The staff at The Week has compiled a nice summary of private space businesses run by billionaire “astropreneurs” including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Paul Allen, and Richard Branson. The article quotes former NASA astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman as saying that Musk “is far and away in the lead right now in private rocket development,” because his company SpaceX can put payloads in orbit.
Musk’s relative success is not without problems, including the recent explosion of a Falcon 9 rocket and AMOS-6 satellite. And private billionaires aren’t the only options for getting satellites into orbit. Miriam Kramer at Mashable quotes Bill Ostrove, an aerospace and defense analyst working with Forecast International, as saying after a previous SpaceX launch failure in 2015, “…Arianespace actually got more orders than SpaceX just because their manifest was smaller and customers were willing to pay a higher price for that quicker turnaround.”
The article in The Week notes that the billionaires’ companies are filling a void left by NASA funding cuts. NASA funding has declined from 4.4% of the federal budget in 1966 to about 0.5% today.
Both Musk and Bezos are targeting Mars. Musk, The Week reports, hopes to unveil by year end the Falcon Heavy, which could launch capsules to Mars. If Musk is in the lead in the race to Mars, perhaps Bezos has the more far-reaching vision. The article reports he wants “to save Earth” from pollution by relocating energy-intensive industry to Mars. Ultimately, he predicts, “Earth will be zoned residential and light industrial.”
Read the complete article in The Week here.
