Be thankful tycoons like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are focused on space and moon bases Planet Earth isn't enough. Fortunately, as NASA flounders, visionary tycoons like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are leading the way on spaceships and moon bases.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds | Opinion columnist

When I was a kid, comic books and novels were full of “tycoons” — brash, vigorous men who had made fortunes and were out to change the world. But in real life, tycoons were pretty scarce. It was an era when IBM was the biggest tech company, and everything was done by committee. Which was disappointing, because the tycoons seemed to be the ones interested in funding spaceships, time machines, moon bases and so on.

Well, now it’s the 21st century, and we do have tycoons. And, happily, they’re funding spaceships and thinking about moon bases, though as far as I know, time machines aren’t on the menu yet.

Just this past weekend, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — who as the world’s richest man certainly counts as a tycoon par excellence — spoke at the National Space Society’s International Space Development Conference in Los Angeles, where he received the prestigious Gerard K. O’Neill Memorial Award for advancing human settlement of space. And Bezos says he’s all-in on the spaceships and moon bases.

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As the Wall Street Journal reported:

Without divulging details about the new generations of powerful rockets, spacecraft and landing vehicles he envisions will be necessary to establish such permanent outposts, Mr. Bezos made an impassioned argument for accelerating private space travel. He argued that future generations won’t be able to survive on earth without expanding into other parts of the solar system. “The alternative is stasis,” he said, adding that without space settlements, societies around the globe “will have to stop growing” due to environmental and other constraints. “That’s not the future that I want for my grandchildren, or my grandchildren’s grandchildren.” Mr. Bezos called the efforts of his rocket company, Blue Origin LLC, “the most important work I am doing.”

And he’s right. In fact, the space development work being done by Bezos — and by others, like Elon Musk with his SpaceX — is probably the most important work that anyone is doing. That’s because humanity has reached the point where one planet isn’t enough, and that’s a dangerous place to be. We face weapons and technologies that could render our planet uninhabitable, and at present we’re not able to spread humanity to other planets. It’s a dangerous window of vulnerability.

Such a period may be almost inevitable in the development of technologically advanced societies, as technologies of destruction are generally easier than technologies needed for peaceful settlement. But the fact that we haven’t met, or even detected, any other intelligent species suggests that may be a dangerous period indeed: Perhaps the reason we haven’t found other intelligent species is that they destroyed themselves while they were still concentrated on a single planet.

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There’s no way to know, of course, but simple prudence favors getting human beings established on the moon, in orbit and elsewhere throughout the solar system, making it much less likely that war, an asteroid strike or some other calamity could wipe us all out.

Which brings us back to the tycoons. In the 1960s it was possible to imagine government space programs taking us out into the solar system, but those programs quickly failed to live up to their initial promise. And today’s NASA is a sad shadow of the Apollo era-NASA, both in terms of accomplishment, and in terms of spirit.

But while NASA flounders, Bezos’ Blue Origin flies. Planetary Resources is moving toward asteroid mining. And Musk’s SpaceX is racking up huge progress as well. These companies don’t operate by committee, but by having someone at the top with vision.

Tycoons have their downsides: Their successes can breed hubris, and their fantastic wealth often produces envy. But with so much of both government and industry seemingly ossified via interminable meetings and PowerPoint presentations, it’s nice to see someone shake things up. Sometimes, you need a few tycoons.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors. Follow him on Twitter: @instapundit.