Jeff Bezos is going to space, with three others, in a re-enactment of Alan Shepherd’s suborbital Mercury flight in 1961. Elon Musk is landing reusable rockets, in practice for doing the same thing on Mars. It’s a space race between billionaires.

Bezos seems primarily motivated by the desire many of us had as eight-year-olds to be astronauts, or at least get into space. But he’s taking along an 82-year-old female aviator who trained for the Mercury program before NASA scrapped its Women in Space program, and a space tourist paying $28 million, for the 11-minute ride.

Musk is going for something bolder. He wants to send humans to Mars. Not only that, he wants some of them to stay there, to establish a permanent human presence on another planet.

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