Space Race 2013

On your mark, get set, launch!

When Elon Musk’s D11 interview turned to his space transportation company, SpaceX, I was fascinated by his opinion on space travel and what he wants to achieve. It then made me think of the plethora of other companies such as Blue Origin (Founded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos), Armadillo Aerospace (Founded by id Software founder John Carmack) and Virgin Galactic who were also competing in this space. 

“Helping make the human race a multi-planetary species.” - SpaceX

 To the few who don’t know the Space Race was a competition between the USSR and the USA to see who could be the best at space exploration, it concluded in 1969 with the United States landing Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong on the moon. 

With all of these private companies vying to be the first to offer space travel it seems like the Space Race is coming to the 21st century but not through publicly funded research, through privately funded research. Now this doesn’t mean that institutions like NASA will become irrelevant, the Curiosity rover on Mars shows that.

It seems inevitable that there will be even more companies competing in this market in the future, all of them trying to make space travel as cheap as possible because that’s what seems to be the key to winning this market, safe flights but also cheap enough for a mainstream audience (space travel isn’t niche, who doesn’t want to go into space?). Whichever company figures this out and does it best will most likely win the Space Race.

Soon, we may even see crowdfunded space efforts on sites like Kickstarter (Hermes comes to mind) becoming a regular occurrence. An issue with this however is that if the market becomes too saturated then the idea of space travel from a business standpoint won’t seem lucrative enough to gain a return on investment but then again, space travel is cool.

While a lot of this is speculation one thing is for sure, the Space Race has begun and we should be thankful that we live in a world where this is possible and hopefully because of space travel, we’ll be able to live in another world that we’re thankful to live in.