Behold the Bezos Space Trolley

It costs a lot more than a nickel, pal.

Lionel’s version of a trolley for ETs.

I honestly hope Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez have a happy marriage. I hope that in twenty-five years they will still be married and enjoying every moment.

I do think the Venetian wedding itself was a bit silly, taking over a touristy town far from home and inviting the rich and the really rich to show up in their transatlantic-capable private jets. The whole thing had a Marie Antoinette let-them-eat-cake feel to it, but hey, it’s his money, and the festivities didn’t cost nearly as much as the divorce that had to precede it.

But the wedding wasn’t the silliest thing Mr. Bezos was connected to over the weekend. That honor should go to the 13th crewed launch of his Blue Origin space ship, a 10-minute trip into space that achieved nothing more than the wishes of some other rich people to, um, go into space for ten minutes.

NASA developed the Space Shuttle almost fifty years ago. Jeff Bezos has built the Space Trolley.

Off it goes, and back it will come.

The Lionel model train people sell a similar trolley. Set up a train track that doesn’t form a loop and the trolley will go back and forth from one end to another until you stop it. Sic transit Blue Origin.

Lionel has a new version of its trolley that shows silhouettes of space aliens riding in it. How appropriate that it and Blue Origin have appeared at about the same time. Bezos’s launch complex near Van Horn, Texas is less than 200 miles from Roswell, New Mexico—close by Southwestern standards.

Bezos’s fellow gazillionaire Elon Musk has been overseeing the development of a rocket that can take humans to Mars for the first time—something NASA could have done instead of wasting time, money and effort on the Space Shuttle, which was doomed to low Earth orbit, a neighborhood we’d already visited many times.

Jeff Bezos has managed to recreate the pop-up suborbital trip taken by Alan Shepard in May of 1961, even naming it after the late astronaut. An American child born on the day Shepard flew could now be collecting Social Security; Bezos has done the equivalent of launching a reproduction of the Wright Brothers’ Flyer in 1967. Whoopee.

Again, it’s his money, and if Bezos wants to build a phallic rocket capable only of orbitus interruptus, okay. But when you add the silliness of Blue Origin’s 10-minute sightseeing trips to the silliness of a hundred million-dollar destination wedding, Jeff Bezos starts seeming like a really rich guy who’s not serious enough to have gotten as rich as he is.