In its promethean quest to conquer the heavens and transcend the limitations of earthly existence, the human race may be on the cusp of reaching an historic milestone: in this case, the successful launch of a giant barrel filled with pork into outer space.

Thanks in large part to the giant corporate PR machines now in the fray, the burgeoning contest for dominance of the twenty-first century space travel market tends to be perceived in the loftiest of terms: saturated with futurist mythology and defined by grandiose pronouncements about asteroid mining, multiyear voyages to Mars, and interstellar colonization. But, as this week’s wrangling in Congress suggests, the accelerating rivalry between Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is destined to play out in a decidedly less than utopian fashion.

The tell, as documented in a recent report from the Intercept, is an absurd $10 billion amendment to the sinisterly titled Endless Frontier Act introduced by Washington senator Maria Cantwell. Under the highly dubious auspices of funding scientific and technological research, the cash would almost certainly go straight to Blue Origin — which last month narrowly missed out on a lucrative contract to put astronauts on the moon, and just so happens to be based in Cantwell’s home state (the contract instead went to SpaceX, a move NASA has justified with the absolute howler that it was attempting to “preserve a competitive environment”).