Is Space The Next Luxury Vacation Frontier?

With NASA's discovery of three habitable planets, let's take a look at six companies that want to take you into space.

Author:: TheStreet Staff
Publish date:: Feb 22, 2017 5:57 PM EST

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has spotted seven Earth-sized planets orbiting around a single star. Most importantly three of those planets are in the habitable zone, which encompasses "the area around the parent star where a rocky planet is most likely to have liquid water."

Let's take a look at six companies competing for a slice of space exploration.

SpaceX

Crazy wealthy backer: Elon Musk of Tesla (TSLA) - Get Report
Their cargo craft just failed to dock with the space station!

Orbital Sciences

Backer: Orbital Sciences, a publicly traded company
Was just awarded a $78.18m-worth contract to "provide integration and testing services for the space test programme satellite-6 (STPSat-6) through August 2021."

Blue Origin

Crazy wealthy backer: Jeff Bezos of Amazon (AMZN) - Get Report
They plan on getting civilians into New Shepard for suborbital trips by 2018.

Bigelow Airspace

Crazy wealthy backer: Robert Bigelow of Budget Suites
For the last sixteen years they have been advancing inflatable habitat technology

SpaceDev/Sierra Nevada Corp.

Backing: Sierra Nevada Corp., of Sparks, Nev
NASA selected them for anticipated cargo missions to fly between 2019 and 2024

Virgin Galactic

Crazy wealthy backer: Richard Branson, founder of VirginGroup's personal fortune
They charge $250,000 a person for membership in the Future Astronauts program and a trip to space.

This article was written by a staff member of TheStreet.