The conquest of outer space was a priority for many governments, but it has also become a goal for many billionaires. At first, we just heard names such as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson, but others are joining the club. Many powerful and wealthy people want to get in on a piece of the action. There are many American billionaires but also people from other nationalities.
Some of the richest billionaires like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Li Ka-Shing, and a few others have thrown their support behind space travel research. Clearly, this is not a game for poor people, these billionaires have $513 billion as a whole.
The second richest man on the planet, Jeff Bezos, is funding Blue Origin. This rocket company gets about $1 billion from the billionaire each year. Richard Branson owns Virgin Galactic, the billionaire has spent more than $600 million to make commercial flights into suborbital space by the end of next year.
Many rich people are in the business
Among the billionaires, we can see that they have huge fortunes on August 22, 2017. Sheldon Adelson, whose source of money is Las Vegas Sands, is involved in the funding of SpaceIL. This businessman has a huge fortune, more than $34 billion.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, whose source of wealth is Google, have space investments too. Larry Page is backing Planetary Resources, and Sergey Brin is funding SpaceX.
The fortune of Larry Page surpasses $44 billion, and the wealth of Sergey Brin is more than $43 billion. A lot of investors live in the United States, but there are also foreigners like the billionaire Ricardo Salinas, from Grupo Elektra, who is funding OneWeb. Ricardo Salinas is a Mexican businessman, who has a fortune that surpasses $9 billion.
Space projects on the rise
The conquest of the space isn't just in the hands of billionaires, there are many companies interested in this. There is a network for space investors, Space Angels, that states there are more than 225 private ventures that have got funds. More than $3 billion was invested in these companies in 2016.
Just $409 million was invested in 2011, we can see an exponential increase. Anyway, not all the companies will be successful.
Booking payloads
The company SpaceFlight is booking payloads, and it's even bought the entire capacity of a SpaceX rocket to share among customers. This company has been backed by one of the co-founders of Microsoft, Paul Allen. The conquest of the outer space becomes more intense, and it won't belong to just a few people and governments.
