You see the Earth from space, it changes you.

It changes your relationship.

On Monday, I watched this video on Instagram.

I want to go on this flight because it's a thing I've wanted to do all my life.

That's Jeff Bezos, and the video is from his account.

It's slickly produced, lots of camera angles, shots of the atmosphere.

There's a picture of Bezos as a child next to a model rocket with USA painted on the side.

And the point of this video is to announce that Bezos will be on board the first human space flight

that is rocket company Blue Origin is taking on July 20th.

That's the anniversary of the moon landing in case you missed that part.

And I was curious when I got astronomer Lucian Walkowicz on the line,

what they thought about this whole announcement.

I view it as a very natural outcome. You know, I think if you were going to write the headline,

it would be like billionaire builds rocket wishes to ride rocket. Lucian works with the Adler Planetarium

and is a co-founder of the Just Space Alliance,

which advocates for a more inclusive vision of space.

In the sort of framework in which Jeff Bezos has the means to, like, build himself a midlife crisis sports car in a space,

of course he wants to go to space.

It's not just Bezos. Elon Musk has a

space company. So does Richard Branson. You know, there's this question that I've wondered for a long

time that my producers and I actually were tossing around even before this show got started,

which was basically, why do all the rich guys want to go to space?

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