the potential to make them more money .
Within a century aviation was able to grow from flights of fancy to a real industry thanks in large part to marketing which was able to change the perception of flying as a dare devil pursuit originally reserved for those courting death to the safe , economical and modern way to travel .
With the exception of the World War 2 hiatus , the aviation industry has steadily grown as more businesses in the passenger and cargo industries continued to use planes to create outstanding business opportunities and spur the growth of other industries like logistics and tourism .
Ironically the military need to develop a much more lethal plane contributed to the outstanding development of the commercial usage of planes . As the military fine-tuned the technological advances of their planes the commercial usage improved and became more efficient .
With the prevalence of planes in the world today it may be hard to imagine that only about twenty percent of the world has set foot in a plane despite eight million people flying daily before the corona pandemic took its toll on the industry .
With such a low penetration it is apparent that the aviation industry is still in its infancy and it has a lot of room to grow and expand . The quest for ever cheaper travel and the resultant shrinkage of the world has given air travel and transport a boost .
The wanderlust that came with the ability to defy gravity and hoist tons of metal into the sky made the human imagination even keener and people started to dream of getting to the moon and beyond . The race to the stars was on .
The world was then divided into spheres of capitalist influence claiming to champion the democratic version of governance versus the communist bloc that supposedly championed people ’ s power and claimed to be a better distributor of public wealth .
The race to space became an apparent contest of trying to prove the superiority of one system over another and governments took on the challenge to showcase their political system vis-à-vis their ability to underpin technological development .
In the technological supremacy race the United States managed to land man on the moon in 1969 but surprisingly they have not been back there and the soviet competitors although they have maintained a versatile space program have never landed on the moon .
We need to remember that project moon was not a business but an ideological ego trip undertaken by politicians trying to demonstrate the superiority on their respective political systems . There was really no customer except the government to these extremely egotistical contests .
These excursions into space opened a window for new businesses especially in the telecommunication area . Scientists had discovered that if you were able to put a satellite into orbit you were then able to beam a signal over a very large footprint on earth without topographical interference .
The higher the satellite the better since the footprint would be larger but the challenge was how to launch the satellites into orbit since the price tag for getting the satellite into orbit was exorbitant and outweighed the commercial advantage the satellite would create .
In the meantime NASA retired their shuttle program abandoning the low earth orbits where the satellites are placed and opting for a much more ambitious space program that would resend man to the moon and beyond sometime in the future .
Governments seem to have gotten tired of the expensive and largely pointless race to get as far from earth as possible . There was not much enthusiasm to score brownie points against the communist bloc which had imploded on its own momentum .
Humans were still fascinated by space and a few countries came together to set up an inhabited International Space Station in the low earth orbit zone which created a need for regular launches into space . The Russians were able to turn their Soyuz program into a viable space shuttling business .
More technological advances that would operate cheaper with a wider reach and more reliability from satellites started to make the need to get to space a business proposition that would actually work if there was a way to mitigate the exorbitant costs .
This whole area was becoming progressively more attractive to the business people who saw vast new business opportunities if they could reliably find a way to operate in space to deliver services on earth at a fraction of the costs currently incurred .
The stumbling block remained the prohibitive and uncertain costs associated with space travel although adequately romanticized by the Star Trek movies . The reality of space travel was still based on archaic technology and procedures that belonged to the sixties space race .
Again business came to the rescue when a new set of visionaries came into the scene and decided that mother earth was in an inherently precarious position since a stray asteroid could put paid to life on earth and they wanted to have a backup plan .
Their plan was to colonize Mars and make it habitable just in case life on earth became impossible . To get to Mars , they figured , they would need to get to the Moon first as it would be a stopover point on the way to the red planet .
For this grand expedition to take place , a cost effective way was necessary to get to space . It helped that there were now companies and governments that were willing to pay a cheaper fare to get to the low earth orbit and this was a boost to business viability .
Innovation to produce cheaper rockets and an integrated marketing effort to convince potential clients to pay upfront for future trips was put into full gear and breakthroughs were achieved when NASA agreed to award private companies ’ contracts to develop space crafts .
As we write resupply trips to the ISS are now scheduled and crew change has been undertaken with a private space company at a fraction of the cost the government would have incurred . Launches to place satellites in low earth orbit are now a regular endeavor .
Space travel has become a business because the visionaries made it possible by getting a customer who was willing to pay for the services provided . You just have to image the gargantuan marketing effort it took to convince bureaucratic government functionaries to take a risk on privateers .
Once again moon landings are back on the agenda but this time as a stop-over on the way to Mars because the space industry like the aviation industry it originated
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