Orion Science Blog

For people who are interested in both space travel and investing, now would be a good time to look into putting some money into the stocks of some of the major players in the space travel business.  Lockheed and Boeing have always been two big names that give government contracts to develop parts for NASA’s rockets.  Recently, however, there are even more companies in which to invest, as we are at the dawn of a new space race.

This space race is not between countries, so much as, between companies; private companies experimenting with ways to bring space travel to the ordinary people.  Companies like SpaceDev, Orbital Sciences, and Virgin, among several others, have begun privately funded space projects.  Check with your broker or online stock service to see which space-travel-minded company would be best for your investing strategy.

Space travel isn’t something that is only limited to government agencies.  A new space race has gotten underway, and it is being led by some of the wealthiest entrepreneurs in the world.  Instead of relying on capital companies, like Arthur Trueger’s BerkeleyVC, these entrepreneurs are fronting the money from their own (very deep) pockets.

People like Richard Branson (Founder of Virgin), Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft), Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon), and Elon Musk (founder of PayPal) are leading a new revolution in space exploration.

In a previous post i mentioned that the Lunar Registry is offering plots of land up in one acre increments.  Once my excitement that i may be able to live on the moon someday subsided, i felt a little uneasy thinking about the negative aspects of what the privatization of space would bring.  Billion-dollar corporations have already shown that they will exploit anyone and everything just to increase profit by a tenth of a percentage point; just imagine the recklessness with which they will treat space.

My fear is that in the not-so-distant future people will be buying and selling plots of moon land or spaces in space like they are trading stocks in the market or online services.  For terrestrial stocks, that’s fine, but i would hate to see space become one huge advertisement like most of the Earth has.