What Matthew McConaughey got wrong about the new space age – Washington Examiner

Nothing is quite as annoying as a Hollywood star attempting to lecture the masses about public policy. Whether it's Tom Hanks with his morning in America pro-Biden ad that left out inflation and supply chain problems, or Matthew McConaughey taking shots at space barons like Elon Musk, entertainment industry virtue-signaling proves how out-of-touch people with tons of money can become living in a leftist cultural bubble.

The ad that features McConaughey first ran during the Super Bowl. It depicts the actor in a spacesuit and looks like a trailer for a sequel to Interstellar, a space movie in which he once starred. The ad, run on behalf of a company called Salesforce, quickly segues into a heavy-handed message about not going to Mars. Instead, the argument goes, we should stay home on Earth and plant trees.

Ars Technica notes that the ad is replete with hypocrisy. Salesforce is just using some fashionable billionaire-bashing to burnish its image as an Earth-friendly company, even as its CEO, Marc Benioff, is an investor in SpaceX. SpaceXs CEO Elon Musk dreams of making humanity an interplanetary species by supporting NASAs Artemis return to the moon program and building a city on Mars.

McConaughey once toyed with the idea of running for governor of Texas. He probably chose wisely by declining at the last minute because bashing an increasingly important industry in the Lone Star State would not have been a good look. From NASAs Johnson Spaceflight Center south of Houston, to SpaceXs Starbase launch facility in Boca Chica, to Jeff Bezoss Blue Origin spaceport in Van Horn, space in Texas is generating a lot of revenue and creating a great many jobs.

In an interview with Variety, McConaughey admitted that he would like to meet with space billionaires such as Musk and Bezos, as well as Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg. Those meetings would have been useful before the actor cut an ad throwing shade on the idea of rich people running their own space programs. The wealthy actor might have learned a thing or two.

Musk, for instance, could take McConaughey on a tour of Starbase. He could explain to him how expanding humankind across the solar system does not constitute abandoning the Earth any more than the settlement of the Americas constituted the abandonment of Europe. Musk might also mention the carbon capture X-Prize he is financing. Carbon capture will not only help to fight climate change but will also help SpaceX manufacture rocket fuel. Incidentally, Musk also owns the electric car company, Tesla.

Bezos could do Musk one better by taking McConaughey on a ride in his New Shepard rocket. He performed the same service for another actor, William Shatner, who returned to Earth awestruck at what he saw and experienced. Bezos could also explain to McConaughey his vision of moving heavy industry off the planet and building free-flying space settlements, a concept he learned from his mentor Gerard K. ONeill.

Finally, McConaughey may want to have a chat with Jared Isaacman, a new, somewhat unlikely, space billionaire. Last year, Isaacman bought a flight on a SpaceX Crewed Dragon, called Inspiration4, that raised about a quarter of a billion dollars for St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital. Isaacman has bought three more flights from SpaceX, with which he intends not only to raise more funds for worthy causes but also to test useful space travel technology.

Spaceflight and helping the Earth are not mutually exclusive undertakings. The idea that they are is one of the great lies of the Space Age, promulgated by the late Sen. Walter Mondale during the Apollo program and by Sen. Bernie Sanders in the present era. From the awesome image of the Earth rising above the lunar surface taken by the Apollo 8 crew that inspired the environmental movement, to the new technologies, such as space-based solar power that could lead to a clean-energy future, the two are inevitably linked. The sooner McConaughey educates himself about this, the better it will be for him and the rest of us, as well.

Mark Whittington, who writes frequently about space and politics, has published a political study of space exploration, Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon? as well as The Moon, Mars and Beyond, and, most recently, Why is America Going Back to the Moon? He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.

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What Matthew McConaughey got wrong about the new space age - Washington Examiner