The billionaires’ space race benefits the rest of us. Really.

True, at this moment, space flight is not very useful. As Kern points out, space wants to kill you, so certainly substantial time keeping one person alive and functioning in space requires a team of round-the-clock specialists groundside, a huge amount of money and some of the most impressive engineering feats in human history, from rocket design to space toilets. In exchange, we mostly get — a person in space. And Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Bezos’s Blue Origin will be sending people up for minutes, not days.