A few of the world's billionaires have ventured into the space race recently.
Amazon (AMZN) founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos started Blue Origin in 2000. He has traveled into space and has taken space tourists along with him, including former Star Trek actor William Shatner.
Billionaire Sir Richard Branson traveled to the edge of space on board his Virgin Galactic rocket plane.
Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 and has launched its Starlink communications satellites that provide international Internet access.
Musk has said one of his goals with SpaceX is sending crewed flights to Mars. He has even said he wants to die on the red planet.
Bill Gates Has Other Priorities
For his part, Microsoft (MSFT) co-founder Bill Gates wants nothing to do with outer space. His concerns are closer to home.
"It's actually quite expensive to go to Mars. You can buy measles vaccines and save lives for $1,000 per life saved," he told the BBC. "And so [that] just kind of grounds you, as in -- don't go to Mars."
In an interview with the BBC, he touched on other topics as well, including artificial intelligence (AI).
"It will help us look into medical and scientific questions. It's not just robots, it's helping to read and write as well," he said of AI. "In fact, there's been more progress there than on the robotic side. Both of them will give us much higher productivity."
Gates also discussed what it was like to be the center of some conspiracy theories during the covid pandemic.
"During the pandemic, there were tens of millions of messages that I intentionally caused it, or I'm tracking people. It's true I'm involved with vaccines, but I'm involved with vaccines to save lives," he said.
"These messages sort of inverted that," he continued. "I guess people are looking for the 'boogeyman' behind the curtain, the over-simplistic explanation. Malevolence is a lot easier to understand than biology."
