You don't need to be Sigmund Freud to have a pretty good idea why three zillionaires are competing to have the biggest rocket to go whoosh into space.
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The egos of Sir Richard Branson, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos can no longer be confined to Earth. Their brands are going boldly where no brands have gone before - into space, the final marketing frontier.
Their ventures' names are straight out of Star Trek. Starship Enterprise was already taken, so the branding experts chose Blue Origin for the founder of Amazon's venture; SpaceX for Mr Musk's and Virgin Galactic for the creator of a host of other less exciting Virgin products.
Where poorer - or less fantastically rich - men might buy a Harley as age creeps on, these fellows get themselves a spacecraft. They can't even settle for a typically compensatory big red Lamborghini.
They can afford it. After all, their net worth is astronomical. The business magazine Forbes puts the total value of what they own at $US381 billion (that's roughly $A510,000,000,000, give or take the odd billion not worth prising out of the back of the sofa).
In normal times, the vanity of rich men ought to be their own business - except right now we're in a time of crisis. There is so much desperate need for dollars at the moment that such a vainglorious enterprise in self-promotion is jarring to see.
According to the World Bank, it would cost the 48 countries in sub-Saharan Africa $US12.5 billion to vaccinate 70 per cent of their population against COVID-19.
According to the UN's World Food Programme, $US6 billion would prevent 41 million people from starving.
Malaria kills at least 400,000 people a year, mostly children in sub-Saharan Africa. It is preventable and treatable.
In a barely noticed announcement, scientists at Oxford University (which is substantially funded by the taxpayer) have developed a vaccine which is 77 per cent effective against malaria.
These scientists should be feted, along with their colleagues in Burkina Faso, the desperately poor west-African country where the World Food Programme says "only 11.4 per cent of children under two years of age receive the recommended number of daily meals", and "about 499,000 children under five suffer from acute malnutrition", and "40.1 per cent of infant deaths in Burkina Faso are associated with undernutrition".
But let's not dwell on them. Let's instead applaud our urban spacemen.
We are witnessing "the privatisation of space", as the breathless commentators put it.
"It's about transitioning the space industry from one propped up by the government to something self-sufficient; it's about private enterprise investing in rockets, in equipment, in experiments in space," trills Industry Week.
"It's about NASA stepping aside after 60 years of building a basic space infrastructure. It's about the future. The future of space."
In other words, taxpayer-funded NASA did the hard work, but now it's time for the buccaneers to start "space tourism" (hopefully ticket prices will come down from $200,000 a pop - or rather, a whoosh).
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But let us cloud the euphoria with some hard figures.
According to the Planetary Society, which describes itself as "the largest and most effective nonprofit organisation that promotes the exploration of space", NASA spent $US49.4 billion ($US482 billion, adjusted to current values) between 1960 and 1973 to put human beings on the moon.
There is a pattern here. In her brilliant book The Entrepreneurial State, the economist Mariana Mazzucato analyses the source of the basic research behind some of the everyday objects which have come to symbolise modern capitalism.
The parts of the iPhone which made it so revolutionary came from government labs, according to Professor Mazzucato. GPS, touch screens and the internet itself came out of the US Defense Department. Tesla's battery technology and solar panels were developed with a grant from the Energy Department. Google's search-engine algorithm depended on public funding.
There was an eye-moistening moment during Wimbledon (as well as the magical moment when Ash Barty won the women's title).
One of the scientists behind the AstraZeneca vaccine was given a standing ovation. Dame Sarah Gilbert from Oxford University couldn't have looked more embarrassed. What an antidote to the puffery of the space buccaneers she was.
There is no doubt Sir Richard Branson, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are brilliant businessmen. They have made our lives better by helping us buy stuff through the companies they created (Virgin, Amazon and PayPal amongst them). But their businesses are also very assiduous in the perfectly legal way they minimise tax.
According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy in the United States, "Amazon, the ubiquitous purveyor of two-day delivery of just about everything, nearly doubled its profits to $11.2 billion in 2018 from $5.6 billion the previous year and, once again, didn't pay a single cent of federal income taxes."
This was legal - but it would have been nice if more of its profits had gone to help the infants of Burkina Faso.
- Steve Evans is a Canberra Times reporter.
Steve Evans
Steve Evans is a reporter on The Canberra Times. He's been a BBC correspondent in New York, London, Berlin and Seoul and the sole reporter/photographer/paper deliverer on The Glen Innes Examiner in country New South Wales. "All the jobs have been fascinating - and so it continues."
Steve Evans is a reporter on The Canberra Times. He's been a BBC correspondent in New York, London, Berlin and Seoul and the sole reporter/photographer/paper deliverer on The Glen Innes Examiner in country New South Wales. "All the jobs have been fascinating - and so it continues."
