Branson, Bezos and Musk should help on earth, not go to space

Bezos's trip lasted all but 10 minutes. Team Jeff expected to land back on terra firma to the gleeful thanks of the global community but have instead faced condemnation and derision from all quarters.

No one ever remembers second, as FA cup runners up will attest and, not wishing to be outdone having been beaten to the prize by the Virgin supremo, Bezos took scant consolation in his four-person trip having on board the youngest and oldest visitors to space, with Oliver Daemon, 18, and the octogenarian with the jazz trumpeter's name, Wally Funk, who weighed in at 82 years young. 60 miles up, the crew were left hanging around for three minutes as I spent the same amount of time in hours peering out of the front window for the Amazon delivery driver, who was not primed to arrive when he said he would.

But was the deadly duo's action but a folly, or were they really undertaking such endeavour to turn a previously untapped market into a viable commercial activity? The form book would say the latter, with Virgin Galactic’s value having doubled this year to $11.8 billion, with a proposed fee of a quarter of a million a seat for paying customers (which prices them only slightly less per mile than Virgin trains). To date 600 high net worth individuals have stumped up the cash which, for less than an hour’s enjoyment, equates to £4,237 per minute or £70.62 per second.

And that there is where derision has arisen. In our ‘brave new Covid world’, sorry, I got hit by the cliché train for a second there, with family finances desecrated, the economy in tatters and swathes of our compatriots having died needlessly or suffered job, marriage or sanity losses, the question must be asked: Is this what the world needs right here, right now? Would a charitable endeavour not have been better undertaken in which to pump their excess cash? A new town to house the homeless? Medical centres in downtrodden economic backwaters or even a new hospital or 12 here and there?

Undated file photos of (left to right) Elon Musk, Sir Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos. Sir Richard will attempt to become the first billionaire to leave Earth as the mega-rich space race heats up. The Virgin owner is planning to beat rival billionaires

Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos are all taking their businesses into space. Photo: PA

Instead, we are met with pictures of uber rich middle-aged men in fancy dress pretending to be spacemen as they race into the void at a cost that most of us can't fathom. Space has been done you see, and our heroes weren’t the gilded etailers of this world, but those who faced true danger and a terrifying leap into the unknown such as Armstrong, Gagarin and even Wallace and Gromit, who reached the moon in 1989. Bezos, meanwhile, has designs to build a colony in space. Elon Musk, the third overlord in the space race, is already delivering others' satellites into space for a fee of around $62 million and, along with a $2.9 billion Nasa contract, plans to land on the moon and Mars, proving his SpaceX company is already a serious player in a limited niche marketplace.

As for us Joe Averages, we look on, not with awe and wonder, or even jealousy, but with a disdain as to how those who have proven greedy have little time for the needy. There are real issues out there that they could address, for the greater good, off the back of their business successes. But they choose not to, and whilst we keep our feet on the ground and struggle to pay next month's council tax, they have proved that their ideas, along with their ethical judgements, are out of this world.

• Brett Ellis is a teacher