, that network openly advocates that people with money should do whatever they want, and no one should ever expect them to do otherwise.
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Read this article I link below. I don’t see a single thing that advances science. Making reusable ships to create a path to space. Why? This is space tourism and its an environmental disaster. This is also ego stroking. See if there’s really anything that advances science: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/20/jeff-bezos-says-this-is-a-tiny-little-step-toward-blue-origins-plan-to-build-a-road-to-space.html
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It’s not an environmental disaster, lol. As much as I loathe Bezos, his rocket’s exhaust is only water. Once the rocket is built and fueled, the launches themselves are near carbon neutral.
He is using Liquid Oxygen and Liquid Hydrogen. LOX + LH = H2O + energy (heat).
Yes, it does cost electricity to create these fuels, and then there’s manufacturing of the rocket itself…but that’s about as carbon neutral we can get.
SpaceX and Virgin, in the other hand….use propellants that dump tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Methane (CH4) + Liquid Oxygen (LOX) = H2O + CO2 + Energy (heat).
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So burning oxygen and generating heat in an overheating planet for space tourism and showing off is ok? Got it.
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As I showed you in the chemical reaction, yes, it’s completely clean burning with the only byproducts being heat and water vapor. I think the amount of heat produced by even a thousand rockets is totally negligible.
The New Shepard generates 490kW of energy for its launch. Meanwhile, we get 173,000 tera-watts of energy from the sun. A tera watt is a trillion watts. A kW is a thousand watts. How tiny that is in comparison to the sun’s energy hitting the earth is impossible to comprehend.
In general, generating just heat isn’t affecting our climate. It’s the byproducts of carbon-based combustion that releases pollutants into the air, which in turn make our atmosphere more absorbent to heat from the sun. Given that this is clean burning, there are no carbon byproducts.
Reading into it, the only environmental concerns with these rockets seem to be with manufacturing and there are some concerns about the release of water vapor in the high atmosphere, with potential chemical reactions going on up there.
FYI, it’s not the oxygen that burns, rather the hydrogen.
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Recall that Blue origin, Virgin galactic, and SpaceX all started about the same time. The last in that list is currently doing launches at a pace and low cost envied by every national space program, including the folks at NASA. If you don't understand why satellites are important/useful or what useful science is being done on the international space station, then you have a point of view that does not give proper recognition to the everyday conveniences you enjoy that are a direct result of space programs.
Personally, I believe that both Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos are about done with their respective pet projects. They got their 10 minutes of weightlessness (which they could have also bought on a vomit comet airplane for a much much lower price). They lost the three way space race to Musk, who is now putting satellites into orbit that will make the internet accessible from every point on the surface of the earth.
The combined environmental impact of these three companies is microscopic and a couple of orders of magnitude below what would legitimately be called a "disaster".
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Focus, man, focus. The space trip coverage was about...the space trip!
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Which was? bullshit ego stroking. The trillionaire club pastime. At least SoaceX has some applications. This was like idiots who roll through town on loud motorcycles or their Ferrari. And everyone looks. And nobody questions why things stay the way they are
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CNN sucks.
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Just go away, please. No one invited you.
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- his insane wealth
- no taxes
- anti union efforts that have been uncovered since the union vote
- attempt to discredit the person trying to expose work conditions and to unionize
- pandemic dangers they didn’t cate about
- security issues with Amazon devices taking over our lives (video doorbells, speakers with microphones everywhere etc..)
- anti competitive practices
- intellectual property theft making their own Amazon products which are copies of products from their third party sellers as soon as they start to do well
Any others?
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Agree these are important issues but not sure any of these negate the fact that the space trip WAS newsworthy.
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what did fox news do?
The right thing, as usual!
Why does everything have to be a competition ? CNN/ FOX news ONE IN THE SAME wake up dummy.