Jeff Bezos’ flight is an ego trip, yes, but it sets the stage for so much more

Tuesday morning, Jeff Bezos is scheduled to take off for outer space. Showing faith in his engineers, he will ride the first passenger flight of his space company Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket. With him will go, among others, the oldest and youngest people ever to fly into space. (Bezos, of course, will be the richest.)

Many dismiss this as just a billionaire’s ego trip, the next step beyond superyachts and private jets. But there’s much more going on here than ego. As I wrote in my recent book, “America’s New Destiny in Space,” we’re now in the third phase of human spaceflight. In the first “visionary” phase, people wrote, planned and dreamed, but only small rockets, a la Robert Goddard’s, got off the ground. In the second, “command economy” phase, governments got involved and built spaceships, space stations and moon rockets.