High-tech billionaires may yet have the most favorable chance of colonizing Mars and setting up a life in space, but there’s one thing that’s holding them back—money. That’s why Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, who founded Blue Origin and Blue Origin, respectively, are also pursuing space tourism.
The two spacecraft, which the companies are developing, would seat up to six passengers in each vehicle. Among other things, the rockets’ crew capsules would feature reclining seats and an overhead walkway, leading to understated bragging rights as the “world’s first space landings.”
However, according to former NASA space shuttle contractor Rick Searfoss, CEO of Space Adventures, which helps outfit wealthy individuals with commercial trips to the space station, a reality show isn’t the best way to reach the final frontier—yet.
“If you were going to get the largest number of people in the space business going for space in the next five years, the best approach would be commercializing spaceports and getting into some kind of travel to space,” he told CBS This Morning co-host Gayle King. “The reality of the space industry is it’s really difficult to deploy the infrastructure for commercial space travel—and that’s why the industry is a multi-generational game.”
It’s an extension of his views on extraterrestrial travel, which is something he has publicly held since the mid-1980s, when he and his two brothers built a model of a space vehicle for a science-fiction film they were working on called “Starship One,” which was partially inspired by classic Star Trek.
“No way would he have used the word ‘conspiracy’ when I was the crew commander for a mission he had organized in 1984,” said Capt. Brin’s then-rival, veteran astronaut Wally Schirra, who holds the distinction of having been the first person to reach space twice: once in 1966 on Apollo 11, when he orbited the moon, and again in 1969 on Gemini 9, his most recent trip to the moon. “I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t know anything about that. And I was just captain of the mission and was honest about it. It wasn’t very friendly to that kind of thinking.”
However, Brin came to the same conclusion Schirra did about the ultimate purpose of his project: “I didn’t think about it beyond for a moment of time,” Brin told Bloomberg Businessweek in 2014. “What I was really trying to do was help NASA do what I had heard so much about and I knew they had been dedicated to doing. I figured we could help them for about three days, and then there was a solar eclipse. But then the appetite was apparently whetted by the eclipse.”
Calls and e-mails to Brin’s representatives were not returned.