On a typical day, many people can be seen looking out the window into space and thinking. What they think about is as individual as their people, but they look up into space. In the TV series, Star Trek space was considered the final frontier. Every year we as a society learn more about space and there will always be more to learn and there are many areas to learn about.

In a book called The Space Barons by Christian Davenport published by BBS Publications, New York, 2018 describes some of the dreams coming slowly to being fulfilled by billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Paul Allen. All have been interested in space, inspired by the 1969 moon landing of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin with Michael Collins in the capsule but all 3 fulfilled President John Kennedy’s speech where he said I believe before the decade is out to landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.

In the book, all 3 had different journeys or paths to their interest in space and hopefully it will mean more can and will be done in space. In the book, all the billionaires used their own money to start the business, but it took government grants from NASA to sustain it. As well as the satellite industry and telecommunications to ensure the companies could do what they dreamed about. Both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos believed in recycling and reuse – if you have seen the Apollo launches a stage falls off to land in the ocean, the billionaires wanted to rocket to take off and land where it had taken off to be reused again.

From the book is a wonderful passage most of us believe that there is something new and exciting to be found. For example, the heavy lifting in the internet world was to put the infrastructure in place. Once the infrastructure or the ability to use the internet is in place, the dynamic entrepreneurial explosion of thousands of companies happened and will continue to happen.

For example, Amazon had its path laid out for it. Cables for the internet had been laid. The postal system delivered packages to its customers. There was a payment system called credit cards. All Amazon had to do was take the infrastructure and reassemble it in a new way, and do something new and inventive with it. On the internet today, 2 people in a dorm room can reinvent an industry because the heavy lifting infrastructure is in place, in space it is only beginning to be.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, often times you want to invest in the companies after the heavy lifting has been done because heavy lifting tends to mean high capital costs. Once the infrastructure is in place and government grants have paid for part or the whole for the good of the nation, the money is to be made from using the system. It is similar when President Eisenhower had the interstate freeway system built. Then not only people but goods and services could be moved on the roads – many trucking companies benefited from the highways. Sometimes government grants are very useful to business.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.