William Shatner — who gained international fame playing the iconic role of Captain Kirk on "Star Trek" — will make a very real trek to outer space today, if only for a brief suborbital joyride aboard a New Shepard rocket. It's the same one that took Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos to space this summer. Blue Origin has billed New Shepard as a spacecraft that virtually anyone can fly on with only a few days of light training. It will mark the second of what Blue Origin hopes will be many space tourism launches, carrying wealthy customers and thrill-seekers to the edge of space. (CNN Politics)
Maybe for three seconds, as I write this I will NOT be snarky and pretend that this news is just fun and frivolous. An EX- TV Space Captain flying high and proud, ah, ain’t that the American Dream…but as I watched coverage of this soon to happen event, I heard an ex-Astronaut make a comment which bugged the shit out of me. To paraphrase, the gentleman said, that Blue Origin was ALL private money, and isn’t it refreshing to see the private sector in the space flight business. It may be a bit of semantics for me, but INDEED, the reason why Jeff Bezos, has the amount of private money to fly wealthy passengers into space, and most likely the reason some of those wealthy passengers can fly into space IS…because that accumulation of PRIVATE MONEY, is due to the lack of TAXES these BILLIONAIRES AND MILLIONAIRES have paid in taxes.
Let’s get real America, the people who pay all kinds of taxes on wealth which is not in the seven, eight, nine, ten-digit range, if the GOVERNMENT is not receiving everyone’s fair share, then NOT EVERYONE can or will benefit from the privileges of what seems to be BECOMING more and more for only a VERY SELECT FEW!
