Billionaires boldly go: private space-treks

0:28The Economist populists, deporting illegal immigrants. American voters have been promised historic levels of it starting next week. We ask if, at ground level, that is what many of them actually want. And Peter Fenwick was a psychiatrist who became fascinated by near-death experiences and came to believe that his consciousness would outlive his physical body. Our obituaries editor celebrates his life and consciousness.

1:01First up, though.

1:07Nine, eight, seven, six, five. Space buffs have had a lot to celebrate lately. Oliver Morton is our Planetary Affairs Editor. But this week, there was a really remarkable couple of days.

1:27All seven engines have called Thread. On Thursday, Blue Origin, which is a company run by Jeff Bezos of Amazon, successfully launched its first space rocket into orbit on the first attempt. The launcher took off really slowly, which added to both the majesty and the tension of the event. But in flight, it performed beautifully, delivering its payload, a prototype of a Blue Origin spacecraft called Blue Ring, there's a lot of blue going on here, into the planned orbit with exactly the precision that was needed. One minute, 15 seconds into flight. As we build a road to space.

2:13That's really unusual for a maiden flight. Reaching orbit means that New Glenn and, by implication, Blue Origin is now a real competitor to the rest of the launch industry and thus potentially to SpaceX itself.

2:38Later that same day, in Texas rather than in Florida, SpaceX's vast Starship rocket made its seventh test flight. The booster performed a flip maneuver and returned back to the Gulf Coast here. There you can see it on your screen. Obviously a successful catch. And in terms of tension, majesty and holding your breath, nothing can match the sight now seen for the second time of its huge booster returning from the edge of space to be grasped in the arms of the launch tower. We did lose the upper stage of the ship. So, again, we're going to listen in and try and figure out a little bit more about what happened.

3:23The rest of the flight, though, not so much. The focus of this test flight was on the upper stage of the rocket, the Starship proper. And that part was not a success. Mission control lost contact with the craft around the time its six engines was supposed to stop firing. That's about a minute after the catch. And fairly soon it was clear that the craft itself was a goner. People started seeing trails of debris across the sky over the Caribbean and this sort of stream of very pretty but potentially hazardous debris falling down. We didn't have contact with it, so at this point we are assuming that the ship has been lost.

4:00So this was a brand new... So hard not to see that as a setback. At the same time, the idea of testing the technology to its edges is fundamental to the Starship program. And in both the case of Starship and New Glenn, we are seeing real progress in the ability to put large amounts of mass into orbit cheaply. And that is a remarkable step forward for private space and for space in general. Oli, as you say, it's incredible that this first launch by Blue Origin was successful. Can they feasibly now challenge SpaceX's monopoly? Well, it's worth remembering that Blue Origin started 25 years ago. The fact that they stuck at it for 25 years suggests that sticking at it is a very strong part of what Blue Origin does.

4:50But you have to not only stick at it, but also get it done pretty quickly if you're going to catch up with a phenomenal company like SpaceX. New Glenn is clearly a very capable, successful, heavy lift rocket slated for maybe 10 launches this year. and one of the purposes of New Glenn is to launch satellites for Amazon's Kuiper constellation and I'm sure it will be able to do that. They've got the kit but SpaceX has this extraordinary lead in terms of how much it's already done and how quickly it does things. So last year SpaceX launched 134 Vulcan rockets. It's turning them around every couple of days.

5:27It's done eight launches so far this year. At the same time, SpaceX has already launched something like 7 ,000 satellites for its Starlink system. They have the same sort of technological capabilities, but the cadence of SpaceX is just far, far greater. So there's a certain amount of hare and tortoise, or maybe even two hares, but one of the hares is about three fields ahead of the other one and heading for the horizon. and whatever their intrinsic capabilities, that's one hell of a lead to try and whittle away. And despite Blue Origin's tortoise-like beginnings, now it's begun to make its acceleration, what are its other plans?

6:08Well, New Glenn is a more capable ship in terms of the amount of mass it can lift to orbit than the Falcon 9, which is the everyday rocket from SpaceX. And people will be paying for that. The first launch counted as one of its certification launches to be able to launch national security payloads for the Pentagon. It has commercial customers. Its main customer is going to be Amazon, because Amazon is launching a constellation of low-Earth orbit communication satellites that's intended to rival the Starlink constellation that SpaceX has been putting up, this constellation called Kuiper. and it will be very interesting to see if they really can compete with SpaceX's Starlink.

