A few years ago, a billionaire from Silicon Valley decried that he and his friends dreamed of driving cars. On the contrary, it had 140 characters. He was wrong: with entrepreneurs and governments around the world, they had a lot more – a space race on steroids.
The big pictureFrom Dubai to the United States, from Tokyo to Moscow, from Tel Aviv to Beijing, and more, billionaires, privateers and political leaders compete to land on the moon, colonize Mars, extract its asteroids – and leave the Earth. "Whatever we are now in hundreds and thousands of years, we will see these decades as a time when humanity has left the planet," said Peter Diamandis, president of the X-Prize Foundation.
There is a handful of catalysts to the race, including national pride and compelling interest for an industry valued at billions of dollars. But none of these has primarily attracted the private market players who are the most powerful forces of the new era – billionaires like Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin, Elon Musk with SpaceX and Richard Branson with Virgin Galactic.
For them, the motivation first seems to be romantic. All grew up in the middle of Apollo and Star Trek and regarded the stars as, in Jim Kirk's words, "the last frontier", a place where humans were at last, Diamandis told Axios. They thought they maybe even science is changing fast, and we were deeply disappointed when, in the 1970s, NASA stopped sending human beings into space.
"But then they earned enough money to do it themselves.
– Peter Diamandis
Diamandis himself launched the competition with a $ 10 million prize, launched in 1996, for the first private actor to send a rocket into the suborbital space. When it was awarded in 2004, the private sector took off.
Between the lines: A space program has become imperative for governments, not just for the usual actors:
- United Arab Emirates: In 2021, on the occasion of the country's fiftieth anniversary, the United Arab Emirates plans to place a spacecraft in orbit around Mars.
- Saudi Arabia invests $ 1 billion in space companies in Branson.
- Last month, Indian Prime minister Narendra Modi said that he wanted to put humans in space four years from now.
- Israeli commercial space plans to land a spaceship on the moon next year.
All this activity is very much like the era of exploration, many centuries ago, says Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist, who explains to Axios that we are becoming "countries that fly in space ".
- The result can be a peaceful business, says Tyson. As long as people are just moving around, "do what you want in space, go get my asteroids, build settlements, it's a big universe."
- But, he continues, "if you go to the Moon or Mars and establish a military base, it can be considered a threat."
- To protect American interests, President Trump ordered last summer to create a space force.
Already, According to Nicholas Wright, a UK-based analyst, in-orbit equipment blocks signals, opens the eyes to the laser and spies on cyber tools. This makes him wonder: "Is space fundamentally a military story?"
It will not be if private players have something to do with that. According to Morgan Stanley, the space economy will reach 1,200 billion by 2040; Bank of America estimates $ 2.7 billion.
- For the moment, these figures are notional; the private sector is still trying to decipher what it can do in the space it can not on Earth – or that millions of people will pay for it.
- Diamandis says, "I'm focusing on" Can you build a business that brings money back into space? "
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