Since the first walk on the moon done by Neil Armstrong, the idea of a common goal to explore space slowly deteriorated into obscurity. Instead, space exploration became a novelty - at the time of writing this, which would be the 12th of September of 2024, the first commercial spacewalk was performed today by a billionaire, who's father was a salesman.
This isn't surprising. With an ever growing power gap between the working class and the upper class, the poor struggle to buy their first home, while the rich continue to beat milestones of wealth, obtaining more and more expensive amenities for their own enjoyment. In consequence, you no longer have to be a president to have a private jet - all you have to do is play in a blockbuster, do a world tour that appeals to countless teenage girls willing to break the bank to see you (and you wouldn't hesitate to raise the ticket prices) or be a descendant of a cobalt mine owner.
This has been in the works for years - the Polaris Program is merely another step towards a ludicrous business that will only be affordable to the few who exploited or inherited long enough. And this is a limited time offer - the resources needed for space missions will soon run out, and inevitably so, no one will be able to go to space, ever. Before a single worker will be able to go to space, the billionaires will host enough tea parties on the moon so that none will get that opportunity, no matter how much money they have.
There is no reason for the working class to be applauding the initial succes of commercial space flight as much as they do. Media may be praising the opportunities this opens for a utopian era where anybody could spacewalk, but it has to be always kept in mind that media needs to profit somehow, and revenue from the readers just won't cut it. This supposed idea that space flight will be accessible to everybody will never be true, as long as we live in a system set on profit for the few.
There are countless human beings who dream of seeing earth from outside its atmosphere, countless individuals who dream of being in the shoes of Neil Armstrong on July 20th of 1969, countless children who grew up seeing the first succesful moon landing on the TV who wished to catch even a glimpse of what it was like. But that dream is shredded away by the fact at hand - they will never afford this. They were born in a family in the Gaza Strip where they will be bombed for months on end. They were born into a family in the rural Balkans where the closest thing they have to seeing space is photos on their home computer. They were born into a family in Tanzania where they have to dig up gold to afford their next meal.
Now, those same children who saw the moon landing worked their entire lives in dead-end jobs. They saw 9/11 and the war in Iraq, they saw the prices of property rise to unimaginable values, and now, if still alive, they see the war in Gaza. And yet, most of the elders are still not as dissilusioned as the youth. They still believe in the red scare and that the system is working correctly. And they are right - it is. The rich keep getting richer.