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You have to feel for the American pilot Wally Funk. You would sympathize with anyone with that name, but she’s had a particularly mixed week. On the one hand, at 82, she is on the verge of finally realizing her life’s ambition and traveling to space. Funk was one of the most promising candidates for the Mercury 13 program in the 1960s, but was denied a place because of her gender. Good things, bad parts. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced on Instagram on Thursday that Wally would become the oldest person in space as one of New Shepard’s four passengers, with the rocket being launched by his company Blue Origin on July 20. “I didn’t think I could ever get on,” Funk said in an interview.
The obvious downside, which she was too polite to mention, is that she has to ride with Bezos, her brother, and another, in some sort of UberPool from hell. It should have been more specific to genius. 40s do weird things to men, just like being a billionaire. The combination leads to strange results. Not content with building his own rockets, Jeff, approaching his sixties, decided to start piloting them as well. The towers and the yachts are so old fashioned. Private space travel is the thing. Elon Musk is there too, and presumably a bunch of guys in China.
To fund his exploits, Jeff sells about $ 1 billion in Amazon stock each year, in the same way others might save for a weekend of golf. When you’ve hit your capital level, Jeff said, there’s a finite number of things you can spend money on, which is true if your frame of reference is all “hobbies”. Many billionaires show that you can be much more creative with your largesse. Just last year, Bill Gates created a pandemic as a pretext to inject everyone with 5G-compatible mind control nanobots.
Not to be outdone, Englishman Sir Richard Branson responded to Bezos’ announcement by saying he would board his own Virgin Galactic spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo, nine days before Jeff et al. Branson is the original and the worst ego space flight mogul. Since the inception of Virgin Galactic in 2004, the company has built a reputation for glorious ineptitude, a sort of Virgin Trains from the sky with the advantage that no one has to use it to get around.
The low point was the death of pilot Michael Alsbury in 2014, but Galactic has always promised too much and underestimated. Whenever Branson talks about space, he looks like a classmate who has never quite managed to pull himself together and instead reverts to unrealistic dreams.
Before we know it, he will convert to reflexology. Homeopathic virgin. True to form, his July 11 flight won’t even technically go into space, just high enough in the sky. EasyJet would have been cheaper. “My mom taught me to never give up and aim for the stars,” Branson said. I think maybe that was a metaphor, Richard.
It represents a particular point in the history of evolution. The first monkeys in space did well against their will. Now the most privileged and powerful monkeys of all are fighting for luck. At work, these men fight to replace human employees with robots. Then, in their free time, they insist on leisure activities which obviously should be performed by robots.
As the roosters go it’s pretty lame. It’s not like they’re doing anything awesome when they get up there. Jeff doesn’t walk on the moon or fix the solar panels on the space station. He sits for a few hours. If sitting in a chair on top of billions of dollars’ worth of penis-shaped employee work that could explode at any moment isn’t a metaphor for capitalism, I don’t know what it is. We have to assume that Wally did not study Amazon’s history of labor disputes in detail before agreeing to step on Jeff’s La-Z-Bomb.
As of this writing, the fourth passenger of the Bezos mission has yet to be announced. We only know that they bought the ticket at auction, paying $ 28 million for the privilege. Wally must be worried. Come to think of it, there is an ideal British candidate, a man used to paying a high price for traveling with eccentric billionaires. Prince Andrew, your helmet awaits.
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