The Billionaire Space Race: Who Will Win?
No matter which one gets to Mars first, humanity will be the real winner.
If you had every resource in the world at your disposal, would you make survival on another planet your main focus? Billionaires around the world are doing just that. The billionaire space race has only just gotten started, and already some are closer to the finish line than others.
Who Will be the First Billionaire on Mars?
The race to Mars is about more than survival. Billionaires are in competition with each other for bragging rights as well. Who will win? Only time—and a whole lot of money—will tell. So far over $18.4 billion has been spent on space exploration, and we can expect that figure to skyrocket faster than a billionaire on his way to Mars in the future.
Who are the billionaires currently winning the race? These are the top three contenders.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk is a citizen of the U.S., South Africa, and Canada, and next he wants to become a citizen of Mars.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has the ultimate goal of building a rocket that can carry 100 passengers to Mars once every 26 months, when the planets are aligned. So far the plan is to launch the first crew in 2024, with the possibility of beginning to colonize the red planet by 2025. The billionaire believes humans could live on mars within the next 30 years.
How much is SpaceX worth? In 2018 the company reported $2 billion in revenue, and they are continually improving their systems to increase profits. SpaceX is getting ready for a Mars voyage by perfecting human transportation here on earth. Their SpaceX Hyperloop will allow humans to travel via a system of sealed tubes.
Musk claims his motives are not about money or beating out the competition to become the first billionaire to successfully travel to Mars. Instead, the PayPal mogul says he is driven by the desire to help humanity overcome a catastrophic extinction event.
Of this potential future event, Musk said, “The alternative is to become a spacefaring civilization and a multi-planetary species.
Richard Branson
Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is also developing a Hyperloop system, and that’s just the beginning of what the adventurous billionaire has in the works. Rather than planning to take elite groups of human survivors to Mars, Branson wants to make the survival of an extinction event accessible to all humans by making it possible to fly outside of our atmosphere.
So far, Virgin Galactic is off to an impressive start. Since 2018, the company has been testing flights with human pilots. Branson has said he believes it will be a matter of months and not years before he personally is able to experience flight outside of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Beyond Virgin Galactic, Branson also has other companies working on space travel, including The Spaceship Company and Virgin Orbit. Of his future chances at success, Branson said, “Space is hard—but worth it.” The billionaire believes space travel is inevitable. For him, perhaps it is.
Despite Branson’s plans to make space flight accessible to average people, at this time each trip is projected to cost over $200K. Of travel in space, the billionaire said, “This fascination with flying, breaking boundaries, and exploring the great unknown has never left me.”
Jeff Bezos
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s space company Blue Origin was founded because the billionaire believes space travel is going to be necessary if humans are going to survive into the future. At the rate we’re destroying our planet, he may be correct.
Blue Origin is the billionaire’s most important project. Of space travel Bezos said, “In order to preserve Earth, our home, for our grandchildren’s grandchildren, we must go to space to tap its unlimited resources and energy.
Bezos believes that because of his wealth he has an obligation to invest in the long-term survival of the human race because this area of research isn’t accessible to anyone except those who are in a position of extreme wealth.
Blue Origin is on a more modern timeline than the other billionaire-led space companies, however. This company expects to have humans in space within 200 years, and at the soonest in a few decades.
Bezos has mentioned how important Blue Origin is to him not just because of what can be accomplished in his lifetime, but for what is to come. “This is super important to me, and I believe on the longest time frame — and really here I’m thinking of a timeframe of a couple of hundred years, so over many decades — I believe and I get increasing conviction with every passing year, that Blue Origin, the space company, is the most important work I’m doing,” Bezos said.
As many accomplishments and advancements as these three billionaires have enjoyed, the are not the only members of the 2% in the space race. American billionaire Paul G. Allen’s Vulcan Aerospace and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough Starshot are also working on improving space exploration and travel.
Be sure to check back next week, when Rob Raskin’s Millionaire Survivalist takes an in-depth at what went wrong with the Mars One project.
Can Mars be colonized?
Learn more about Elon Musk’s plan to colonize Mars.