Ready for take off?

摘要

Fifty years ago this year, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1. The unmanned satellite was only the size of a basketball, but its successful 98-minute journey around the planet marked the start of the space age. Back then, and for nearly all of the five decades that followed, space was the exclusive domain of governments and professional astronauts. Happily the doors of space are now about to be thrown open to the ordinary punter. That, in any case, was the starry-eyed argument made by a throng of aerospace entrepreneurs who gathered this week in New York at a space-investment summit.