Billionaires in Spaaaaace!

I’m still on a mad rush to finish the novel, so I thought I’d pose a question for you all, and let you do the work of filling up this blog space.

A number of American billionaires (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Paul Allen, and Robert Bigelow, for starters) plus one highly-leveraged Brit (Sir Richard Branson) have started up their own space programs.

We in the States tend to approve of this (free enterprise on the final frontier, yeah!), but I wonder what we’d think of private space programs were being funded by billionaires of another nationality?

What would we think if five Chinese billionaires started shooting off their own rockets?  Or five Russian oligarchs?

As the world discovered back in the 1960s, rockets are tools the same way sharp knives are tools.  You can use a knife to pry the lid off a can of paint, to chop your way through jungle, or to stab your spouse to death.  Rockets carry payloads into space, and some of these payloads have military applications, and you can’t necessarily tell by looking.  So one thing a private space program can give you is deniability.

If a Chinese billionaire fired a rocket into space from his semi-secret Pacific volcanic island base (and Bezos had one of these, remember!), and if that rocket “accidentally” dropped a payload on an American task force patrolling the debated waters of the South China Sea (a tungsten “Rod of God,” for example, which vaporized on contact with the target thus providing even more deniability), and if the Chinese government denied any culpability and had the billionaire arrested and his physical assets acquired by the state  . . . or if a Russian package fell on, say, the capital of Estonia, and scattered radioactive waste equivalent to a dirty bomb, which required a large Russian military presence to clean up . . . Well, what would the US do?  Accept apologies?  Assume we’re in a state of war and launch World War III?

Well, you get the idea.  Does space exploration by billionaire still sound like such a great idea?

Of course if the Russians or Chinese look at our billionaires, they may not be so happy, either.

Plus, of course, a billionaire’s goals may not necessarily be the same as those of the ordinary citizen.  Elon Musk wants to build a space program and retire to Mars, which seems like an eccentric and wonky and basically harmless thing to do, but Jeff Bezos strikes me as a guy who basically wants to RULE THE WORLD!!!, and he hasn’t really provided any evidence to the contrary.  (In fact the nagging emails I get from Amazon about my ebooks only serve to convince me that he’s trying to micro-manage my life already.)

So are we scared yet?  Or is a billionaire developing what amounts to a first-strike capability covering the entire planet just a harmless eccentric?

Feel free to discuss.