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Space race: the private firms aiming to fly you to the stars
SpaceX is not alone in aiming for the stars. A raft of private firms, set up by billionaires, most of them former CEOs or founders of dotcom or IT companies, have joined in a new space race. These space-age entrepreneurs include:
■ Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, now America's largest online retailer. He set up his space company, Blue Origin, in 2000, though its existence only became public in 2003 when Bezos started buying land in Texas so that he could build a test site for his spacecraft. Blue Origin's main project is New Shepard, a vertical take-off and landing rocket, that is designed to take tourists to the edge of Earth's atmosphere: the edge of space .
■ John Carmack, the man behind video games such as Doom and Quake, has set up a company called Armadillo Aerospace which is developing a series of spacecraft including a lunar landing vehicle and a spacecraft which is also aimed at taking tourists to the edge of Earth's atmosphere. Fares will cost around $100,000, says Carmack. The Virginia-based travel firm Space Adventures has signed an exclusive deal with Armadillo to sell tourist seats on its spaceships.
■ Richard Branson, is planning to start suborbital space-tourist flights on his Virgin Galactic spaceplanes within the next two years. In 2004 he signed a deal with the US inventor Burt Rutan to use the spaceplane technology that he had just developed. When flights begin, a small craft carrying half a dozen passengers - who will pay up to $200,000 - will be flown to the edge of the atmosphere. After a few minutes, the spacecraft will then spiral back to the ground. Branson says he expects first flights to begin within two years.
■ Jeff Greason's XCOR Aerospace also aims to start suborbital tourist flights. XCOR is based in California where it designs, builds and operates rocket engines and rocket-powered vehicles to government and private markets. The Lynx spacecraft – fuelled by liquid oxygen and kerosene - is a two-seat rocket plane that can take off and land on a runway. The spacecraft has been designed to make up to four flights a day, carrying a single passenger into space where he or she can briefly experience weightlessness before returning to Earth.
■ Steve Bennett is Britain's principal space engineer. His company, Starchaser, is developing rockets that are intended to blast paying passengers on 20-minute long suborbital flights that will include several minutes in which they will experience the delights of zero gravity.
■ However, SpaceX is the most advanced and ambitious player in the field. Its rockets have already flown into space and it has won hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business contracts for future payload launches.