Space race is now a battle of the billionaires
Man is pushing the frontiers of space again with businessmen taking the place of superpowers
THE space race was once fought out by superpowers, with the United States and the Soviet Union goading each other to ever greater heights.
Today, 50 years after Apollo 11 landed man on the Moon, the same battle is raging between three billionaires.
Each nurses grandiose schemes to send tourists beyond Earth’s atmosphere and even establish colonies on Mars and the lunar surface.
Richard Branson, of Virgin; Elon Musk, of SpaceX; and Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder behind Blue Origin, are armed with a combined wealth of some £140billion – and all claim to be close to sending civilians into space.
Within just weeks, SpaceX plans to launch the first humans in its Crew Dragon transporter, which docked unmanned at the International Space Station (ISS) last month.
The ship holds seven people, and will initially be used to take US astronauts to and from the space station.
However, earlier this month, Nasa announced it would allow tourists to visit the ISS from 2020, at a cost of £40million per flight and £27,500 per night. SpaceX will almost certainly be the company transporting them.
It is also developing a 100-passenger spacecraft called Starship, which will launch on a reusable rocket dubbed “Super Heavy” and is designed to take tourists around the Moon by 2023.
Garrett Reisman, a former Nasa astronaut and director of crew operations at Space X, said: “I think we’re about to enter a new golden age … led by a few visionary individuals.
“Elon and Jeff get knocked a lot in our somewhat cynical culture for being crazy dreamers and having these crazy ideas that will never come true but the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 really puts things in perspective.
“We take for granted we can fly to the Moon because we did. We had logged a total of just 15 minutes of suborbital human spaceflight when John F Kennedy said, ‘10 years from now I’m going to the Moon and back.’
“Nothing Elon or Jeff has ever said is as audacious as what JFK said. ”
Blue Origin is also close to launching tourists beyond the Karman Line, the boundary for space, using its New Shepard rocket – named after Alan Shepard, the first American in space.
It is also building a Moon lander that will take astronauts back to the lunar surface by 2024 and help establish a colony.
Speaking at the Starmus festival in Zurich this week, Bob Smith, the CEO of Blue Origin, said: “What Blue Origin is committed to is going to space and building the infrastructure so future generations can leave the Earth.
“We need to get to a place where we have millions of people living in space. That’s a big audacious idea.
“The fundamental premise is that the Earth is finite. We will burn out of energy and resources at some point. Nobody wants a future of rationing.
“Things go badly when we have rationing, liberty gets compromised. So we look to space to preserve us.”
Speaking about sending tourists to space on board New Shepard, Mr Smith added: “We’ve landed it now 12 times, so we’re getting very confident and by the end of this year we’re going to be flying people in that capsule.
“We want to be able to fly this vehicle every week, with six people on board and do it safely.
“Once we do that we know we are on the right path to getting millions of people living and working in space.”
Mr Bezos recently unveiled plans to build enormous space colonies, housing trillions of people.
“We can have a trillion humans in the solar system,” he said, “which means we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. This would be an incredible civilization.”
In contrast to the huge ambitions of Blue Origin and SpaceX, the plans of Virgin Galactic appear far tamer.
Like Blue Origin, Mr Branson is planning to send space tourists beyond the Karman Line, where they will experience five minutes of weightlessness before floating back to Earth.
However, Virgin is further ahead than its rivals and has begun moving operations to Spaceport America in New Mexico ready for the first flights, which could take place this year.
Sir Richard said he intended to lift off on or close to the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing on July 20, although the company has experienced several false starts.
He originally said he wanted tourists in space by 2009, but the entire project has been dogged with problems. Two of the six flights made by SpaceShipOne had potentially catastrophic problems. And in 2007, an explosion killed three engineers.
The company also struggled to reestablish itself following the death of co-pilot Michael Alsbury, 39, when his aircraft crashed into the Mojave Desert in California in 2014.
But in December the latest version of SpaceShipTwo, Unity, broke through the Karman Line for the first time and out of the three tycoons Branson looks likely to be the first to reach space, ushering in a new era of space tourism.
‘Nothing Elon or Jeff has ever said is as audacious as what JFK said about going to the Moon’
‘The premise is that Earth is finite, will run out of resources. So we look to space to preserve us’