Four space baron wannabes are heading in different directions to turn that outer realm into a well-traveled highway, according to the author a new book talking about the space race between billionaire business owners.
"The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos" by Christian Davenport has two of the four right in the title, National Geographic reported, but he doesn't count out the efforts of Richard Branson and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
Musk, as almost everyone knows, wants to get to Mars. His SpaceX is already flying regularly to the International Space Station and launching satellites for NASA and other customers.
But the book also examines Bezos' relatively quiet plans to colonize the moon, Branson's efforts to create a space tourism industry under his Virgin branding, and Allen's efforts with Stratolaunch, an air-launch platform that hopes to make getting into space more convenient, reliable, and routine.
In an interview with NatGeo, Davenport described Musk as "a marketing genius who gets a lot of attention from the media, a lot of it self-generated" while Bezos’ Blue Origin project has been "much quieter and more clandestine."
Branson's Virgin Galactic, which had to overcome the death of one of its pilots in a crash in 2014, wants to take tourists up in space at $250,000 a pop so they can float in the cabin and see the curvature of the Earth.
"Nearly a half-century after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, these Space Barons-most notably Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, along with Richard Branson and Paul Allen, are using Silicon Valley-style innovation to dramatically lower the cost of space travel, and send humans even further than NASA has gone," says a book synopsis on GoodReads.com.
"These entrepreneurs have founded some of the biggest brands in the world-Amazon, Microsoft, Virgin, Tesla, PayPal, and upended industry after industry. Now they are pursuing the biggest disruption of all: space."
Who will win? Davenport told National Geographic it's hard to tell.
"It's hard to pick just one," Davenport said. "Elon’s got a track record of success; Jeff has got so much money you can't count him out. Virgin Galactic had a huge setback, but seems to have learned from it and is making progress. So, at this point, it's hard to say. They all have the ambition and the drive and, just as importantly, they have the money."
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