So what do you do once you have made billions in the dot-com business? The common answer seems to be to leave earth behind.
Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com), Elon Musk (Paypal.com), John Carmack (coder of Doom and Quake) and Paul Allen (Microsoft co-founder) are each trying to build their own spacecraft to create a private space industry. They are competing for the XPrize which is offering a $10M US prize to the first group to launch a privately made vehicle to an altitude of 100,000km, land safely and repeat with the same vehicle within 2 weeks.
Says Musk, “The computer and Internet revolutions have given a great deal of capital to the ‘Star Wars’ fans.”
