Bezos vs Musk: who will win the new space race?

While the West gets itself into a lather on a weekly basis about the evils of past colonialism is anyone paying attention to the new empire builders in our midst? Although their ideas for space travel often read like the pages of an Arthur C Clark novel, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have done little to disguise the colonising instincts of their space projects. Both have outlined competing intentions to mine the moon and put humans on Mars. And, with Bezos stepping down from Amazon to devote more time to his space venture Blue Origin, we could be witnessing the beginnings of a galactic power struggle – executed not by States but by corporations.

Bezos and Musk are far from the only billionaires to follow this route. The co-founder of Google Sergey Brin has been spending much of his time on Planetary Ventures – a Google-funded space exploration project which in 2006 took over a Silicon Valley airfield from NASA for the purpose of space research.