Determined to suck all joy out of the cosmos, Jeff Bezos announces his space business park

Orbital Reef wants to turn our journey to the stars into a rush hour commute

By
Andrew Paul
Thursday 1:30PM


Jeff Bezos’ private spacefaring company, Blue Origin, announced its Orbital Reef space station earlier this week via a 4-minute promotional video with all the CGI “wow” factor of a Blockbuster direct-to-DVD sci-fi knockoff rental circa 2003.

Presumably, this offers a means for the burgeoning space tourism industry to siphon even more excess wealth from the pockets of the world’s richest people—which is depressing enough in its own right. What we see and read of the plan somehow makes the whole thing even more soul-suckingly bland. Check out the Avenue 5 outtake below:

Yawn...Yawn! About a new chapter set against the backdrop of the miracles of space, for God’s sake!

“Orbital Reef will be operated as a ‘mixed use business park’ in space,” the actual, very real press release reads, as if that sells the project to anyone other than Boeing—who are, incidentally, also a partner in Bezos’ new venture that’s due to float inanely above humanity’s heads by the end of the decade. “The Orbital Reef business model makes it easy for customers and is strategically designed to support a diverse portfolio of uses,” that same, real (we swear) PR statement sells us a few paragraphs later.

“Now, anyone can establish an address in space,” Blue Origin claims at one point in its sales pitch video. But we’re gonna go ahead and remind everyone reading this that, no, you cannot “establish an address in space.” Wealthy tycoons and the occasional token civilian can.

Orbital Reef changes nothing about humanity’s access to the cosmos, it just makes it easier for the people who ruined Earth in the first place to get a head-start on ruining what’s next for our species.

Oh, and by the way—Orbital Reef? Really? Jeff Bezos already named one company after an ecosystem his businesses helped to destroy. Does he truly need to do that all over again?