Wilson hoping for ticket to space
Former Dragon will wait for lower prices
W. Brett Wilson, a Canadian businessman and entrepreneur best known for starring on the CBC show Dragon’s Den, wants to rocket into space.
And when the technology is available for orbital space trips, such as what Elon Musk’s company SpaceX is developing, he plans to buy a ticket to ride, he said.
But, Mr. Wilson plans to wait until the steep prices — which could be as high as US$5-million a seat — come down to earth.
“I’m not going to be on the first bus, I might be on the third bus, so to speak.... The costs will drop dramatically, so there will be people who pay for the privilege of being the first,” he told the Financial Post. “I don’t get any value out of being first, I just want to do it.”
Mr. Wilson, an engineer by trade who co-founded Calgarybased brokerage firm First Energy Capital Corp., was speaking from California where he was visiting Mr. Musk’s SpaceX facility and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Thursday as part of a three-day tour with the XPrize Foundation, a non-profit organization whose mandate is to stimulate breakthrough research, including in space exploration.
Mr. Wilson said he was there as part of a group of roughly 30 “interested observers,” including Canadian businessman and mining magnate Rob McEwen, from around the world encouraged by XPrize chief executive Peter Diamandis to come for a closer look, Mr. Wilson said.
“I’m an engineer by training. As a scientist, I’m fascinated by space travel,” Mr. Wilson said. “As an entrepreneur and a businessman, I appreciate what’s happening now. That we’ve taken control of the exploration... Space is not completely out of the hands of government, but it’s moving into the hands of entrepreneurs.”
Mr. Wilson also said he was look- ing at potential investment opportunities during his trip, which wraps up on Sunday.
Last month, NASA announced it was partnering with Boeing and SpaceX — signing contracts worth US$4.2-billion and US$2.6-billion, respectively — to build commercially owned and operated “space taxis” to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, according to Reuters. This reduces the U.S. space agency’s reliance on the Russian space program to bring its astronauts to the International Space Station, which costs roughly US$50-million per seat.
Mr. Musk has been exploring commercial space travel with his company Space Explorations Technologies Corporation, also known as SpaceX, that is relatively affordable in comparison.
He has previously said that a space ticket price would be in the range of US$500,000, but has hinted more recently it will cost a bit more.
Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic venture is much closer to space travel, with a commercial flight planned for the spring (after some delays), at the more affordable price of US$250,000 per seat, according to Bloomberg.
But that is a suborbital flight — a shorter trip which reaches space, but does not involve sending the vehicle into orbit.
Mr. Musk, who Mr. Wilson called a visionary and a “geek’s geek,” is still developing the technology for commercial orbital space flight, and isn’t taking deposits yet.