Few things expedite innovation faster than competing billionaires with elastic budgets and a steely determination to make history. This has certainly proved true for the modern-age space race. Billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX in 2020 was the first private company to send humans into orbit. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin journeyed to zero gravity not long after. Their endeavours have pushed down costs and ushered in a new era of space activity. The cosmos is now more accessible than ever.
Since 1957 around 10,000 objects have been launched into space; 30 per cent of these were in the last six years alone. This coincided with a spike in annual investment from below a billion dollars a year to $7.6bn (£5.8bn) in 2020, according to BryceTech, a space-focused engineering and analytics company. Morgan Stanley now expects the sector to reach $1tn (£763bn) by 2040.
“Bezos, Musk and Branson have invested billions into the space...