Or at least that’s what he hoped would happen. The upgraded ship would carry a total of six passengers up into space and launch a thriving space tourism industry. He then set to work on building the next-generation spaceship, SpaceShipTwo. He acquired Rutan’s company, Scaled Composites, and founded his own space company, Virgin Galactic in 2004. The craft’s success was an inspiration to many, as Diamandis hoped, and caught the eye of one particular space enthusiast - Sir Richard Branson. A team led by Burt Rutan built a small, rocket-powered vehicle called SpaceShipOne, which was designed to launch from an aircraft, like NASA’s old X-15s. It would take nearly a decade before the prize would be claimed. The first team to successfully launch (and do it twice in a short period of time) would win a $10m prize. That initial competition challenged teams across the globe to build a spacecraft capable of carrying humans into space multiple times. Though Musk, Bezos and Branson are currently capturing headlines, it was another billionaire named Peter Diamandis who took the first significant steps towards opening up space to commercial players in the late 1990s, by creating a competition he hoped would spark a thriving private space industry: the X Prize. Right now, a seat on the Crew Dragon capsule costs NASA an estimated $55m versus the $90m NASA was paying per seat to Roscosmos for a ride on the Soyuz. SpaceX has successfully launched three different astronaut missions into space, bringing down the cost of space travel by millions. The United States space agency is reaping the fruits of that labour now with its commercial crew and cargo programmes. Instead of building all the hardware itself, NASA has turned to the private sector to help reduce costs and spur innovation. But in recent years, there’s been a paradigm shift, with more and more private companies making a name for themselves by putting hardware in space.

Historically, space has been a domain that solely belonged to the military or to governments and their respective space agencies, like NASA and Russia’s Roscosmos. That rocket is estimated to start flying sometime next year. In the meantime, Blue Origin is building a massive new rocket, called New Glenn, which will compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. A ruling on that is expected sometime in August. An official protest to contest the award was filed by Bezos’s firm. Blue Origin also wants to build infrastructure in space and help NASA return to the moon, just like Elon Musk’s private space firm, SpaceX.īlue Origin was part of a team that lost out to SpaceX for a multibillion-dollar contract to build NASA’s next human landing system to ferry astronauts to the lunar surface. But the world’s richest man – Jeff Bezos – is also vying for a piece of the commercial space market with his company, Blue Origin.Īnd Bezos’s ambitions don’t end there. “But honestly, nothing could prepare you for the view of Earth from space.”Īlways the salesman, Branson has claimed a major victory for Virgin Galactic, which he founded. “I have wanted to do this since I was a child,” Branson said following his return to terra firma on Sunday. Some of the paid-up passengers include celebrities like Tom Hanks and Lady Gaga as well as fellow space-boosting billionaire Elon Musk. To date, the firm has sold an estimated 600 tickets, fetching a price of roughly $250,000 each.

The 70-year-old billionaire rocketed towards the stars in a fully crewed Virgin Galactic spacecraft on Sunday morning – at least nine days before rival space tycoon Jeff Bezos hopes to try and reach the edge of space in a Blue Origin ship.īranson’s successful flight is more than just a victory in a space race between billionaires it fires the starting gun on a new era that could open space travel beyond government programmes to non-professional astronauts – and in doing so, provide yet another boost to a rapidly evolving space economy.įollowing Sunday’s success, Virgin Galactic expects to launch commercial flights to suborbital space next year.

Spaceship in space