Parasites in space!

Following hot on the heels of Richard Branson, billionaire parasite Jeff Bezos launched into space this week, in a rocket shaped like a giant cock.

In a triumph of private sector capitalist engenuity, Bezos spent ten minutes above the 100km threshold recognized as the boundary of space, not quite doing what state-funded astronauts already achieved 60 years ago.

Upon returning to earth, Bezos said the quiet part out loud, stating "I want to thank every Amazon employee, and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all this."

What a cunt.

For once, I agree with the slur.

https://wordforge.net/index.php?threads/the-blue-origin-space-news-thread.112674/

This is a Red Room thread. Or am I entitled to call Bezos a cunt in Techforge?

I am unaware of any rules preventing duplicate threads in multiple forums. @shootER? @Bickendan?

No worse than me saying I was hoping for some 'splosions.

Besides, "cunt" isn't really a bad word unless you're an uptight American.

There aren't.

I like the fact that there is a debate on whether or not the dick rocket is in space. Only the richest overcompesating microdick in the world could make a penis rocket that might never have penetrated outer space.

We know real astronauts went to space because they spend days in it and accomplish something.

I low-key wonder if the "billionaire vanity space race" was actually cover for some new missile project with the military, lobbying and showing off their product publicly without raising any red flags.

That's what the original space race was about, right? "We put a man on the moon, so that proves we can nuke Moscow" or something?

Possible but unlikely. Burt Rutan had been shopping his idea of using planes to launch stuff into space for ages, but didn't get any real takers until Paul Allen decided he wanted to win the X Prize. About the same time he started investing in that, Bezos and Musk started their rocket companies (there are others but I'm not going to bother looking them up). There had been a strong push from the the government to find cheaper ways to get to space when it became apparent that the design of the shuttle wasn't going to allow them to make the kind of cheap flights that had been promised back in the 70s when the shuttles were first proposed. (If you read the Columbia Accident Investigation Board's final report, you'll find out that the shuttles worked as they were intended to, but the Nixon Administration forced NASA to lie about the capabilities to get it through Congress.) Heck, people were starting private spaceflight companies back in the 60s, because they thought that it would be like starting an airline in the early 1900s.

With or without military contracts Bezos, Musk, et al would still have their own space programs because they're a bunch of rich nerds who grew up reading SF and wanted to live in a world where spaceflight was common.

Not quite. The US proved that when the sent up the Explorer I satellite not too terribly long after the Soviets put up Sputnik. The US and the Soviet Union were basically matching what one another could do in space (with the US generally coming in second) and the moon landing was pitched as a way that the US could definitively prove their tech was better than the Soviets. Had the Soviet Union's best rocket engineer not died in '66, they might have managed to make it to the moon shortly after the US did.

I'm pretty sure I've seen this exact same event before.

FAA changes astronaut definition, disqualifying Bezos and Branson.

LOLOLOL.

And the other shoe drops!

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/26/bezos-offers-to-cover-2-billion-in-exchange-for-nasa-contract.html

I was (probably) wrong about the missile thing, but Bezos making his "I can compete directly with Musk, just give me a chance" pitch shortly after his competing space flight can't be a coincidence.

I'm just pissed we have all these billionaires and no-one has formed International Rescue.

I am wondering where ironman and batman are. All we seem to have is a bunch of really stupid lex luthors.

There are some decent billionaires out there. Paul McCartney and George Lucas come to mind.

I honestly couldn't quite believe anyone had the gall to say anything like that in public, even though, of course, it is irrefutably true.

I ran one of those two over once.

Not to totally fat shame, but which one would Lucas play? On the one hand you would need to reshape batnipples to include some moobs, and on the other hand no one is going to believe those tiny little jets are going to fly Lucas around thousands of feet in the air. On the other hand who the fuck is going to believe Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne ordering vegan, or drinking tea? Daniel Craig as James bond was a stretch because it is hard to imagine a brittish guy throwing down like that. Could you imagine Tony Stark or Batman apologizing all the time for blowing up something?

Did Paul apologize profusely for the damage he did to your car? I know it had to be paul because even a land rover could not make it over Lucas.

Sorry to all the larger people around here, it is not you, it is Lucas.

A van and yes he did as it happens. It was back in the day when I had spare time to do these things. He was being interviewed backstage at Liverpool docks in a temporary arena pre show. I was one of the on site first aid/medical volunteers and maneuvering the support van nearby when he half stepped, half hopped back into the bumper demonstrating something or other to the interviewer.

He wasn't hurt but mortified and entirely apologetic, no question about blame. After the initial horror of potentially having killed an international star before he went on stage by hitting him in a fucking ambulance I stopped having palpitations enough to string a sentence together.

In fairness I'd been there all week so he knew who I was well enough to joke about my suing him for the trauma.

Which under the circumstances I obviously didn't.

There are tardigrades living on the moon. Some space rover carrying a box of the crash landed.