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I'm David Brown and this is Business Wars.

Today we conclude our series on the new Space Race, SpaceX vs. Blue Origin.

After a bumpy start, things are looking good for Elon Musk's SpaceX.

Last May, the company's Crew Dragon capsule hit a milestone in human history by managing a safe and successful round trip to the International Space Station, carrying its first set of astronauts aboard.

As a result, Elon Musk's net worth shot Skyward. In January, he surpassed Jeff Bezos to claim the title of Richest Man on Earth.

But don't count Bezos out just yet. NASA recently added Blue Origin's new Glenn rocket to its list of vehicles eligible to compete for launch missions.

After decades of incremental leaps forward, the Space Race feels like it's really ramping up, and though Musk and Bezos are the most popular contenders, they're not the only ones in the running.

For more, we're talking with Tim Furnholz. He wrote Rocket Billionaires.

Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the new Space Race. And he writes about space and the economy for courts.

He'll be talking with us about the future prospects of space travel and whether space tourism is really viable. That's all just ahead.

Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, host of the Wondery Show Business Movers. In our latest series, an intrepid lawyer turned fast food executive named George Cohan, creates an ingenious and wily scheme to sell big Macs behind the Iron Curtain in the middle of the Cold War.

Listen to business movers and McDonald's invasion on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts.

Tim Furnholz, welcome to Business Wars. It's a pleasure to be here.

Our series picks up in 2003, really, when the private space sector was just an idea. And you fast forward almost two decades.

The private industry all but runs the shows these days, it seems as of now, where do things stand in the space race?

It has been a sea change in the last two decades that you've just recounted as these new players backed by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have really changed the industry and proven to be the major source of innovation.

The way things stand now is NASA now fully embraces working directly with private companies rather than sort of designing their own hardware and handing it off to the military industrial complex.

And we're seeing now the venture capital industry throw hundreds of millions of dollars at new space startups that are trying to follow in Jeff and Elon's weight.

So we've seen a major change, a major inflection point because of these firms, but at the same time, their real promise is still to come.

So what brought about the change to the status quo anti? I mean, you were talking about how NASA used to do things, right?

There had to have been some sort of inflection point that made NASA willing to trust outside contractors like SpaceX.

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