Forget Monaco. Space appears to be the new billionaires’ playground.
Richard Branson’s announcement that he will blast off into space on July 11 signaled that the new space race is now firmly a three-way dance involving the Virgin Galactic founder, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
Here’s how they match up against each other.
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Richard Branson, Virgin Galactic
With a net worth of $5.5 billion, Branson founded the Virgin Group in 1970, which owns his private space travel company Virgin Galactic, established in 2004.
The company’s most recent success came on May 22 when it performed a test of the VMS Eve and the VSS Unity spacecraft. The ships hit a speed of Mach 3 and reached a height of 55.5 miles above the ground. On June 25, the Federal Aviation Administration approved a commercial license for the company, allowing it to fly customers to space.
The flight conducted experiments created by NASA’s Flight Opportunities program, which awarded a federal contract to the company. Virgin Galactic will receive $45 million through 2023 in exchange for payload space on its commercial flights, the agency announced in November 2020.
Branson will take flight with five other mission specialists on July 11, he announced Thursday. After returning to Earth, Branson will announce “something very exciting to give more people the chance to become an astronaut,” he said. Branson’s scheduled launch will occur just nine days before one of his competitors, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin
Holding a net worth of $198.7 billion, the richest of any person on the planet (and maybe beyond), Bezos is most famously the founder and CEO of Amazon. He is also the creator and owner of Blue Origin, which will conduct its first human flight on July 20.
Bezos, along with his brother, will occupy seats on the New Shepherd flight experience. The module will hit Mach 3, reaching its apogee, the top of the flight, four minutes after liftoff. Six minutes later, the capsule will parachute back down to Earth.
The Bezos brothers will be joined by the winner, whose name has yet to be released, of a June 12 auction, who paid $28 million for a seat on the flight. Those proceeds will go to Blue Origin’s Club for the Future, which funds STEM education for children.
The fourth and final seat will be filled by 82-year-old Wally Funk, the company revealed Thursday. The first female FAA inspector, Funk received the same training as NASA astronauts, but she never had the opportunity to go to space until now.
Blue Origin was in the running to send humans back to the surface of the moon. NASA appointed Blue Origin to lead a team of flight companies, including Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, to receive a preliminary contract for the ships that will reach the moon’s south pole, the company announced in April 2020.
However, the terms of the contract still forced Blue Origin to compete with SpaceX for the final deal. The New Shepherd is capable only of flying for about 10 minutes, reaching Earth’s orbit and coming back down in that span, well behind the achievements of Musk’s company.
Elon Musk, SpaceX
A significant portion of Elon Musk’s $169.8 billion net worth is taken up by his holdings in SpaceX, which regularly sends astronauts into orbit.
On April 16, NASA chose SpaceX as the sole recipient of a new $2.9 billion contract to take astronauts to the moon, the company announced that day. Bezos and Blue Origin challenged NASA’s decision, filing a protest with the Government Accountability Office, which is still being adjudicated.
“Can’t get it up (to orbit) lol,” Musk tweeted after news of the protest broke.
On May 30, 2020, SpaceX partnered with NASA to fly veteran astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley up to the International Space Station using its Falcon 9 spacecraft as part of its Demo-2 mission. SpaceX also makes regular supply runs to the station.
Its commercial endeavors include taking civilians into orbit for its own sake and using orbital travel to move passengers between international destinations more quickly. SpaceX’s Inspiration 4 mission will launch sometime after the final quarter of 2021 and see an all-commercial crew of astronauts fly into orbit, the company announced in February.
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Musk, who currently lives in a $50,000 house near SpaceX’s “Starbase” in southern Texas, has never personally been to space and does not have plans to go.
