that this was coming and to me it was just a natural progression of what they've been doing for years now in fact if anything i don't know why it took them so long to do it i mean blue origin did like NUMBER_TOKEN tests before they finally put some people on it and and me and i know a lot of other people were like are you guys going to actually do something or not so i knew their first human flight was coming up and you know i was i was happy for it i was ready for it and then they announced that jeff bezos was gonna actually be on the flight and i remember i actually texted my buddy tim dodd and and said like that's very richard branson of him and then richard branson swooped in and did it first because nobody out branson's the branson and yeah i know i tweeted that out at the time it's it's it's a decent enough line i'll repeat it i don't care i'll steal for myself and because of that timing the two of them going up at about the same time the media was just flooded with a deluge of op-eds and hot takes and articles and millions of people who had never heard of these companies before in their lives were hearing about how these these billionaires were going up into space and flaunting their wealth while you know billions of people on earth are suffering and some of these people were other creators that i respect a great deal and you know agree with on most things it was it was weird it was like there was this divide that i didn't know was there again i don't know maybe i'm naive maybe maybe i'm in a bubble and i mean i get it we're all going through a rough time right now unprecedented times and all that and wealth inequality has become just absolutely absurd the world is definitely in a eat the rich phase so yeah you know not exactly reading the room fellas do you want guillotines because that's how you get guillotines but at the risk of sounding like i'm defending billionaires which is not my job um i don't think that characterization is fair actually who cares about fair it's inaccurate because first of all this wasn't just like trips these guys took on a whim these were projects that these companies have been working on for a very long time in fact it's kind of funny that these guys had their milestones so close to each other because like virgin galactic got started in NUMBER_TOKEN when they bought the design from scale composites blue origin got started in the year NUMBER_TOKEN. so these launches were NUMBER_TOKEN years and NUMBER_TOKEN years in the making respectively and um you know they've been testing with uncrewed vehicles for a long time now again nobody cared about that nobody paid any attention to it and all of us space nerds knew that they were going to be launching with their first crude mission soon and uh if they had just done that let's just be honest nobody would have cared about that either so yeah putting themselves on the ship was a publicity stunt let's just let's just call it what it is or if you want to give them the benefit of the doubt you could say that they were proving the safety of it by putting
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