Billionaire bon vivant Richard Branson, adventurous owner of Virgin Galactic, rocketed into space with five other crew members Sunday on a sub-orbital test flight of his company’s air-launched spaceplane. In doing so, he upstaged Amazon founder and fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos, who plans a similar flight of his own aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft on July 20, the 52nd anniversary of America successfully landing men on the moon and returning them safely to Earth.

The nascent competition between the two companies competing for passengers in the emerging commercial space marketplace heralds a new age in which the expanse beyond our planet is no longer the sole preserve of government agencies. We may be on the verge of a new space race in which private entities vie against each other and against state organizations. For most of us, this an exciting development for humanity. Most.

Not progressives, of course, who are outraged on the grounds of – not racism, surprisingly — class warfare. Leftist anger is best summarized by a meme making its way around social media just prior to Branson’s historic flight: “The existence of a space race between billionaires is a clear sign these people aren’t being taxed nearly enough.”

Curmudgeonly (democratic) socialist millionaire — as if that is not a contradiction in terms — Sen. Bernie Sanders, poster child for economic ignorance for at least the past half-century, echoed those sentiments with this buzzkill of a tweet in the aftermath of Branson and company successfully touching down in New Mexico:



Others on the political left — including Rep. Ro Khanna and Clara Jeffery of Mother Jones magazine — have made no secret of their view that the ultra-rich spending their own money on a quest to get homo sapiens to the stars is an ostentatious display of economic inequality that must be remedied with a wealth tax.

Meanwhile, NBC tech and culture journalist Chandra Steel took the opportunity to pen this Debbie Downer of a column that echoes Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s comments that billionaires should not exist.

This is short-sighted thinking by party-pooper progressives, who regard billionaires in space as a mere organ-measuring contest between economic royalists. In reality, Branson’s successful journey and what is planned to follow portends an era of human spaceflights on privately built vehicles by private citizens. In this endeavor, the private sector — with its bottom line sensibilities — is now poised to take advantage of the fact it functions more efficiently than government. Someday, fleets of spaceships will be commonplace because of free-market capitalism.

Government bureaucrats did not block Christopher Columbus from opening the way for widespread European exploration and colonization of the Americas. Likewise, it would be foolish for progressives in government — ironically, many of whom are convinced of Earth’s doom via anthropogenic climate change — to try to stop the human race from taking these first steps to colonizing the solar system and beyond.

Ad astra.