How Many Billionaires Can Space Hold?
No word yet on whether Elon Musk, who also founded his spaceflight company, SpaceX, about two decades ago, plans to hop on a Falcon 9 rocket and beat them both. Musk has been uncharacteristically silent during this little spectacle, but he could certainly chime in. SpaceX is the only one of the three companies that has moved beyond test flights, and regularly flies NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. This is the reality of modern human spaceflight. NASA is no longer the most exciting name in the game, and the refrain ad astrato the starscarries a bit more emphasis on the ad. Bezos wouldnt be the first rich person to buy their way to spacethe first space tourist flew in 2001, paying some $20 million for the experiencebut he could be the first who could conceivably take the ride again, just because he liked it. For two decades, these space billionaires have been talking about dreamy and urgent reasons for exploring space, but their first step off Earth is turning a visit to space into the ultimate status symbol. When Blue Origin was founded, Amazon was crawling out from the implosion of the dot-com bubble, and Bezos, the 48th-richest person in the world at the time, bankrolled the new venture with millions of dollars from his personal fortune. Few knew it even existed until a few years later, when Bezos started buying land in Texas for a launch facility. Only in the past several years, as Blue Origin has begun to publicize its work, have more people come to associate Bezos with space travel. Two weeks before his historic flight, Bezos will step down as Amazon CEO, motivated in part by his desire to devote more time to the space business. Bezos, a sci-fi fan since childhood, has an Interstellar-esque hope for humankinds future in space. As high-school valedictorian, he told his classmates he wanted to save the Earth by sending millions of its inhabitants into space. He now envisions many space stations, kept in perpetual motion to produce artificial gravity, orbiting Earth. Some outposts would replicate idyllic versions of familiar cities, national parks, and landmarks. Others would contain factories and their harmful pollution. Our home planet, with its boundless beauty and finite resources, would be reserved for residential and light industrial use. But Bezos has always wanted to go to space himself, in his own lifetime, since he was 5 years old and watched Neil Armstrong walk on the surface of the moon. Bezos has been maneuvering toward that dream ever since. In the 1990s, as Amazon grew, an ex-girlfriend told reporters that the reason hes earning so much money is to get to outer space. As Franklin Foer wrote in an Atlantic profile of Bezos, a friend claimed that Bezos began bulking upa regimen that produced his infamous muscles-and-puffer-vest look in 2017in anticipation of the day that he, too, would journey to the heavens. Between the shipping and handling, the web servers and the streaming, the sexting scandal and the not-paying-federal-income-taxes, Bezos had a loftier dream.