Who will emerge as the final victor in this new age Space Race?
The last century's space race was a competition between the world's great powers and a test of their ideologies. It would prove to be a synecdoche of the entire Cold War between the capitalist United States and the socialist Soviet Union.
The starting pistol in the race to the future was fired in 1961 when President John F Kennedy committed to "achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth" and it ended with a US victory on 24 July 1969 when the crew of the Apollo 11 mission splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean.
There are no such stakes in today's race. The values of the future aren't in question, merely the egos of three billionaires.
So here's how they compare and what you need to know:
Let’s introduce the three main players
The press has billed Bezos, Branson, and Musk as the three so-called space barons because of their similarities: All made their fortunes in other industries before setting their sites on extraterrestrial ventures — Musk in online payments and electric cars, Bezos with Amazon, and Branson with his empire of Virgin-branded businesses. And they all founded their companies within a few years of each other, becoming the most recognizable faces in the 21st-century space race.
But they certainly are not the only players in the game, and they may not be the only space barons for very long. There are hundreds of space startups across the United States and the world focused on everything from satellite tech to orbiting hotels. SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin have also all benefited greatly through partnerships with NASA and the US military, and all three continue to compete — and occasionally partner with — legacy aerospace companies, such as Boeing and Northrop Grumman and United Launch Alliance.
Elon Musk
Age: 50
Estimated Net Worth: $167bn (£121bn)
Company: SpaceX
Launch date: Unknown
"I want to die on Mars - just not on impact," Elon Musk once quipped, although he hasn't announced his immediate intention to travel into space at all.
If there is a race underway, space fans are usually the first to declare SpaceX the frontrunner. Musk's venture, founded in 2002, has built rockets capable of shuttling satellites and other cargo into Earth's orbit, a trip that requires speeds topping 17,000 miles per hour, and built a 1,500-piece constellation of internet-beaming satellites known as SpaceLink; it's figured out how to land and reuse much of its hardware after flight, and it's won massive NASA and US military contracts.
It's created and flown the most powerful rocket in operation — and performed synchronized landings of its boosters — and developed a spacecraft that successfully ferried astronauts to the International Space Station.
There's no denying that SpaceX has frequently been the pioneer of the commercial space sector by breaking records, making history, and accomplishing things that industry professionals once deemed unfeasible. The company is credited with almost single-handedly disrupting the rocket industry, which was considered fairly stagnant and somewhat uninteresting for a couple of decades before SpaceX came along.
Musk, the world's second-richest man, has also criticized rivals for attempting to generate profits, as opposed to SpaceX, which has the stated goal of "making life multi-planetary." Take that as you will.
Jeff Bezos
Age: 67
Estimated Net Worth: $198bn (£144bn)
Company: Blue Origin
Launch date: 20 July
If one billionaire has made a desire not to rush-manufacture rockets a part of his brand, its Bezos. He founded Blue Origin in 2000 — six years after starting Amazon — and gave it the motto "gradatim ferociter," a Latin phrase that translates to "step by step, ferociously." The company's mascot is also a tortoise, paying homage to the tortoise and the hare fable that made the "slow and steady wins the race" mantra a childhood staple.
"Our mascot is the tortoise because we believe slow is smooth and smooth is fast,"
Bezos has said, which could be seen as an attempt to position Blue Origin as the anti-SpaceX, which is known to embrace speed and trial-and-error over slow, meticulous development processes.
For years, the company operated in almost complete secrecy. But now it's goals are quite clear: Bezos, the world's richest person, wants to eventually send people to live and work in spinning, orbital space colonies to extend human life after Earth reaches a theoretical, far-off energy scarcity crisis. And he started Blue Origin to develop cheaper rocket and spacecraft technologies that would be necessary to create such extraterrestrial housing.
New Shepard — Blue Origin's fully autonomous, reusable, suborbital rocket — was intended to be an early step toward creating lunar lander technology, helping to teach the company how to safely land a small spacecraft on the moon. But the company is also parlaying its New Shepard vehicle into a suborbital space tourism business in which it can sell tickets to wealthy thrill-seekers. Bezos and three others will be the first passengers ever to take the high-speed, 11-minute joyride aboard a New Shepard capsule.
But in the background, Blue Origin is still working on more ambitious technologies. It's laid out plans for a gargantuan orbital rocket called New Glenn. It's also selling the engines for its New Glenn rocket to legacy aerospace company United Launch Alliance and it has unveiled a concept for Blue Moon, its lunar lander.
Amazon has also announced plans to create a constellation of internet-beaming satellites, much like SpaceX's Starlink. Though Starlink is based on ideas that were first attempted in the 1990s, Musk has frequently accused Bezos of being a "copycat."
Among the other incidents in which Bezos and Musk have sparred: Musk made a "blue balls" joke about Bezos' "Blue Moon" spacecraft, a back-and-forth over who figured out how to land rocket boosters first, and a spat about whether Mars is a livable planet.
Sir Richard Branson
Age: 70
Estimated Net Worth: $5.8bn (£4.2bn)
Company: Virgin Galactic
Launch date: 11 July
Lately, however, Branson and Bezos' rivalry has taken center stage.
Branson's Virgin Galactic was founded with virtually the same business plan as Blue Origin's with New Shepard: take paying customers on supersonic flights to the edge of space. Virgin Galactic's technology looks far different — making use of a winged, rocket-powered spaceplane rather than a vertically launched rocket and capsule — but the short-term goal is practically identical.
Branson set off a wave of speculation that Virgin Galactic had rearranged its test flight plans to get Branson to space before Bezos' flight on July 20.
Though Branson has long pledged to be the first space baron to travel to space, Virgin Galactic had encountered several major hurdles that have set its plans back by years. A tragic mishap during a 2014 test flight of the company's SpaceShipTwo killed a co-pilot. And a series of other technical difficulties had to be ironed out before the company was ready to deem the spacecraft safe enough to fly Branson.
Still, in the Branson vs. Bezos battle, Branson does have one bragging right that Bezos does not: Virgin Galactic has already made 8 people into astronauts — including four pilots, Branson and a group of Virgin Galactic employees who flew as crew members — whereas every Blue Origin flight thus far has had nobody inside.
Branson's Virgin Orbit, which spun off from Virgin Galactic in 2017, sent its first batch of satellites to orbit in January. Though Virgin Orbit's LauncherOne, which takes off from beneath the wing from a Boeing 747 jet, is not nearly as powerful as Musk's Falcon 9s or Bezos' planned New Glenn rockets, it is considered an industry leader in a niche race to develop rockets designed specifically for hauling small satellites, or smallsats, to space as they've boomed in popularity.
Virgin Galactic also has some bold long-term visions, including creating a suborbital, supersonic jet that can shuttle people between cities at breakneck speeds. The company aims to be operating multiple space tourism flights a year, and already has more than 600 customers for the $250,000 (£189,000) seats - including Justin Bieber and Leonardo DiCaprio.
To Sum it up
Although Deep-space exploration might provide clues to life elsewhere and insight into how humans could adapt to much harsher environments. Venturing farther into the solar system would drive technologies in areas such as laser communications and radiation shielding. But the race — as much as it is one — can also be just as much about the eccentric personalities and egoism of some of the world's richest men.
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