Name: Billionaires Have Funded Space Travel For Decades
Uploaded: 2020-03-07T16:01:38.000Z
Duration: 5 min 38 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Those crazy billionaires competing with each other.

Modern day rocket man wants to send you to Mars.

We tend to think that space exploration and

the early rocketry pioneers  were funded by the private sector.

In the U.S. it begins with  the University of Clark professor

"A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes”

They called him the "Moon Man" and laughed.

implied that your husband didn’t even know  high school physics.

He did not let such things deter him from his experiments.

In 1926 Goddard successfully launches the first liquid-fueled rocket.

Money from the family of the mining magnate Daniel Guggenheim soon follows.

They provided him funding in today's dollars

at the scale of tens of millions of dollars.

What's interesting is that at the very start of this period of the 1920s

there was actually a great amount of enthusiasm

in the potential for these private rockets to go to space.

The Second World War gives rockets a whole new meaning.

And then the knowledge of rocketry  became critical to the Cold War.

And in the ‘50s and ‘60s rocketry was almost  exclusively a governmental affair.

The private sector, in terms of companies, was essentially working as contractors to

It’s not until 1982, that a serious effort is made to build a privately funded rocket.

The idea comes from a Texas businessman,  David Hannah Jr.

Conestoga 1 is pieced together from a  repurposed ballistic missile.

It may not have had the majesty of an Apollo,  or the thunder of a Shuttle

Everything speeds up at the turn of the millennium

when freshly minted millionaires take interest.

A few months later he sets up Blue Origin.

This is a $10 million award for reaching the industry’s holy grail -

There it is, a craft that has been to space and back, today right in front of you.

Richard Branson buys the rights,  turns it into Virgin Galactic

and in the same year starts accepting commercial reservations for future suborbital flights.

Although we are seeing a lot of billionaires  have interest in space flight,

their investments still pale in comparison to governmental investments.

And they have now managed to partner in many cases with U.S. government agencies.

NASA for example is in most years  SpaceX's primary customer.

Local company's mission for NASA  explodes into a ball of fire and debris.

Deadly crash involving Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo.

A SpaceX rocket bringing supplies for  the International Space Station

Eventually, in 2015 Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket

becomes the first to take off and land vertically  after reaching space.

Shortly after SpaceX goes even further, sending its Falcon 9 to orbit altitude.

The other major milestone will be the first tourists on commercial suborbital vehicles.

And I'm not gonna predict who's gonna be there first but

more competition amongst commercial companies

and by leveraging advanced technologies that we're gonna be able to

2019 is the year that SpaceX and Boeing are gearing up to finally take astronauts

The first private lunar lander is on its way to the Moon

and Chinese companies are joining the space race as well.

For well over a hundred years, people have been dreaming and thinking and planning

for a future for humanity beyond this planet.

And that includes a future for humanity on the surface of the moon,

And as long as we have a social goal of continuing to expand our knowledge of the cosmos,

then the ambitions and dreams of individuals

are gonna be an important part of realizing those goals.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Billionaires Have Funded Space Travel For Decades

realize

enthusiasm

amount

commercial