6:56Again, there's just the question of how fast SpaceX is already going. Another thing about New Glenn though is it's much more capable of putting things on a trajectory to go to the moon and indeed one of the early launches by New Glenn is intended to be a moon lander that will deliver a few tons rather than a few hundred kilos to the surface of the moon. That is called Blue Moon. Again, you see the theme. Before we get to the moon, so to speak, are there other private companies coming into view here that are also going to challenge these two run by two of the world's richest men? There are. There's the, as it were, the legacy company, ULA, which has a newish rocket called Vulcan Centaur.

7:39That's also capable of providing launches for national security. and it's not always a perfect market space launch because given national security major powers all feel that they need to have their own rockets. China has a whole panoply of rockets, Europe has the Ariane 6 still in development and India has rockets of its own. Now the other thing is that there are a whole bunch of smaller rocket companies building up so there's Rocket Lab which is an American company begun in New Zealand, which has a small launcher called Electron and is developing a larger launcher, still not anything like as big as Starship or New Glenn, called Neutron, which I think we expect to see fly this year.

8:23And there are various other people being funded, perhaps the what might have been the big space news of the week, if it hadn't been for all the other space news of the week, was that there was a very successful funding round for a company called Stokespace, which intends to build effectively a smaller version of Starship and among the aficionati. That's very much the launch company to watch. It's also interesting that one of its backers is Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which is an investment vehicle founded by Bill Gates. So if you want billionaires in space, that's another one you can add to your tally.

9:00He's nothing like as personally invested in and associated with it as Mr. Musk at SpaceX and Mr. Bezos of Blue Origin. But it's intriguing that he's putting a fair amount of cash into what may be the next big technological success in launch rockets. Oli, you mentioned billionaires in space. And when space becomes a game played by two of the richest men on Earth, I've got to ask you, is this about power, business or what? Oh, I think a fair amount of what. SpaceX is a spectacularly successful business. It's doing things that no one had been able to do before. It's not just launching a disproportionate share of everyone else's satellites.

9:43It's also putting up this huge Starlink constellation. That's actually net positive on revenue as far as we can make out. So they've actually made a big business where there wasn't a business before, where there wasn't a market before. It's also strategically important. One of the launches from SpaceX this year was of Starship satellites, as they're called, for the American military. The effect of being able to get high bandwidth internet anywhere through Starlink is also clearly having other political effects in terms of who gets to use the access to the system where. So it's not just a bit of billionaire willy-waggling, but it kind of is also that thing.

10:25Mr. Bezos and Mr. Musk both have big 1970s inflected dreams of what they want to do in space. Mr Bezos talks about moving huge amounts of the Earth's industrial infrastructure out into space where any effluence will be blown away on the solar wind and the Earth becoming something of a park underneath this sky full of industry. Mr Musk famously wants to establish a bolt hole on Mars to make life multi-planetary. I think both these dreams are simplistic and to some extent wrong, but they are firmly held beliefs of people who have huge amounts of capital and influence and technological power, so they are going to be explored.

11:13Also, we must remember that national prestige still matters in spaceflight. There's no doubt that as he prepares for his inauguration, Mr. Trump is very aware that he has a four-year term and he would like to see some spectacular things happen in space. He would love to see American astronauts either return to the moon or Mr. Musk's preferred option go for the first time to Mars. I think a Mars mission in four years is stretching the bounds of credulity. But that sort of thing matters too. So it's a complicated thing where the real requirements of national security, very big business, personal egos and national ambitions all intersect, along with really big rockets.

11:57Ollie, great to talk to you as ever. Thank you so much. It's a great pleasure, Rosie. Thank you.

12:32This week, it's a special one by the executive editor of the Weekend Intelligence herself, who's exploring the phenomenon of adult children choosing to go no contact with their parents. If you aren't already a subscriber to Economist Podcast Plus, you'd better do something about that. Sign up now to get a free trial.

13:00You know, when they let, I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country, when they do that, we get a lot of work to do. They're poisoning the blood of our country. That's what they've done. They poison... The they that's doing the poisoning of the blood, that means undocumented immigrants. Donald Trump's campaign trail rhetoric about them was vicious, even by his low standards. Remember the claims of rapists and drug lords and bad hombres from eight years ago? They're back, and more. Mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America. In Mr. Trump's casting, it's been an invasion.

13:38The immigrants have taken over America. We're now known as, and all throughout the world, as an occupied country. We're an occupied country. His solution for this annexation by the unworthy was, is, nice and simple. We will begin the largest deportation operation in the history of the United States. Next week, Mr. Trump will be president, and top of the agenda will be starting what he and others are calling mass deportations. Or trying to start, anyway. During Joe Biden's administration, apprehensions of migrants at the southern borders surged. Erin Braun is our West Coast correspondent. That convinced voters that both the border and immigration policy were out of control and not working.

