Civilian Space Travel #1
– The new Frontier in Business
I will boldly go & I’d like to take you too !!!
from USA Today 28 May 13 enhanced by Peter/CXO Wiz4biz
Competing for Space. If you think that civilian space travel is only a fantasy of the movies, then you are probably underestimating the vision & vigilance of two of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time: Virgin Group Chairman Sir Richard Branson and Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos. If anyone is capable of pulling off recreational rocket rides, it is these two.
Combining Forces. Although they have each launched companies dedicated to bringing sub-orbital space travel to the public, they have yet to share with each other, details of their respective commercial forays into the final frontier. But that should soon change. The two $B moguls recently had a conversation and have agreed to meet and discuss their respective space odysseys, Branson told reporters at a business conference here last week. Branson’s Virgin Galactic, founded in 2004, part of his London
-based Virgin Group, recently opened operations in Las Cruces, N.M. Bezo’s very stealthy Blue Origin, based in suburban Seattle, was incorporated in 2000 and owns vast acres in rural Texas devoted to launch facilities.
Their Common Bond. The two multi-billionaires, who couldn’t be more different in personality, share a common bond: They have successfully disrupted disparate industries in which they had little previous expertise. Branson cut his teeth on music & retailing before branching out into airlines & mobile phones. Bezos, who was a hedge fund wonk, pioneered electronic commerce by harnessing the Internet to sell books & music and is now a leader in tablet devices and cloud-based utility computing.
Previous Close Encounter. As it turns out, the two already ran into each other when Amazon started selling music over the Web, which competed with Virgin’s once-revolutionary brick-and-mortar mega-stores. Ultimately, Steve Job’s plunge into digital music with the introduction of iTunes led to the demise of Virgin’s core business, Branson says.
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