Elon Musk put up $100 million of his own money for SpaceX and received $1.25 billion in venture capital. NASA has awarded the company $3 billion in contracts. (“SpaceX overview on secondmarket,” Secondmarket, a division of NASDAQ)
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.
