Rosemary McLeod: Rich listers' space race lacks the glory

Richard Branson has a mission to thrill in outer space. Photo / AP

I do not mean to mention Freud, as in laying it on thick. I think it's bad manners to allude to that old Austrian bogeyman, with his crazy theories about what makes big boys do what they do. But just let me say: big thrusting engines, spurting rockets, bigger and better than the next bloke's. Big octane. There. It's all over and I'll never mention him again. Not for ages.

Just what is it with these rockets, these rich man's follies hurtling into outer space as if inner space is just too much trouble to explore?

Is it the joy of just throwing money away after something semi-useless and hopefully very dangerous once you've exhausted the thrills of racehorses, high stakes poker, blondes with big white teeth and bigger plastic breasts, and fast cars, hand-tooled by helots who, if you like, will lick the tyres clean?

Do such joys pall, even though you've got enough money to shower everyone with banknotes, wipe your nose on them for good measure, or wipe other parts. I want to understand this callous, egocentric squandering of lives, the un-heroic madness of peeing highest up the wall in space. It links, in essence, so unfortunately to wars and weaponry.

Does the joy of out-bidding other rich boys at show-off art auctions, competing for the biggest, most repulsive canvases to show you're avant-garde enough not to care - dwindle? As other things might wither? Is the only real thrill left to feel like god, only bigger and better, thrusting ever further into unknown places and spaces, leaving your detritus behind you? What a bore these mega-rich men must be at a dinner table, rich to the point of lunacy, their drives and desires like those in the cautionary tales you read in myths. And someone else, as in wartime with the brainy boys who dream it all up, does the dying for them.

Honestly, where's the glory in Richard Branson's quest, with his $5.5 billion fortune (one estimate) to take other rich twits into space for kicks?

Do Leonardo DiCaprio and Stephen Hawking want to think again about having seats on the first real flight that works, or will anyone be called a sissy if they back down?

It's hard to guess the etiquette of alpha-male planet, but I doubt common sense comes into it. Apparently there are New Zealanders lining up for this status experience. Others, after all, flew into Mt Erebus.

What glory either can there be in that dead pilot, and another badly wounded one, after a test flight that blew up into five miles of wreckage?

There've long been critics on the sidelines, Cassandra-like, warning of such an outcome - but money bypasses common sense. Why would money need peer review of its endeavours, which Branson's Space Ship Two project reportedly lacked?

It's not real scholarship at stake, after all, but taking capitalism to its limits just to show you can buy technology and test pilots and get there first. But get to where?

There'll only be a momentary pause. The obscenely rich have to dominate space or the other guys will - and let them, I say. Money's nothing when you're dead, and after all, you'll only be looking out a window like a sap when the big day comes.

There's a line-up of these rocket-making men, wallets fattened by big businesses that impact on all our lives - PayPal, Amazon, Microsoft, and Virgin in its various guises.

The combined whiz-bang of their personal fortunes might save the world's forests, help preserve biodiversity, fight Ebola, ease poverty, bring joy, help to keep this planet habitable, none of which a space-travelling erection hurtling through space will do.

But where's the thrill, the thrust, the grunt in that?

Only silly old Bill Gates bothers, with a US$500 million ($643 million) gift this week to fight malaria and other infectious diseases in developing countries.

I guess that's wimpy. He's more my type.

• Rosemary McLeod is a journalist and author