The so-called “battle of the billionaires” to get into space has been filling column inches in newspapers and absorbing time on the airwaves for quite a while.
Simplified, it’s the rivalry between entrepreneur and adventurer Richard Branson and his company Virgin Galactic, and online retail magnate Jeff Bezos – of Amazon fame – and his company Blue Origin. To be clear, the Branson/Bezos ‘race’ is about space tourism. The world’s third space-obsessed billionaire, Elon Musk, is way out ahead of the privateer field with his company SpaceX, which is already contracted to shuttle proper astronauts to, well, infinity and beyond.
In this video interview, RiAus lead scientist Professor Alan Duffy takes questions from institution editor-in-chief Ian Connellan (spaceflight tragics both) about the billionaire race, and what it’s likely to mean for the future of space exploration – because it has to mean more than uber-rich white guys getting to do stuff that no one else can. Right?
More video interviews:
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Originally published by Cosmos as The billionaire space race
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