The first commercial flight took place on New Year’s Day, 1914, with a ticket price of $400. It carried a single passenger from St. Petersburg to Tampa, Florida. (Tim Sharp, “World’s First Commercial Airline,” in space.com)
It really wasn’t that long ago when the two greatest superpowers were vying to put satellites into space. Now, 50 nations have their own satellites in low Earth orbit. If you’re a Thailand, say, you can call Space Systems/Loral, a Canadian-owned company based in Palo Alto, California, and tell them you want to put a satellite into geostationary orbit for television broadcasting or military communications. You can have the thing in orbit 25,000 miles above Earth within two years.