14:25And on the campaign trail during the election, that gave Donald Trump buy-in. And he thinks it gave him a mandate to carry out deportations. So now we're trying to figure out what that might look like and what masks actually means.

14:42And so who in the administration is going to bear the responsibility for these policies? Trump has longtime advisors that he's elevating to these posts. So Stephen Miller, who is an anti-immigration hawk, is going to be his deputy chief of staff and an advisor for Homeland Security. Tom Homan led ICE during Donald Trump's first term. That's Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. It's the agency that carries out deportations. This time around, he's going to be border czar. Both of these men were two architects of the family separation policy during Donald Trump's first term, which separated children from their parents at the southern border.

15:22And their task is basically to deport as many unauthorized immigrants as possible. And Donald Trump likes to say that 15 million or 20 million illegal immigrants came in during Joe Biden's administration alone. Those numbers are very inflated. They seem plucked from thin air. The last time the census counted in 2022, they came up with 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. But since then, there has been this huge influx at the border. So most experts think that the total right now is probably somewhere north of 13 million, which is not really a number that needs exaggerating in the first place.

16:06Whether we get to the numbers that count as a mass deportation, what does that whole deportation scene look like? To try to understand this, I decided to go to Storm Lake, Iowa. This is a small town of about 11 ,000 people in the northwest corner of the state. Iowa voted for Donald Trump in this particular county by 33 points. But I wanted to go to Storm Lake because it has a huge meatpacking industry there. There's two plants. It employs thousands of people and it's totally dependent on immigrant labor. And one thing that I think we're likely to see from the Trump administration is workplace raids.

16:45And Storm Lake actually was where a big raid happened back in 1996. So I was able to talk to Mark Prosser, who was the local police chief at the time, about how that raid went and why he now regrets it. We tore up the relations between the city and our immigrant community and really placed a lot of fear in. This time around, Mark is worried that Storm Lake might be targeted again. If we scare our labor force away, are they going to want to come back? I don't know. And people were even hesitant to talk to me because they were afraid that they would put a target on Storm Lake, that Donald Trump would go after them because he was made aware of their immigrant population.

17:31And I should say here that Tyson Foods, which runs the two big meatpacking plants in Storm Lake, says it does not employ illegal immigrants. And I guess the point here is that this is not just people freshly arrived in the country, but rather people with jobs and families and lives, established lives. That's exactly right, Jason. About 80 percent of unauthorized migrants in 2022 had lived in America for more than a decade. Millions of Americans, many of them children, live with undocumented parents. But I think it's fair to say that Donald Trump will be very limited in his ambitions for a mass deportation campaign because there are a number of constraints that will limit how many people he can deport.

18:15What do you mean by constraints? Not just public outrage. The first is the legal system. If you're a migrant who is claiming asylum, you're entitled to a hearing. There's a really long court backlog with millions of people in it. It can take years to get a hearing. It's also very logistically hard to deport people. First, you have to find them. Then you have to find somewhere to detain them. And there's not nearly as many deportation beds as Donald Trump and Tom Homan would like. Then you have to make sure that the countries these folks are from will even take them back. And that's not a guarantee.

18:49And finally, there are political constraints. The vast majority of people that ICE arrested between 2014 and 2017 were handoffs from local law enforcement. And if in democratic cities and states, those police departments and sheriff departments don't want to cooperate with the Trump administration, that limits the number of people that they're going to be able to detain. So all of these things make deporting 13 million people a fantasy. But at the same time, you say he has stacked his administration with loyalists that have some immigration experience. He's had years to plan. He has a coterie of people around him thinking about how to close loopholes, what have you.

19:30Like, surely there is a way and he's going to try to find it. Absolutely. They're already planning executive orders to try to get around these roadblocks. One thing that I'm pretty certain is going to happen is he's going to expand something called expedited removal. It streamlines deportations for people who entered the country within two weeks and are residing within 100 miles of the border. Donald Trump would like that to extend to people who had entered in the last two years anywhere in the country. On the logistical front, I think we'll see some sort of emergency declaration at the border, help probably send National Guard troops there.

20:09And that sounds radical, but it's actually something that presidents from both parties have done. And they don't arrest migrants. They help with things like travel and surveillance and paperwork, that kind of thing. He'll probably restart the Remain in Mexico policy that requires immigrants to wait in Mexico for their immigration court claims to be adjudicated. But crucially, that requires Claudia Scheinbaum, Mexico's president, to agree to that. In a big picture view, is this what the American electorate wants, even if on balance the American electorate wants Trump as president? Voters have a really nuanced view on this topic.

