Rocket Men

THREE BILLIONAIRES ARE IN A RACE TO REALISE AFFORDABLE SPACE TRAVEL WITHIN OUR LIFETIMES. BUT WHOS WINNING, AND ARE THEY CHASING THE SAME GOALS? MADELEINE ROSS INVESTIGATES

- Madeleine Ross

‘We are sitting on the edge of a golden age of space exploration,” declared Jeff Bezos in 2016. The founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, who recently overtook Microsoft mogul Bill Gates as the world’s wealthiest person, was referring to a new chapter in aerospace innovation, a second space race where players are no longer nations but tech billionaires with bold ambitions, fortunes to burn, and boyish infatuations with the beyond.

In this quest to conquer the cosmos with Blue Origin, Bezos is chiefly competing with British business magnate Richard Branson and his spaceflight company, Virgin Galactic, and the brash, charismatic founder of Tesla, Elon Musk, and his space technology giant, SpaceX. While the scope of their missions differ, their goals align on two key fronts: to reduce the cost of space travel and to make space accessible to the masses.

Between 1957 and 1975, the US and Soviet Union jockeyed for dominance in space, fuelling giant leaps forward in technology and human spaceflight. This period saw six manned lunar landings, the last of which took place in 1972. Since then, human missions have been limited to the International Space Station (ISS), which is just 400 kilometres above the Earth. When one considers that the moon is 384,400 kilometres away—almost 1,000 times as far from the Earth as the ISS—these most recent expeditions don’t inspire a great deal of awe. “Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and Jeff Bezos would have grown up watching the space race and I think they would have thought that by now we would be much further out than we are—that we would have had a base on the moon and humans on Mars,” says Christian Davenport, who reports on the space and defence industries at the Washington Post and recently authored Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and The Quest to Colonize the Cosmos.