52 Years After Apollo 11

Blue Origin crew: Oliver Daemen, Wally Funk,
Jeff Bezos and Mark Bezos. (CBS)

52 years to the day after the first moon landing Jeff Bezos' company launched four men into space:

Tuesday’s space flight was Blue Origin’s first with passengers on board, a group that included the world’s wealthiest person—Mr. Bezos’ net worth amounts to more than $200 billion, according to Bloomberg—as well the oldest-ever space traveler and the youngest, 82-year-old aviator Wally Funk and 18-year-old student Oliver Daemen, respectively. Mark Bezos, 50, the co-founder of private-equity firm HighPost Capital and Jeff Bezos’ brother, also was on the trip.

Virgin Galactic Unity 22 July 11 crew: Pilot Dave Mackay,
Op. Engineer Colin Bennett, Astronaut Instructor Beth
Moses, Richard Branson, VP Gov Affairs & Research
Sirisha Bandla, Pilot Michael Masucci. (space.com)

The race by three billionaires to bring space travel to the masses may seem like a "boys and their toys" moment in history, but such dismissiveness belies the seriousness with which each has approached this mission:

Tourism is merely the first rung of the space ladder. Blue Origin has two more manned flights on the schedule for this year, and Mr. Bezos said the company is approaching $100 million in private sales. Virgin Galactic has presold hundreds of tickets for its space plane, which flew its founder, Richard Branson, to weightlessness last week. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has ferried NASA astronauts to orbit, but it has private flights on the calendar, too...

The money paid by wealthy passengers will also help these companies go higher. Blue Origin has other projects in the works, including a New Glenn rocket that will be big enough to put satellites into orbit. Mr. Musk, as everyone knows, is aiming for Mars. The benefits of all this are hard to say precisely, but that’s the nature of exploration and entrepreneurial risk-taking.

Several companies are working on constellations of small satellites that could beam fast internet to remote areas that lack it. Novel uses of technology are harder to predict, but surprises happen when smart people are trying to be the first to achieve some milestone. Nobody working on America’s first satellite missions in the 1950s and ’60s could have ever imagined that the Global Positioning System, or GPS, would one day keep millions of people and Uber drivers from getting lost.

Elon Musk wants to set up colonies on Mars but
will go into space himself on Virgin Galactic.

The resources that the billionaires can bring to space travel are tiny compared to what state actors like the U.S., China, Russia, and India have at their disposal. On the other hand, governments are limited to spending money on traditional functions like military and basic scientific research, functions that will be cut when the political winds shift.

My betting is on the entrepreneurs, not the governments, to figure out how to make space travel economically sustainable, to use a fashionable term.

July 20, 2021 will never be as famous as July 20, 1969, but it will be a milestone date nevertheless.