20:51Recent Pew polling suggested that 56 % of registered voters favored mass deportations, but 58 % supported allowing unauthorized immigrants to stay if they're married to an American. I think voters are really sympathetic to people who have been in this country a long time, who are embedded, who have families. A parallel that I've been thinking a lot about is that family separation policy that Stephen Miller and Tom Homan were the architects of. That sparked national outrage. Seeing pictures of children in cages was appalling. And it eventually forced the administration to end the practice. So I think we're about to see whether Donald Trump's advisors learned from that or whether we're going to see a repeat of that cruelty.

21:40Erin, thanks very much for joining us. Thank you, Jason.

21:56The man who sat facing Peter Fenwick was lucky to be alive. Anne Rowe is The Economist's obituaries editor. He had come into the hospital to have a cardiac catheter inserted and he'd gone into cardiac arrest. There was no reflex in the brainstem. He was clinically dead as far as the doctors around him were concerned.

22:26But as far as he was concerned, He was outside his body, looking at what was going on as he lay on the slab. And having watched himself for a little while, he then went down a tunnel towards a marvellous, welcoming, bright light. At the end of the tunnel, in the light, there was a wonderful garden, like an English country garden full of flowers. he wandered around in it a bit and he met relatives who had been dead as far as he knew and friends he knew too that had died and he could telepathically converse with them he wandered about and then at some moment he became aware that if he went any further he would actually die and so he decided that he would come back

23:28When Peter Fenwick heard this, he was rather amazed. He did know all about near-death experiences because a book had come out in the United States by someone called Raymond Moody called Life After Life. And Dr. Fenwick had read it and dismissed it as absolute rubbish, psychobabble. And now he realised if this patient, whom he'd known a long time and was a sober, ordinary chap, if this patient seemed to have had one of these experiences, perhaps they were worth looking into. In the end, he set up a unit at the Maudsley Hospital, which has a large psychiatric wing. And this unit studied sleep, meditation, dreams, all those strange experiences where the mind seems to be acting completely independently of the body.

24:28In any case, he found when he started looking into the near-death experiences there was almost no literature on them. There were about seven papers. So the whole field was new to him, but it was also a field that was completely dismissed by scientists. The scientific view of the world was completely materialistic and mechanical. There was really no room in it for consciousness. He hardly ever heard the word when he was at Cambridge. So, Dr Fenwick realised he'd got a very hard road to travel here. But then there was a lucky break for him. The BBC made a documentary in 1988, which featured Dr Fenwick and near-death experiences, and 2 ,000 people wrote letters in.

25:25He sent 500 of them a questionnaire with many more details to be given about what this experience had been like and what they had seen. It gave him a very good database for a proper study of the subject. And what he found when the questionnaires came back was that almost all of them reported going down the tunnel towards this wonderful light. About 75 % of them reported that there was a tremendous feeling of serenity and peace and being held in love. and they arrived either in a brilliant pastoral landscape. About 40 % of them saw relatives or people they knew and they found they could converse with them.

26:19The relatives or friends would often, however, would have shaked their hands at them as if to say, don't come here, you should go back. This is not your time. And they would come as that initial patient had come to a point where there was a boundary, often a stream of water, or just a feeling that they shouldn't go on, and then they came back. So he began to study the phenomenon of death and the approach to it and stages of it. Patients had been able to go in and out of these wonderful landscapes and gardens in the weeks before death, but also that they'd had times of great anguish when they realized they would have to give everything up, that they would have to shed the ego completely.

27:10When he realized this, Dr. Fenwick decided to try to strip away his ego as much as possible. And he found, and he always appeared when he was doing his many YouTube talks and lectures, to be a person of complete happiness. So he had certainly got that far. and although he couldn't say for certain what was going to happen to him after death he absolutely believed that his consciousness would survive it and indeed he could hardly wait to find out what lay for him beyond the body

27:54Anne Rowe on Peter Fenwick who has died aged 89

28:18The Intelligence

28:28with extra help this week from Alex Portfelix. Our senior producers are Rory Galloway and Sarah Larniuk. Our senior creative producer is William Warren. Our producers are Maggie Kadifa and Benji Guy. And our assistant producer is Henrietta McFarlane with extra production help this week from Jonathan Day. We'll all see you back here for the Weekend Intelligence tomorrow.