Alex McColgan

In other words, companies have already been commercialising space for some time.

So, what's different about these recent space flights?

Well, these flights are the first time that private companies have built their own rockets and flown their own founders into space.

They represent a turning point in space exploration and the beginning of a fledgling space tourism industry where wealthy individuals can pay to spend time in space.

This could have larger future impacts than you might think, as we'll explore later in the video.

But let's first take a look at some of the companies that have been developing their own rockets to travel into space.

In particular, we'll be looking at Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, and SpaceX.

as the differing approaches of all of these companies offer us the best glimpses of the many possible outcomes of commercial space flights.

To begin with, let's examine Virgin Galactic, as it was Richard Branson who won the race to be the first billionaire to fly into space on their own rocket.

He did this on the 11th of July in 2021, but had actually created Virgin Galactic much earlier, back in 2004.

Branson's company, the Virgin Group, had taken an interest in the idea of space tourism, and had noted that another smaller company, Scaled Composites, was developing their own rocket, called Spaceship One.

Scaled Composites hoped to win the Ansari X Prize for the first private crewed spacecraft.

Branson reached out to Scaled Composites and convinced them to make the Virgin Group their sole customer of future spacecrafts if they succeeded.

They did so on October 4th, 2004, with Spaceship One flying to 112km in altitude and returning to the Earth safely and with a crew.

It's worth noting that space is officially recognised as starting at 100km by many agencies at a point known as the Kármán Line, named after Theodor von Kármán, the first person who'd tried to define such a boundary.

Spaceship One did successfully fly over the Kármán Line boundary.

However, NASA sees space as beginning at around 80km.

With that success under their belt, Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic began working together to create a whole fleet of new spaceships, model name SpaceShipTwo, with Scaled Composites providing the technical know-how and Virgin Galactic providing much of the initial capital.

Together they founded the Spaceship Company, with Virgin owning 70% of the shares, but eventually this rose to 100% when Virgin bought out the company completely.

The rocket they designed had one aim in mind, space tourism.