Billionaires in Orbit 🚀

The Space Race of the 1960s was a battle between superpowers: the USA and the USSR. Today, the new space race is being driven by private corporations and billionaires. Companies like SpaceX (Elon Musk) and Blue Origin (Jeff Bezos) have drastically reduced the cost of launching payloads into orbit through the innovation of reusable rockets. This has opened the door for a booming commercial space industry, from satellite internet constellations like Starlink to prospective space tourism sectors.

The ultimate prize remains Mars. SpaceX's Starship is being designed with the explicit goal of making humanity 'multi-planetary', envisioning a self-sustaining city on the Red Planet. Meanwhile, NASA's Artemis program aims to return humans to the Moon, establishing a permanent lunar base as a stepping stone for deep space exploration.

However, this rapid commercialization raises legal and ethical questions. Who owns the resources on the Moon? How do we manage the growing problem of 'space junk'—debris from old satellites that threatens to collide with active spacecraft? The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, written for a different era, may rely on updates to govern this new frontier where private entities wield power rivaling massive nations.