Satire City, TX – NASA recently announced it will utilize the services of both Space X and Blue Origin to build competing spacecrafts to land astronauts on the surface of the moon setting off a space race between the enormous egos and bulging bank accounts of Elon Musk vs Jeff Bezos.
Musk’s SpaceX has proven itself as a space industry leader by delivering astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station for years, assembling a satellite based literal World Wide Web (Starlink) and test launching the world’s largest rocket ‘Starship’ as a first step toward reaching Mars.
Meanwhile, Bezos’ Blue Origin’s biggest success has been in designing a spacesuit with an extra absorbent diaper, putting it on the geriatric, 90 year old James T. Kirk and shooting him up to the edge of space on a 10 minute mission “to go where no man has gone before” – in his pants, 100 kilometers above Texas.
Blue Origin currently has a monopoly on building the world’s largest backyard rockets – which go straight up and come straight back down. The embarrassingly phallic shaped rockets while able to achieve impressive thrust and repeatedly penetrate the atmosphere have nevertheless proven themselves impotent, failing to achieve the Big O – Orbital space flight.
We asked Amazon founder and Blue Origin funder Jeff Bezos about his rivalry with Musk.
“Jeff…”
“That’s Mr. Bezos to you…”
“Mr. Bezos, does it bother you that not only has Elon Musk and Space X achieved multiple or – orbital flights, they have also assembled a network of satellites in orbit circling the globe.
“No they didn’t…”
“What do you mean “they didn’t ?”
“They didn’t build satellites ‘circling’ the earth because that’s not possible.”
“Why is that not possible?”
“Because the earth is flat.”
“Really? You run an space exploration company and you think the earth is flat…”
“Well for as high up as we at Blue Origin have been able to go, it’s still looks kinda flat…especially over Texas.”
“Seriously? You’re a flat earther?”
“Not exactly, I mean… I’m willing to concede that the earth might be shaped like a box…. of course, in my business everything looks like a shipping box…”
“Mr. Bezos, how did you manage to win a 3.4 billion dollar contract from NASA to deliver astronauts to the moon?”
“Well I told them that instead of making multiple deliveries on different days, I would deliver all the astronauts to the moon on Prime day and give NASA a one dollar credit toward a digital purchase like a movie rental…works every time.”
“And how did you plan to deliver living, breathing human packages to the surface of the moon?”
“Well after UPS and FedEx turned me away, I had no idea. I fell into a deep depression. I was on my 500 million dollar yacht, forlornly looking out over the beautiful blue waters of the French Riviera, sadly sipping on $5,000 bottles of champagne with my smokin’ hot fiancé, when I hit rock bottom. I was going to quit the space business and write off the 7 billion dollars I had found in my couch cushions that were already sunk into it. But just as I was going to pull the plug, I was confronted with an environmental impact report that stated Amazon has created a total of 321 million kilograms of packaging waste and if this waste was laid out end to end, it would circle the earth more than 800 times. Eureka ! In that moment, I, Jeff Bezos, the world’s most successful book and shoe salesman, came up with a novel plan to get to the moon. Instead of wastefully laying out my garbage to ‘circle’ the earth 800 times, all I had to do was pile it up in one place and it would easily reach to the surface of the moon.”
“Really, that’s your plan, to create a cardboard box and bubble wrap plastic trash heap 238,855 miles high?!”
“Yes and then just drive a specially designed garbage truck/ moon buggy all the way up there. Hell yeah, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure this out – and more importantly for me, you don’t need a real rocket.”
“That’ll never work.”
“I hired a team of civil and custodial engineers who said it will – and – it already has.”
“Has what?”
“It worked ! As a matter of fact, I just got back yesterday. That 30-carat engagement ring I gave my fiancé wasn’t some run of the million-dollar diamond, it was a priceless moonrock.”
“Where on earth did they let you pile trash that high…”
“We scouted hellhole, trash-filled cities all over the world but when we got to Detroit we knew we had hit the jackpot! The rubble and trash was already piled SO high no one could see the top of it – so we just kept piling it on.”
“That sounds like an environmental disaster!”
“On the contrary, a 238,000 mile high pile of garbage, while having an actual 50 square mile wide footprint on the surface of the earth, has a far smaller carbon footprint and is much more environmentally friendly than the kerosene and methane burning, greenhouse gas spewing Space X rockets !! And while Elon Musk is wasting his time and money building bigger and better rockets, I’ll just make bigger more wasteful packaging to create enough trash to pile up and beat him to Mars!”
