Bernie Sanders said he's worried NASA is becoming an 'ATM' for Jeff Bezos' and Elon Musk's personal space race

• Senator Bernie Sanders published an op-ed saying NASA overly subsidizes private space companies.
• He took particular aim at Blue Origin and SpaceX, which are owned by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

Senator Bernie Sanders has come out swinging against the amount of money that NASA pays to Jeff Bezos' and Elon Musk's private space exploration companies in an op-ed piece for The Guardian.

Sanders argues that US taxpayer dollars are being used to overly subsidize private space exploration firms including Bezos' Blue Origin and Musk's SpaceX through lucrative NASA contracts.

"I am concerned that NASA has become little more than an ATM machine to fuel a space race not between the US and other countries, but between the two wealthiest men in America – Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who are worth more than $450bn combined," Sanders wrote.

At time of writing Musk's net worth clocks in at $260 billion while Bezos' stands at $173 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The two billionaires have a long history of sparring with each other over their competing space ventures.

Sanders specifically took issue with an additional fund that Congress is debating which would add an extra $10 billion to NASA's moon lander budget. Sanders referred to the proposed provision as a "bailout fund" for Bezos, whose company Blue Origin lost out on a NASA moon lander contract to SpaceX in November.

"At a time when over half of the people in this country live paycheck to paycheck, when more than 70 million are uninsured or underinsured and when some 600,000 Americans are homeless, should we really be providing a multibillion-dollar taxpayer bailout for Bezos to fuel his space hobby?" Sanders wrote.

Sanders has a long history of criticizing the Amazon founder, but in his piece he emphasized the problem goes beyond Bezos.

"The reality is that the space economy – which today mostly consists of private companies utilizing NASA facilities and technology essentially free of charge to launch satellites into orbit – is already very profitable and has the potential to become exponentially more profitable in the future," Sanders wrote.

He pointed to SpaceX's commercial satellite venture Starlink and the burgeoning market of space tourism.

"The time is now to have a serious debate in Congress and throughout our country as to how to develop a rational space policy that does not simply socialize all of the risks and privatize all of the profits," Sanders wrote.

"Space exploration is very exciting. Its potential to improve life here on planet Earth is limitless. But it also has the potential to make the richest people in the world incredibly richer and unimaginably more powerful. When we take that next giant leap into space let us do it to benefit all of humanity, not to turn a handful of billionaires into trillionaires," he concluded.

NASA, Blue Origin, and SpaceX did not immediately respond when contacted for comment on Sanders' article.