The space race was a struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union for the conquest of space that lasted approximately from 1955 to 1975. It was the parallel effort of both countries to explore outer space with artificial satellites, to send humans to space and moon surface.
Did you know that we are seeing what could be a new “fight” for the conquest of space? This new space race is led by private companies, and those behind them are the new industry giants Bezos, Branson and Musk.
What’s this about?
Blue Origin is an American aerospace transportation company founded in 2000 by Jeff Bezos, also founder of Amazon.
Among its objectives are sub-orbital and orbital flights, both for official missions in the United States and for private flights1. Their main work is the reusable rockets by means of controlled descents of them by propulsion after the launches.
Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) is an American aerospace transportation company founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, who is also a co-founder of PayPal, and CEO and President of Tesla Motors, SolarCity, Hyperloop, The Boring Company, Neuralink, and OpenAI.
Elon Musk has said that one of its objectives is to reduce the cost and improve the reliability of access to space by a factor of ten. The company’s plans in 2004 aimed at “developing a heavy and even super-heavy launch vehicle on demand.” With each increase in size the cost per kilogram in orbit decreases, Musk said: “I think $ 500 per pound (€ 950 kilogram) or less is easily achievable.”
One of the greatest objectives of SpaceX has been the development of a rapid reuse launch system. In March 2013 they publicly announced that this development effort included tests carried out with the vehicle called Grasshopper (Grasshopper) with the aim of demonstrating vertical take-off / landing technology and equipment for the first phase of Falcon 9 rockets. with the instruments necessary to perform a controlled descent from mid-2013. In 2013, at the Satellite Industry Forum in Singapore, SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell said “If we do this (reuse technology) well, and we are trying with all our strength, we would be talking about releases in the range of 5-7 million dollars and that would change things drastically “
Elon Musk said in an interview in 2011 that he hopes to send humans to the surface of Mars in about 10-20 years. In 2010 his calculations convinced him that the colonization of Mars was possible. In June 2013, Musk used the name “Mars Colonial Transporter” (Later “Interplanetary transport system”) to refer to the development and construction project of a series of engines, launch vehicles. and space capsules to transport humans to Mars and return to Earth. In March 2014, Gwynne Shotwell said that once the Falcon Heavy and the manned version of the Dragon 2 are flying, the efforts of SpaceX engineers will be redirected to the necessary infrastructure for Mars missions.
In January 2019, the company announced the dismissal of 10% of its 6,000 employees.
Virgin Galactic, founded in 2004 by British businessman Richard Branson, who had previously founded Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Group.
One of its main objectives is to provide manned suborbital space flights, suborbital launches for scientific missions and orbital launches for small satellites. In the future Virgin Galactic plans to also offer orbital flights. The company also hopes to develop an orbital launch vehicle called LauncherOne. Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson initially had the end of 2009 as the date of the first suborbital flight.
