will get to the moon,

with rockets!

Private companies won't want to do this,

how are they gonna make money?

By charging for the ride.

Those crazy billionaires competing with each other.

Modern day rocket man wants to send you to Mars.

Difficult.

Dangerous.

Good chance you will die.

The private industry's space race

it's on.

We tend to think that space exploration and

human space flight is all about

governmental agencies like NASA.

But it wasn't really always like that.

Some of the very first steps by

the early rocketry pioneers were funded by the private sector.

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

Robert Goddard.

It’s 1920 and he publishes

"A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes”

mentioning that rockets could be used

to carry payloads to the moon.

They called him the "Moon Man" and laughed.

The Times editorial writer

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

and a great amount of belief

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

The German war machine gets under way.

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

the U.S. government.

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

but it flew and that’s what counts.

Everything speeds up at the turn of the millennium

when freshly minted millionaires take interest.

One of them is Jeff Bezos.

I don’t actually hold out great hopes.

But If I could do anything,

I would like to go help explore space.

A few months later he sets up Blue Origin.

Then Elon Musk starts SpaceX.

And yet another tech millionaire

Anousheh Ansari and her family

promise to foot the bill for XPrize.

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

a reusable manned space vehicle.

In 2004 SpaceShipOne wins the prize.

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.

But there are setbacks.

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

as you can see there, it exploded!

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

the hope is that by having

more competition amongst commercial companies

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

reduce the cost of going into space.

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

up to the International Space Station.

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,

a future for humanity on Mars

and even farther still.

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.