Billionaires have form! The original G.O.A.T Howard Hughes held the title from 1947 for building ‘Spruce Goose’, the world’s biggest aeroplane, right up until 2019, but nowadays, billionaires are moving from planes to rockets.
Elon Musk has SpaceX, Jeff Bezos Blue Origin and local hero Richard Branson has given us Virgin Galactic.
They all get a bit of stick for showing off their latest toys whilst the rest of the planet recovers from a pandemic. Space rockets can appear as an indulgence, even if these projects could one day fly us hypersonically to Australia in three hours whilst helping develop more sustainable hydrogen fuels.
Joe Public has every reason to be sceptical, as I was, until I met Commander Chris Hadfield, the Canadian space station astronaut. You may remember Chris singing Bowie’s Space Oddity when he really was ‘floating in a most peculiar way’ up there in the tin can International Space Station. He enlightened me as to the true purpose behind all this fly-boy stuff. Building their own SkyNet! Without the murderous Terminators, of course!
You see, it’s not so much about space tourism, being the first Mars inhabitant, or trying to find alien life outside of Slough. The new Space Race is all about telecommunications.
Musk, Bezos and their private equity backers have realised world domination can be truly stellar if they Wi-Fi the planet via mini-satellites, making the world borderless and every single human from city to Sahara down to the ocean depths a potential 5G connected customer.
Each rocket launched contains 20-30 new satellites set to extend Wi-Fi coverage to the most barren areas of the planet. And that’ll mean everyone can enjoy Amazon Prime wherever they are, although next-day delivery may be an issue.
The cost of this may be eye-watering but so are the rewards, and they’re guaranteed, that whoever manages it will become the world’s first trillionaire. And I am sure you’re like me in feeling that being a billionaire is no longer enough. It might sound a bit cocky on your annual appraisal, but these guys are living it.
If you can’t grasp a trillion try this; a million seconds is 12 days, a billion seconds is 32 years and a trillion seconds is just short of 32,000 years.
What’s all this got to do with me I hear you ask? Well, even if you don’t build rockets, using them for business travel is a way off, plus it won’t score well on the sustainability index. Meon is picking up more and more clients from the Space and Telecommunications support sectors housed in innocuous-looking industrial estates that are aiming for infinity and beyond.
Whether it’s satellite production itself going on behind steel shutters in Guildford – only now known for its cosmic ambitions – recovering space debris out of Tokyo, or your local business installing fibreoptics in a street near you, it’s a big growth sector for UK PLC and a fascinating world, so I am taking an interest.
Correctly done, these space ventures, already on our doorstep have the capacity to democratise the planet – and all this borne of an industry building electric cars, delivering parcels in my neighbour’s van or in Branson’s case, expanding the gorgeous Limited Edition Hotel chain (There must be a freebie in that one somewhere!)
So, please be patient when they start digging up your road to install fibreoptic, do buy a new house with a built-in charging point and, do book with a Travel Agent who knows their stuff. If you want to do business with growing sectors that, like us, are intent on saving the planet, take a look in your local industrial estate or business park, it’s all part of the project.
